JotYou: Location-Based Mobile Phone Messaging
The basic concept of location-based mobile phone messaging is that you can send a text message to someone's cell phone and they will receive the SMS message only when they enter into the exact location you specify. How can this be useful? Let's say you're up really late working and you want your co-worker to pick up some donuts in the morning on their way to the office.
Using a service called JotYou, you can send a message to your friend's cell phone and have them receive it just before they get to the donut shop.
You could use the service to remind yourself to do things when you drive by specific locations in a city. Next time you need to pick up some groceries from the local supermarket on the way home, create a JotYou message that will send you a text message when you drive near the supermarket.
JotYou also has a tracking feature that you can turn on for more fun stuff like games, events, and contests. The organizer of the event can create a tracking group and track the positions and times of all of the participants as the event unfolds.
To get started with JotYou, you need to first create a free account. Once you do that, it's a simple process and fun to play around with. First you'll need to install the JotYou software onto your mobile phone. You can then send messages from your computer or from your cell phone.
The cool thing about this program is that it uses Google Maps to pick the location and set the area for the message to be delivered. First you drag the little marker close to the city where you want to send the message. You'll then be zoomed in on a part of the city with a red circle around the marker.
You can zoom in or out to the exact location you're looking for and then press the smaller or larger buttons that are below the map. You can make the circle smaller, but there's a minimum size that it can go. Obviously, it must determine locations based on cell phone towers and that's the reason why it can't be too small an area. According to the map, the radius of the circle is about .6 miles.
You then simply fill out who you want to send it to, the time, when it message should expire, and the actual message.
If you enable tracking and everyone accepts, then you can actually plot the path across the city or town that the person traveled using Google Maps. Which would perhaps dissuade people from accepting! Nevertheless, JotYou is a Mobile Web app with a lot of potential uses.
Share
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
"Obviously, it must determine locations based on cell phone towers"
That's only if you have a Windows Mobile phone with wifi. Otherwise you'll need a GPS phone or a separate 'GPS puck'. Or at least that's what I gather from this page: http://www.jotyou.com/JotYou/myjy-download.php
Given all the above conditions are in place the chances of this service being useful (donut-example notwithstanding) are slim enough to make it pointless.
I commend their innovation, but I think I would have wiped this one off the board at the brainstorming stage.
Is this run by www.jott.com? If not, it bears more than a passing resemblance to that service (including the logo). Jott has a good part of this functionality.
Probably this will be integrated with other SMS features. Does this work with Palm OS (Centro)?
Personally, I think this is genius.
I can see so many uses for this. I'm so forgetful that it'd be great to just have my shopping list sent to me when I head to the store. Or reminding friends about various things... I know you mentioned both of these uses, but they alone have such potential. This is the kind of location-based service I would definitely use.
I'm guessing it somehow incorporates with the pseudo-GPS on many phones - the part that you set to either e911-only or not.
The donut scenario sounds like the perfect plan until your friend takes a different route because traffic by the donut shop is bad. No donuts for you.
I like the idea for scavenger hunts and geo-based games like that though.
You don't need to be luck smartphone or GPS-module users to use this kind of function. It is possible to track your location without all this stuff, 'cause your phone connects to the nearest station in your area. Tracking is simple.
What a load of rubbish...donuts on the way to work...I have been hearing about location based services in the mobile industry for over 10 years now ...with no genuine money making scenarios..that donut story is too stupid
should I go to all that trouble just to ask someone to buy a donut...can anyone come up with a convincing business case that might actually make a difference to someones life ..like emergency service
In case you are interested, this is an unpublished link on the site. It allows you to get location based messages on your computer if you don't have a supported mobile phone:
http://www.jotyou.com/JotYou/myjy-getmessages.php
Either let Skyhook Loki (WiFi location, same as used on iPhone) install or just double click on the map to tell it where you are.
What first struck me about this app, when I saw its presence on WHERE (http://www.where.com) is the ability to insert serendipity in one's daily life. Especially when it's used on GPS-enabled mobile phones, as an earlier comment mentions. I can leave friends and family fun little notes in locations I know they'll pass through (like a subway station).
The trick is getting enough of a "network effect" to trust that the people you leave messages for will actually see them.
Great post!
JotYou is currently live on Sprint handsets on WHERE (http://developer.where.com). It gets location from Sprint's aGPS handset APIs, which WHERE exposes through a server-side markup language.