Killer niche apps for location-based services

I've blogged in the last few months about location-based and geographic information system (GIS) related social software tools. If you are still trying to work out what you might do with location-based services (LBS) and GIS, GPSWorld has some suggestions - the following ideas all won cash prizes at the Cellular Telephone Industry Association Wireless show held in March this year:

• asset tracking/field services;
• monitoring and measuring physical activity in fitness programs;
• child/teen tracking service for parents;
• peer-to-peer/find me;
• navigation systems giving real-time traffic, weather and fuel-price information, and nearby points of interest;
• sale prices for houses and recently sold in the vicinity; and
• location-based imaging and tagging.

However, I think Rob Roveta, from Qualcomm CDMA Technologies (QCT), makes the right observation when he says about location-based services that "more targeted niche apps will get the market going."

I'd also suggest that we are seeing a similar thing evolving in the social software space as people connect different social software and GIS tools into niche applications. For example, Foundcity combines mobile camera phones/PDA, Google Maps and tagging:

"What's Foundcity? With Foundcity you send photos and text messages from the street to your personal map and tag it, share it, blog it and more..."



Tags: GIS, Google Maps, location-based services, social software