What is missing in today's mobile applications?

Mobile applications and Location Based Services (LBS) together have a whole new tech world to reveal. But they have been waiting for each other to come up. Besides, they both are waiting for the infrastructure to come up. LBS for instance, demand the handset to have an attached GPS device for geo-coding.

Can LBS work without GPS co-ordinates? Well, that depends on the type of application. If you are looking at a street navigator, yes you need a GPS. But plenty other common LBS applications such as payments, reservation, cataloging, you don’t really need the GPS. Look at your own day-to-day activities – most of the time you know where to go and what to do or buy. You don’t really need to know the exact locations of your friends. I am not saying these are unnecessary features, but you and everyone else should not have to buy an expensive handset to use these features.

Another important difference about mobile applications is its usefulness. Working on mobile handset will never be as friendly as a desktop or a laptop. That is definitely not because of the design of the application front-end. Handset cannot be larger than a limit. The screen is small, so is the keypad. Again when you sit with your lap/desk top, you are 200% more relaxed than when you are on handset. When you work on mobile, you have very specific need such as check your email, send SMS etc. The bottom line is you don’t want to spend a lot of time on it. So your mobile application should be designed in such a way that it is simple, useful and serves the purpose. For instance I have Acrobat reader, MSWord reader etc on my Nokia 6682 handset. But I have never used it!! A useful mobile application must be a personal assistant, not just another application.

I had a meeting with one of the oldest VC firms in the valley last year. He says he looked at over 200 mobile applications in 2006 and sadly none of them are really useful for common users.

In my opinion, the real power of mobile application is exposed only when:

1) It can represent the owner himself. The owner should be able to use all his existing ID’s like his credit cards, membership cards etc seamlessly
2) It is secure – at least like online transactions (PKI)
3) It should be multi-purpose and portable. A browser-like experience is preferred where it’sfront-end can reflect the server/service itself
4) It is capable of accessing Location Based Services (LBS)
5) It require minimum user interaction

The challenges are:
1) How to securely store and seamlessly retrieve owner’s personal information
2) How to locate and authenticate a LBS server
3) How to make the application portable like a browser
4) How to make it run on common handsets

Besides these there are server side challenges as well.
How to host a cheap non-GPS based LBS server

Not so easy – I know. But there are solutions. Fujitsu is one of the pioneers who entered the space. Companies like EzCheckout are coming up with inexpensive solutions. One of the major slow-down factors is that no one wants to take a major step and invest in this area.