We like to think of ourselves as global citizens, but actually we live locally, extremely locally...
In today's global village atmosphere, it's easy to think that we are all citizens of the world and forget that when it comes to running our day to day lives, we are all local creatures. While we all interact on a daily basis with consumer brands, and have professional and social connections around the world, at the end of the day, most of our daily interactions are local, in our country, in our city, in our neighbourhood.
Adding location to the mobile mix ensures that you get the services and information that's most relevant to you and your actual location. "One-size-fits-all" solutions, providing an identical solution all over the world are bound to fail as they cannot provide a fully personalised and localised user experience. In order to provide this level of experience apps should take into account specific geographical and cultural characteristics of each individual market, giving the user access to relevant local content that's relevant to their immediate living environment.
Such local and relevant location-based apps can show you and point you in the direction of exactly what suits you, based on your real-time location as well as your likes and dislikes, using information from local, familiar brands.
If you're in Paris, for example, Orange France's Orange Maps service provides you with real-time local traffic and speed camera information and gives you access to NavX Gas (gas station prices) and NavX Parking (for local parking availability). In addition Orange Maps offers users access to Champerard Guide (for local restaurant reviews), 118 Yellow Pages for people search and 118 White Pages (for local business search). Using the service, Parisians can also access Velib, Paris' bike transit system; easy to search for and navigate to the nearest Velib station.
All the information above means nothing of course, to a UK or a German user. They are naturally looking to interact with a whole other set of familiar brands that will provide this useful information for their own geography like Barclays bike hire, Top Table restaurant guide and the Good Pub Guide, in the UK for example.
There is no doubt that today's mobile phones have the potential of becoming our personal concierge, answering real life questions such as: "What movies are playing at the Odeon near my current location in the next two hours?", "What is the weather forecast for the coming hours (can I continue window shopping or is it going to heavily rain and I better search for an interesting in-door activity nearby)?" or "Where can I enjoy an inexpensive Japanese meal nearby?"
But surely, our personal concierge must be fed with local, up-to-date, relevant information, creating a convenient, best-in-class, "must-have - can't-live-without" service that's superior to anything else out there. Otherwise, we will miss a real opportunity for technology to truly impact our on-the-go, busy lives.
The key success factor is written on the wall: It's all about being local...