Where Are You? Mobile Apps For Finding Family and People at Risk
For a long time we have been encouraging our business partners to look at developing applications and devices to track elderly people, people with memory impaired conditions such as dementia, blind, autistic and others. There have been many challenges in this area because these devices are often a little on the bulky side and need daily charging due to the power constraints of batteries used for communications and GPS. Designing devices that are appealing such as bracelets, necklaces that people are prepared to wear has been a challenge. That development goes on and we hope that in the next year or so, we will see some success and demand from the market.
There is of course another huge market segment where mobiles are used. We are starting to see a number of applications like Pingbot, which we mentioned on our Facebook Page. This uses location based services including GPS to identify the location of a person’s mobile, with their permission of course. Effectively with Pingbot, the owner of the mobile has a secret word, effectively like a password that the user can share with those trusted people who may need to be able to find them. Obvious users would be children (most teenage children would not go anywhere without a mobile today), people with some form of disability, injury or medical risk, such as allergies or requiring medication, they may have forgotten to take with them. It could also be a social, sport or other reason for people to be able to find each other, such as a buddy finder environment. The idea of Pingbot is that all you need to do is send an SMS message with the secret word in order to find the location of that person.
GeoSmart has the web services and API’s to help developers create these types of solution in New Zealand and Australia. This includes highly accurate mapping, accurate turn by turn directions via the fastest route and services such as Reverse GeoCoding, which allows you to send a set of coordinates to our servers, which will return the nearest street address to that location.
These sorts of applications were difficult to market in the past because most people didn’t have mobiles with GPS. Today is a different story. It’s almost difficult to find a mobile in a retail store today that does not have GPS. We’d like to hear from developers who would like to help find that child that didn’t get home, the diabetic who went out without their insulin, or the blind person who has become disoriented. We offer a Developer Agreement for free and are local, in your time zone, with real people you can talk to about your application development.
-
Archives
- August 2012 (1)
- July 2012 (2)
- June 2012 (2)
- May 2012 (4)
- April 2012 (4)
- March 2012 (2)
- February 2012 (4)
- January 2012 (2)
- December 2011 (1)
- November 2011 (1)
- October 2011 (1)
- September 2011 (9)
-
Categories
- AA Maps
- AA Traffic
- Agencies
- Android
- Auckland
- Australia
- Australia Maps
- awards
- Business Analytics
- Business Intelligence
- Business Tools
- car navigation
- Car Sales
- carbon footprint
- cartography
- channel partner
- Check Ins
- competition
- competitions
- Data Mining
- Delivery
- Distribution
- driving
- driving directions
- education
- Fleet Management
- foursquare
- Freight
- Furniture Delivery
- Gamification
- Garmin Asus
- Geocoding
- geosmart
- GIS
- gps
- Hyves
- ICT
- Indoor Navigation
- iphone
- lbs
- lbs games
- location based services
- location innovation awards
- Loyalty Card
- map tools
- Mapping Applications
- maps
- Marketing
- Meetups
- Mobile maps
- navman
- new zealand
- new zealand maps
- Oil Price
- petrol
- Print Advertising
- proximity based marketing
- Radio Advertising
- Real Estate
- real time traffic
- Retail
- Retail Profit
- Return On Delivery
- Reverse Geocoding
- ROI
- route optimisation
- Route2GO
- Rugby
- Rugby World Cup
- SaaS
- Sales
- sales territory
- satnav
- school
- Social Media
- social networking
- software
- Sport
- Sustainability
- systems integrator
- territory management
- tomtom
- Traffic
- Uncategorized
- university
- universityschool
- viral marketing
- Web Map
- web maps
-
RSS
Entries RSS
Comments RSS