We are a step closer to being able to view remotely anything on the planet. OK, I exaggerate about anything on the planet. But, adding to the eyeball tendrils of web-cam world is the ability to visualize addresses in a directory. Amazon’s interesting search engine - A9.com - adds photos to addresses in the Yellow Pages, albeit for a limited number of localities in the US.
This is nothing new, except it’s one of the first times such a feature has appeared in an aspiring mainstream service and not some lab demo, or the like.
The A9 team took the pics themselves using a camera mounted on a car with the shutter synchronized to GPS co-ordinates.
This technique has already been used effectively by the team at Property Key I(PK). They use it to grab house pictures, for a variety of applications.
However, PK are a bit more diligent than the guys at A9, who managed to catch some pictures obscured by obstacles like buses, as featured on Seth Godin’s site.
Now, sooner or later, legions of camera-phone holders are going to start posting in cyberspace pictures with co-ordinate information attached, as per the Spatial Messaging concept.
Once this happens, and search engines - like A9.com - can pick out the necessary co-ordinate meta-data geo-coded back to a postal address, who knows what we will see? I’m sure it’ll be more interesting than buses.
How dare you use a mobile to do this - go find a PC! 
SmallPlanet sent me an email to say that the latest version of CrowdSurfer mobile phone software is available for download through the SmallPlanet.net Web site. CrowdSurfer turns your Bluetooth enabled mobile phone into a radar device for finding friends and meeting new people.
The guys from SmallPlanet say: “for any geeks out there like us, it’s like Bluejacking on steroids”.
My last post about “mobile money” made me think about the whole process of mobiles and currency.
Have any operators thought about letting users exchange or sell minutes from one phone to another? It must be quite common to find a group of friends on pre-pay packages and one of them runs out of credit and needs a quick top-up. Why not let them get their minutes from a friend?
Furthermore, given that mobile minutes are such an essential currency for everyone these days, why not allow minutes to become a tradeable currency? Perhaps on websites, incentives could be offered to users by topping up minutes on their phone. I need to speak to my operator CFO friend to see if this makes financial sense. I’m sure he could see the financial benefits, if there are any.
There’s always talk of mobile money - “digital wallets on the mobile”. But, as my CFO friend at a major operator remarked, who’s going to upgrade their EPOS systems so that people can buy things with their mobiles? What’s the business case?
I wonder if the chip-and-pin recepticles being deployed in most stores allow a card to be inserted that can connect with a mobile using Bluetooth over ultra short range? Would a BT chipset and antenna fit inside a chip-and-pin card?
