Don’t focus on devices. Focus on functionality.

Location Based Services (LBS) is all about business models and technological schemes, not about the device you (or your customers/partners/suppliers…) will use. The other day some people made fun of my old-dummy-only-good-for-making-calls mobile.

Jordi! How on earth can you talk about Consilience between Touristology and Web-Engineering when you don’t carry the latest smartphone! Well - I reply- for the same reason that I never got a DVD I just waited for the digital era!

For the same reason, I teach my Touristologists how to deal with the most important social networking sites nowadays BUT ABOVE ALL I teach them to create one of their own. I love to see their faces the first time I say “You have to create communities each one of them will represent a component of your chain of value, then you have to create users, then you have to assign them to the communities and give to them public and private pages, finally, you have to add widgets inside this pages according to the role users have”

To them it seems an impossible task to do, but then they began to work, to deal with bad thoughts and feelings and they end up with the kind of presentations than make me tweet...

But let’s return to Location Based Services (LBS). LBS are great because of the functionality they provide NOT because of the device you will use!

You can make the most of knowing where your customers and members of the chain of value are. You could show them all the options / services that they have nearby. You could show more layers of content, commerce and community related to their positioning. For instance, objective and subjective recommendations, meet with people like them or complementary to them, augmented reality, a little bit of gamification which we talked the other day...

But Jordi, all these things are only available through smartphones and tablets! Well, not only that Touristologists, not only that! Remember George Bernard Shaw  “You see things; and you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say, 'Why not?

As John Lennon said “… you may say, I’m a dreamer but I’m not the only one”!!! Check out this video video for more information about wearable computers.

Or this one here…

Nothing better than the words of the father of Ubiquitous computing, Mark Weiser to know a little bit more… 

"Ubiquitous computing names the third wave in computing, just now beginning. First were mainframes, each shared by lots of people. Now we are in the personal computing era, person and machine staring uneasily at each other across the desktop. Next comes ubiquitous computing, or the age of calm technology, when technology recedes into the background of our lives. ”

Not bad for something said 24 years ago!!!

Wearable computers?  Ubiquitous computing? At the end of the day…Connecting people to their environment.  When is this connection more necessary than when you are travelling?  

To me, there is plenty of room for Touristology here! I love Touristology games!