tienshiao.org

Don’t you hate it when somebody steals one of your ideas and runs with it? OK.. these people didn’t steal my idea, most likely they don’t have a clue who I am.

I am talking about Dodgeball. Some time ago I had a similar idea. Online matchmaking is extremely popular at the moment. Also popular in foreign countries is speed dating done with mobile phones. Ultimately the killer implementation of this would be to provide the matchmaking as a location based service. You’re out with your buddies somewhere, they decide to head home early, you pop on to your phone, hit a site or run a MIDlet to tell people you’re free, and the service using your location matches you up with other free people in your area.

My idea was MIDlet based, and depended on the user to provide geographical data (like a zipcode or something). Far from ideal. Dodgeball seems similar. Which is kinda klunky. Sprint is planning to roll out location based services soon, so they seem to have a leg up on others. There is no standard way of accessing location information (EGPS or whatever) through J2ME. I’ve been thinking I might be able to do something with the Treo. Retrieve some sort of tower ID. Users that have the same tower ID are probably pretty close to each other. And with the Treo I could have it automatically scan for the ID and update the server when it changes. Hrmmm. Too bad the Treos make a relatively small audience. Maybe I should grab the Series 60 SDK.

Anyways, good luck to Dodgeball.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 25th, 2004 at 8:35 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.