ShareOne night in 1991, John Ellenby and his son Thomas were sailing off the coast of Mexico. To compensate for John Ellenby’s poor sense of direction, they tied together a compass, a Global Positioning System receiver and binoculars. That made it possible for them to simply to point at an object or a navigational landmark to identify it. The Ellenby’s, to their credit, didn’t stop there. They formed a company, GeoVector, that developed software that allows a user of a wireless device to simply point at an item in the real world and click to obtain information about the item. Japanese wireless carriers are the first to deploy this innovation.
As the New York Times states:
If you stand on a street corner in Tokyo today you can point a specialized cellphone at a hotel, a restaurant or a historical monument, and with the press of a button the phone will display information from the Internet describing the object you are looking at. …. Think of it as a divining rod for the information age.
This is a particularly interesting form of geographically based search. Click here for the rest of the article.
