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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

What’s on TV today? Uh…nothing

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Now that the dust has settled after Mobile World Congress, what to make of it? As our correspondent Nick Flaherty notes in a column in the next edition of EDN Europe, GPS was big this year; GPS functionality is approaching the price point where its inclusion in a phone build (at least, an upper-end phone) will be automatic. Maybe then all those location-based services that providers have talked about for years will begin to really happen. There is quite a bit of it in place already; tech-savvy users (such as EDNE’s publisher Martin Savery, with his iPhone) can find a fair bit of data if they have the right hardware. Martin reports that using the iPhone to locate services and restaurants, when away from familiar areas, does work. Certainly, the amount of ingenuity being applied to the problem of urban/indoor location fixes with multiple different ways of using assisted GPS, or GPS enhanced by cellular network data, is very impressive.
Location-based services might not, therefore, find themselves trapped in the same blind alley as mobile TV – definitely not the hot topic at MWC this year. It was there: but the technology is not on the critical path. Meaning, the technology is basically done. And on the shelf, waiting for some sort of comprehensive service offering to emerge. Waiting, it appears, for either the mobile service providers or the broadcasters to develop some sort of viable business model. As of now, it looks like it will be waiting a long time.

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