I found this through Nicolas Nova's splendidly corn-fed Blog who pointed me to Russell Buckley's posting on BT's pathetic Location Based Services offering.
About as uninspired a list of offerings as I can imagine. Russell points out that the people tracking applications — this child and elderly people tracking – are a bit misguided. He presumes that the child tracking is for the case where a child is abducted, which may be the case or may be the concern the marketing people are playing towards as they try to sell a new service to overly concerned parents. If a child is abducted, it may be likely that the abductor is savvy enough to toss the phone — it's really a phone tracking app and has nothing to do with tracking the owner of the phone if the phone isn't in their possession. The elderly people tracking, except for the previous misguided assumption, might actually be useful for Alzheimer's patients or other situations in which an elderly individual might become confused and lost. That actually makes a bit of sense to me, although it seems like buying a front door before buying a house that it might look good on.BT Launches a Whole Range of Terribly Boring LBS Services:
– Child and elderly people tracking
– Traffic and directions
– Find my nearest things like ATM's, supermarkets and Petrol/Gas stations.
– Employee spying (actually they call it “tracking”)
Why do I blog this? It's topical because LBS is a big thing and continue to get calls to participate in panels and industry mixers to discuss the future of LBS. Hopefully, more inspired, clever, creative designs will appear. Whatever I can do to help move that objective along, I will do. I promise. Perhaps it's like Ben Cerveny presciently mentioned one day in Linz — "..social software will come into its own when we stop calling it social software." The idea there is that so long as you fetishize the door over the house, you#039ll be designing gizmos that know not of social beings and their practices. Maybe when we stop calling Location Based Services "Location Based Services" we'll finally be onto something.