Vodafone Australia have announced the first trials of ‘Pocket Life’ – a mobile service that combines telecommunications with online social networking and the location-based capabilities of a Global Positioning System (GPS).
Pocket Life is a new creation aimed at utilising the GPS and web features of your mobile phone and transforming it into a social networking tool.
This will differ to other social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace because Pocket Life “enables friends and family to share their current locations, favourite places, real time directions and intended destinations” stated Vodafone in a statement.
Pocket Life is currently free to download, subscription-free, compatible with more than 30 mobile phones and is available to customers on any mobile network in Australia and most mobile networks worldwide.
Hanno Blankenstein, head of innovation at Vodafone, claims that its strongest feature is “friends and family can actually use the technology to meet in person.”
“Pocket Life literally puts your social life on the map.”
But the introduction of such technology is bound to cause a huge problem in regards to security. The ability to monitor where people are at every moment of the day is quite scary.
But Blankenstein claims that security is an important feature of the software, “Pocket Life allows users to control the information they choose to share with other individuals and groups on the network. With the push of a button, one can become invisible to other Pocket Lifer users.”
But it still raises a lot of scepticism in the industry, because undoubtedly there will be people who try to abuse this software.
But overall this is a remarkable new piece of software and it will certainly be interesting to see the outcome of the trials.
The Pocket Life application can be downloaded from www.pocketlife.com