Roaming with Lonely Planet

MoCoNews’ exclusive interview with Lonely Planet’s director of mobile innovation and strategy highlights the importance of Location and User Generated Content to the popular travel guide’s plans for mobile.  The interview also identifies roaming as a billing problem for their plans, but doesn’t include thoughts on Location roaming problems they may encounter.  In today’s circuit-switched world, a location-based app that runs on one network will choke when a user roams to another network, unless there are similar carrier systems in place to support the handoff.  But in tomorrow’s world where every device has location-smarts built into it and all networks support IP, and where there’s less dependency on the network and more on the device, the Location roaming issue becomes less of a problem because applications can access server-based Location systems over the open Internet independent of bearer or protocol.  Until this happens, I won’t expect Lonely Planet mobile to offer reviews for Katmandu hostels nearby, but I’ll definitely read my book and maybe make a few phone calls. 

This entry was contributed by Jonathan Spinney