This ia a guest post by Justin Davies, founder of NinetyTen, a UK-based consultancy providing mobile community and location aware solutions to companies. Davies also founded the now defunct BuddyPing, an early mobile social networking community based on the realtime location of users, and thus has few opinions about the rise of Foursquare and others…
Not to sound too much like my grandad talking about the War, but when I was doing this, it was all about sending a text message to a person walking past Starbucks with a half price voucher.
Back in my day, we had to pay for location information, none of this “SimpleGeo” or “Google Latitude” malarkey you youngsters have these days.
The only phones that had a GPS chip was a prototype N95 I had to beg Nokia for, and some Blackberry phones.
Yes dear Location Based enthusiast, these are bright times, and this does finally seem to be the year of location (though, admittedly, this has been the case for the past 3 years).