Russell Beattie announced his involvement in WaveMarket.com, which issued a press release on Monday:
WaveMarket, a pioneer in location-based blogging, today introduced the first comprehensive location-based blogging system that enables users to broadcast and share location-time information from their cell phones with friends, affinity groups or the world. The new technology has implications for consumers, the enterprise and vertical organizations, according to Tasso Roumeliotis, WaveMarket founder and chief executive officer.
Their product, WaveIQ, will be marketed to telecom service providers rather than directly to consumers, and is reportedly available “now”. The product includes three components:
WaveSpotter—a cellular map interface that allows users move about, letting users drill down to street level and post or consume blogs.
WaveBlog—a company-hosted super blog serving as a multiple channel informational clearinghouse engineered by uber blogger Russell Beattie, WaveMarket director of blog engineering.
WaveAlert—wireless operator infrastructure that allows users to be notified whenever they enter or leave a designated area. The server software powers a scalable system that reduces network loads and hardware requirements
Russ writes more about the blogging aspect of WaveMarket (examples can be found at WaveBlog):
The idea is to provide that data for others to use and to start aggregating other geotagged feeds so that using a handset – via J2ME or WAP2 – you can see which weblogs have been updated in real time near you or in another specific location (“location-based mobile aggregation”). Our pitch has to do with club-goers and other trendy what-if scenarios that carriers love, but in general it’s just the next step in mobile weblogging. Going from “photo blogs” to *real* moblogging, by enabling producing and consuming of information organized not only by time, but also by location. When you combine this with the rich media that modern handsets can produce, people become “personal broadcasters” where every mobile user (everyone?) becomes a roving reporter on the scene around them.
This is all very consistent with an earlier post that Russ made regarding mobile phones becoming the preferred device for both posting and accessing web content, specifically blogs:
Imagine someday soon where your PC browser is secondary. It’ll all be XHTML, but the primary focus and use of the website will be the phone… Most webloggers already sees their web server as an extension of their identity. It holds all the public data associated with that person, thoughts, pictures, resumes, and more. I think we’re going to see that even more with mobile phones.
I share Russ’ view that people are increasingly identifying with their mobile phones, and that the mobile phone may provide the gateway to people’s digital representations of themselves, I just don’t think that mobile phones will overtake larger devices (with QWERTY keypads and larger screens) as the primary conduit through which blog content is authored or accessed. In fact, outside of WaveBlog, I suspect that Russ authors his posts from a more conventional personal computer; it will be interesting to see what proportion of his blogging activities take place via mobile phone vs. computer.