XYPoint made several enhancements to its wireless phone location services last week through partnerships with Vicinity Corp. and GeoVector.
XYPoint partnered with Vicinity to provide wireless customers with location-based information services via a voice user interface blended with text messaging technology, the company said. The partnership combines XYPoint’s wireless phone location and e-commerce technologies with Vicinity’s location content on major consumer brands and retailers.
The service provides users with the location of the nearest requested retailer or service provider, as well as driving directions to each. If a user asks for the nearest Pizza Hut, the service provides the location and directions to it. Or, if a user asks for the nearest store selling a certain brand of clothes, the service can provide the same.
XYPoint’s location services are based on E911 wireless location technology. It expects to begin deploying commercial location-specific applications in partnership with Vicinity by the second quarter.
The company also announced a partnership with GeoVector to add pointing technology to XYPoint’s location technology.
While XYPoint’s 911 location technology knows where the phone is and can give information about the general area, GeoVector adds technology that can determine which direction the phone is pointing, such as toward specific landmarks.
The pointing technology acts like a compass, similar to a compass in a car. It can tell which direction the phone is pointing. On its own, the technology would just add compass capabilities to the phone, perhaps displaying on-screen the direction the phone is pointing.
But added to location-specific technology such as that from XYPoint, it serves as a feature enhancement for location-based information services, much like a GPS device combined with a compass when hiking.
“We need to know where the device is, then we add the capability of determining where the device is pointing,” said Pam Kerwin, GeoVector chief executive officer.
With location technology alone, a user could query information about a given city or district. The pointing technology refines the search even further. The location technology keeps track of what area you’re in and what’s around you, but the pointing technology determines what you’re looking at in that area.
So if you’re downtown and have four landmarks around you-such as a bridge, a building, a land mass and a famous hotel-GeoVector’s technology allows you to point the phone at the specific item of interest and receive information about it, rather than a list of all four and forcing you to choose which is of most interest.
Of course sometimes several items of interest may be in line with the direction the user is pointing, in which case the phone will display a list of everything in that direction.
Services featuring GeoVector’s pointing technology are not expected to be commercially available for another six months, as the technology must be added to wireless devices-either by embedding it in the actual wireless device or as a clip-on feature. GeoVector is pursuing both avenues with manufacturers and application developers as yet unnamed.
GeoVector said it is talking with several location technology companies; XYPoint is just the first public announcement.
“We had to wait for positioning technology to be widespread,” Kerwin said. “That’s begun to happen this year.”
