Why is this useful?
The ice cream example is trivial, but we have demonstrated a number of important capabilities required by location based services and applications:
- How to distribute information to other parties in and around a local area - without adding new infrastructure
- How to search for locally relevant information on the handset and produce a list of results indexed by closest first - all without obtaining a fix on our location.
The ability to post and search for these “Snowball ads” is provided by the Snowball API, intended to be used by any third party application that is running on the handset. Applications can benefit from this new capability in a number of innovate ways, including:
- Location-based services
Any application that needs to know about its local area, e.g. search for my nearest restaurant? What is their telephone number? Do they deliver? - Social networking
Any application where people seek out others, e.g. I want to find people in my local area who want to chat about my favourite band, view peoples Facebook profiles or perhaps advertise for people who want to watch a new film with me tonight. - Gaming
Adds a layer of social and location awareness to games and the people who play them, e.g. find others in your area to play mobile Quake against, or establish local player leagues - where software attempts to match players with similar gaming ability around a school or office. - News and information
Find my nearest cinema via a Snowball search, and then be given a deep link to a mobilised web page listing which films are playing there tonight. - Logistics
Any application that seeks to share services and content with other devices in its general proximity. An application can transmit and receive relevant identity information over Snowball and then make a direct connection over existing network infrastructure, e.g. an office printer may want to advertise what services is it offering (colour printing, scanning, etc) and provide automatic configuration information to computers within easy walking distance.
