Are location based startups trying to milk open alliance publicity?
Today news broke that a new alliance to share location across multiple services appeared on the various tech sites. Of course within the techcrowd, anything “open” is cool: open source, openid, etc so I guess open location must be the next cool thing. Most who know me well, know that I’m betting a lot on the capability and consumer uptake of LBS as a whole, so one would naturally think, I’d be loving this Open Sharing of Location Based Objects Alliance business. But I’m underwhelmed here.
The thing is Location Based Services (which I’m broadly including location based social networks within) are so bleeding edge that I’m not convinced that a consortium of startups (with the exception of powerhouse wayn) is going to lead to much. I mean I have to applaud for Aka-Aki, Belysio, Buddycloud, Locle, Moximity, Nulaz, Rummble, Skout, Tooio and WAYN for all playing nicely in the sandbox. But heck these guys don’t even have a website for the initiative yet so maybe the announcement was premature. Or maybe it was just a crafty way for the startups to get some publicity.
If Google (with Latitude) or Yahoo (with Fireeagle) get involved things may change and certainly in the future as we see more divergent uses of location, then an alliance of sharing data makes sense. But for the shortterm most users will apply location awareness in a similar way and are not likely to take the need/data across multiple (similar/competitive) LBS companies.
I’m all for open, and in the longrun this same play could get interesting, but at present, well, nothing to see here…move along.
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directionsmag Techcrunch VentureBeat