How is this "revolutionary" other than it revolutionarily cuts down on the remaining characters to send?
And it's not really revolutionary in the way that BBM or iMessages is (i.e. taking sms away from the carriers).
And it's not really revolutionary in the way that BBM or iMessages is (i.e. taking sms away from the carriers).
- Sharing you location is a very basic need in communication (don't think Google Latitude on smart phones, think 90.7% of mobile phone calls including the question "where are you?", globally, everywhere)
- Landmarks is a concept that has evolved to solve this; Well known places that can be used to communicate location. And they fit the text based communication perfectly.
- Traditional maps, which can be seen as a competitor, lacks in a few major areas:
→ How do you send a map? SMS is the global standard of communication, you can't SMS a map
→ More than half of the people in the world can't read maps. At all. These people still understand the local landmarks.
→ Good maps are not available everywhere, and will not be anytime soon as traditional maps are expensive to make
So revolutionary in quite a different way than BBM or iMessages.
(edit: formatting)
For a majority of messages it seems like your product mostly eliminates remaining characters.
I agree that if (1) the receiving device is a smartphone, (2) there is map data available for the used area, and (3) the users knows how to read maps, sending a location link with MMS works well. Or a http- google-maps link with SMS, that gets opened in Google Maps at least in iPhone and Android so works pretty brilliantly too and doesn't cost the price of MMS.
I think we have pretty much proven that landmarks in SMS is a killer feature for consumer vehicle tracking with Tramigo (best selling GPS/GSM tracking device), and in that use simplicity is the key: plain SMS, no need for data connection or anything else than just a plain GSM phone. So we are trying to expand from there.