Archive for the ‘Gadgets’ category

My Perfect GPS System

October 30th, 2009

Yesterday Google announcemnt about their new mobile navigation app created an havoc in the shares of GPS companies. Germin for example lost more than 1.2 billion dollar in just one day. Most days I will favor the any company who compete with Google, but this time I have no mercy for Germin and the rest. For too long these companies ruled the GPS market not really innovating and giving consumers what they really need.

Screen shot 2009-10-30 at 8.53.02 PM

I decided to make a quick list of some of the features I would like to see in my perfect GPS system. Here it goes:

  • Connectivity to Yelp. When I look for a Burger place, I want to see the top Yelp results on the map.
  • Voice uploads and personalities – Why can’t we buy new voices. Wouldn’t it will be cool to have Homer Simpson as your GPS system voice? And if we already have voices, why not give it a little more personality based on the character you chose.
  • Voice activation – Like the name. The ability to use voice to do searches.
  • Route by view – The ability to choose the between possible routes based on the view it will take me by.
  • Suggestions – If I need to do a 6 hours drive, wouldn’t it will be great to get suggestions for attractions that are on the way?
  • Recommendations – Similar to the Amazon concept of recommendations, if I chose to go to a specific attraction why can’t the GOS recommend me other attractions people who went there also went to.
  • Events – I would love to have the ability to see on the map a list of music events appearing near me.
  • And of course – live traffic maps and calculation of route time based on traffic.

So… Who is going to build it?

Comments »

Posted in Gadgets

Tags:

Welcome to the New Reality

August 18th, 2009

Augmented RealityOne of the emerging trends among mobile startups is augmented reality. In short, augmented reality is the ability to display relevant information as a layer on top of our real live world. You can see some video examples of this from a company names Layer.

These startups are taking advantage of the latest technologies in modern mobile phones like GPS, Compass and camera, to pin point your position in the world, understand what you are looking at and than add layers of data directly on your screen. So for example, you can look at a street through your cell and see all the top resteraunts from Yelp results.

But now let’s take a second to think and imagine how this could be used in the future. One of the ideas I was bouncing with a friend of mine is the following: Imagine you could simply point your cell screen to a person in a bar, and immediately see his Facebook profile (if you want to think and contribute to this idea, please contact me).
Or think about some sort of a real life world of war craft, where again, when looking at someone through the layer of augmented reality, you will see his virtual identity as a mighty wizard.

And if you really want to take this into the science fiction movies realm – put the screen inside a special glasses instead of your agumented reality glassescell. Think Arnold the robot in Terminator. You can basically walk around the street, and with a light touch on the side of the glasses, start to see a complete different world.
All these sounds like far science fiction… but a lot of today technologies sounded like this ten years ago. Is this the world we are going toward? What do you think?

Comments »

Posted in Gadgets, Mobile