Coordinate-Proxy – January 2010 Ideas

The eleventh idea for my 365 social ideas is another mobile application: An application relaying current position of users to services requiring them. The business model is, that lot’s of websites, competitions and campaigns would like to be able to track their users somehow for some purpose, but if it is just a small campaign or just a funny little gimmick, no-one would bother first making 5 different mobile applications for the different mobile platforms. So instead, they urge their user to download this Coordinate Proxy application from their respective app store, which is free, and then they enter the campaign name (and maybe password if closed) and now they can start relaying information about where they are to the service provider.

Imagine creating a dating website (yes, it is kind of 2005-ish, but they can still make money) and wanting to add some kind of foursquare-like integration with dating spots around town and if you check-in to certain spots, you will be notified about who is present. Or imagine creating a new campaign for some big brand where you every day have a competition where the first person to be at a certain location wins a price. Or image creating a website for geo-artists, allowing people to create paintings via their routes traveled (yes, that is a small bonus idea, might be expanded later in it’s own post). All these ideas are pretty hard to implement, if you want to target all of your target audience equipped with GPS-enabled smart-phones.

As explained, the business model should be between the application creator and service providers needing location tracking. It could be free to track up to say 5 users, but if more than 5 users should be able to be tracked and their positional data forwarded to your service, some payment model should be used. Users should not directly be burdened with this payment (but this could happen between the user and the service provider of course, if location-based tracking is part of a premium package or similar). All kinds of different licenses coudl be used depending on how much and how precise tracking is needed for how many users.

The API provided by the application backend to service providers should be thorough, fast and achieve the expected goals. It should be possible to listen for both real-time, callback-based or digested information as well as give feedback directly back to the users of the application. And it should be possible for the user to have several simultaneously running trackings enabled – e.g. if the user participates in both the dating foursquare and the brand competition mentioned earlier.

Why?

Having lots of users with mobile phones with the ability to report the location is fine, but having to create an application just to create the carrier is simply too much of a hassle. With one application providing a nice consistent (maybe even customizable) interface across GPS-equipped mobile phones along with a decent API, service providers would have a much lower entrance barrier to make their services location-based. And making location-integrated games and campaigns would be similarly easy.

What’s next?

Do with this idea whatever you like – expand, implement, trash or forget. Just remember, that if you use it in anyway make sure to attribute me according to the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, that all these 365 Social Ideas are published under.

Category: API, January 2010 Ideas, Mashup One comment »