[Geowanking] the state of personal positioning?

[Mattias Konradsson]

When building location-based services there's one crucial piece I still feel
is missing, and that's the ability to track my location online. 3G and gsm
operators have started offering their own proprietary position-based
services (often based upon triangulation rather than gps) but in my
experience it's hard to make third-party services. Another thing is that
positioning is fairly expensive, sometimes taking a couple of bucks per
positionining which isnt exactly good for continuous positioning. 

I guess the optimal scenario from a developer standpoint is that the mobile
operators would offer flat fee positioning services that the users
themselves could subscribe to. Then they could simply point it to an url of
the service(s) of their choosing and when positioning was turned on it would
in set intervals deliver the coordinates in xml-format to that url. As an
added bonus it would be good if the positioning aspect was integrated into
the design of the mobile phones so they could be turned on and off with the
press of a button and clearly indicated when they were on.

Have anyone had experience with any operators going this way? I get the
feeling that the operators are wanting to keep their services proprietary.
Which is stupid since services like this could actually make 3G services
useful. The subcription fees for the positioning (if they were reasonable)
would probably be something people would pay if there's useful services.


mvh
--
Mattias Konradsson

"GlobalVillage - world domination or mutual filigration"
http://www.globalvillage.nu/mattias