Geolover.com blog

Back in 1998 I started to work in a small gsm repair shop.  At that time mobile phones were pretty expensive so it worth to repair them.  I started repairing Hagenuk MT-2000 . In 1994 when they introduce it was really cool because there was built in tetris game.  Today Hagenuk is still selling cellphones but they’re not the most innovative company.

Then later I started to repair Nokia,  Ericsson,  Alcatel, Motorola and other popular phones.  I loved mobile technology so much I almost spent all my time hacking and learning how these phones work. I had a new phone every month and was hungry for the new innovations.

Then after about 2 years I burned out.  I started to hate mobile phones. I realized that due to the small screen and lack of qwerty keyboard the only things you can do with a cellphone  are calling and search phone book.
So in 2002 I bought a Nokia 3510i.  I was using it until last month when I got a new Google G1. Now I realized that something changed in this industry.

Apple started this change about a year ago when they introduced iphone sdk. From this time everybody could add an application to there platform. That’s why these phones are more valuable then others. Not the touchscreen or built in GPS or “cool design”. It’s really funny that Apple never made a phone before and now they have a pretty large market share.

This revolution  it just started. If Google will keep up with the development of the Android platform I think they can rule almost the whole market.  Why? Because it’s “opensource” and “free”.  So one more year and all big and small Asian mobile manufacturers will come out with a phone running Android. Just image what would happen with Hagenuk if they came out with a sdk in 1998.

App ideas

Here are 2 of my ideas that I don’t have time to implement. So I share it with the world. If you think they can be killer apps please feel free to develop it and let me know. I can be your first beta tester.

Plant a tree and save our planet

This can be a killer because you can easily build a viral marketing on it. Also most of  pepole want to do something to save our planet so they will install it.
The main purpose of this app is to encourage users to plant a tree. When they install this app they read about how to and where to plant a tree. They can create a profile and when they plant a tree they take a photo and store tree’s gps coordinate.  They can upload there tree to a social website.  On this website you can see trees on google maps, users, countries.  To motivate users you can give them badges and create a competition between countries.

Where is my phone

This is a simple application. But it can be a killer app if somebody steal your phone or you just lose it. Here is how it works:  You just downloads this app.  Install it as a service or it can be a game which does a little bit more in the background. Everytime when phone starts a connection to the internet it pings an auth server. If you lost your phone you can set a flag on this server through a webbased client. If flag is set phone can send you it’s location or just stop working and showing a message that you can set. Something like: “This is Peter’s phone. Please call xxx to and you can get $50″. You can charge a small amount to users using your auth server.

Update: On WWDC Apple introduced “Find My iPhone“. Which does almost the same thing as my app idea. I think this is just another clever move from Apple to boost up mobileme users.