Ever lost finding a place? Ever wanted to know where your friends really are? If you have a MTNL connection and you are in Mumbai, you now can. Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd (MTNL) launched its new Value-Added Service “Location Based Application Services” for its Postpaid & Prepaid GSM subscribers (Dolphin/Trump) from Mumbai. The LBA service utilises the mobile network to exactly pin-point the geographical location of the device. In our earlier posts on Location based Services, we saw how LBA works and the impact of LBS in the industry
Utilising the service, one can identify the location of a person, locate the nearest ATM and moreover the whereabouts of an employee. Find Yourself, Find Your Friends, Locate the nearest airport, bank, hotel, Find nearest tourist destinations and many others soon to join the Find list. The service is free till the 11th September after which Rs.1 would be charged for every request by SMS (to 50123). The service is available through both the website as well as through SMS. One just needs to login to the LBA Portal site and his connection is known automatically.
For all our Mumbai readers and if you are a MTNL user, here is the list of keywords you need to send through SMS.
- Location – To get your geographical location location send <FDM> to 50123
- Find Friend – Type ‘FDF’ followed by 91xxxxxx* (91 followed by the 10 digit MTNL number of your friend followed by an asterisk sign), send this to 50123.
- Find POI – Type ‘FDP hospital’ and send it to 50123.
- Find navigation – Type ‘NAVPT bank’ and send it to 50123.
- City site seeing – Type ‘CSS temple’ and send it to 50123
One one hand, the service might allure many, but on other hand the “Just Dial” service is a big competitor. Inspite of MTNL charging just a rupee for the service, Just Dial does it for free except that it does not find your location but finds any other place you are lloking for in any ara in Mumbai.
Again, those of you who have used Google Maps might not find the service on web as attractive as it is on GMaps. Location Based Service will probably have a very huge market in the future when the 3G service also rolls out. On the other hand, there are several smartphones on which the GPS is applicable, as for example when MapMyIndia had rolled out the GPS services with devices running on Windows Mobile 6 or more and there are several other models on which GPS can be availed of. In fact recently, TATA Docomo and RIM have launched a Blackberry Smartphone with built-in GPS. With a very small percentage of consumers in India using GPS-enabled smartphones, this service has a postive edge. However, until and unless the service is rolled out on a larger scale, the success cannot be determined.
