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Rupert Goldie
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11 months ago
in Fire Eagle - Where's The Mobile App? on A VC
You can buy one of our SIMs, they're quite reasonable priced and give you discounted calling rates when you roam internationally :-)
But seriously, you have to be an operator or an MVNO to do location stuff with the SIM or network. There are plenty of operators who offer location based services (LBS) using the information they have in their network to triangulate your position, but these services are always tied to that operator. So they are useful for domestic services and people use it for logistics - tracking where your trucks are and so on.
We started out building communications services for international travellers and when we began thinking about additional services we could offer that made use of the infrastructure we had, we realised we had an opportunity to build something that used location information. This lead to the development of our Travel Journal, and while we were building it we ran across Fire Eagle and saw that as a great way for people to link together location aware applications.
But seriously, you have to be an operator or an MVNO to do location stuff with the SIM or network. There are plenty of operators who offer location based services (LBS) using the information they have in their network to triangulate your position, but these services are always tied to that operator. So they are useful for domestic services and people use it for logistics - tracking where your trucks are and so on.
We started out building communications services for international travellers and when we began thinking about additional services we could offer that made use of the infrastructure we had, we realised we had an opportunity to build something that used location information. This lead to the development of our Travel Journal, and while we were building it we ran across Fire Eagle and saw that as a great way for people to link together location aware applications.
1 reply
Jonathan
Very cool - thanks Rupert
11 months ago
in Fire Eagle - Where's The Mobile App? on A VC
One problem with planning tools like Tripit and Dopplr is that they depend on you following the plan. So they can update FE, but if you change your plans and don't update Tripit or Dopplr FE will have the wrong information. Of course if you're old school and print your itinerary and give it to someone you have the same problem.
A problem with manual update tools, like using twitter, is that you have to keep doing it all the time. Otherwise you're "in Boston" for days even though you were only there for a day. Facebook status has the same problem.
So you really want something that does it automatically, like a mobile app. But ideally the mobile app runs all the time and doesn't kill your battery life and doesn't use data when your roaming.
At ekit, our focus is on international travellers who may not be web or mobile savvy, so we built the location tracking into the SIM and use the network as well so the user doesn't have to worry about installing an app on their phone, or running the battery flat in a few hours, or spending hundreds of dollars on roaming data.
A problem with manual update tools, like using twitter, is that you have to keep doing it all the time. Otherwise you're "in Boston" for days even though you were only there for a day. Facebook status has the same problem.
So you really want something that does it automatically, like a mobile app. But ideally the mobile app runs all the time and doesn't kill your battery life and doesn't use data when your roaming.
At ekit, our focus is on international travellers who may not be web or mobile savvy, so we built the location tracking into the SIM and use the network as well so the user doesn't have to worry about installing an app on their phone, or running the battery flat in a few hours, or spending hundreds of dollars on roaming data.
2 replies
Jonathan
I'd love to know more about running the app from the SIM... I'm an S60 user
fredwilson
You got this exactly right
