Go By Airship

You are replying to a comment posted by Adam Bondy on May 20, 2008 at 3:09 p.m. View the original.

I'm in an MBA program and one of the projects we worked on was the marketing section of a location-aware concept. As users of Apple's iPhone Maps application are aware, a cell phone signal can be used to triangulate your rough position, a sort of pseudo-GPS. The concept we were working on was tying this information in to an advertising network. This would require fairly constant position updates and a higher level of resolution than is currently available.

The purpose was to serve ads to users of ad-sponsored cell phones that were relevant to the current local. For example, if someone happens to walking near a doughnut shop, their cellphone would be sent a text message coupon that offered a discount at that particular location. Hopefully, this would increase the success rate of the ad since it would be both time and locationally relevant to the consumer. It's a rather frightening concept though and makes me think of cyberpunk dystopias a la Transmetropolitan.

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