Geo2Tag LBS Platform

Location-based services (LBS) are becoming extremely popular and appreciated by many users. ABI Research forecasts tremendous growth in location-specific technology with revenue expected to balloon from $515 million in 2007 to $13 billion in the next five years.

Another big player in the Internet world, namely social networks like facebook, introduces a new network usage paradigm titled Web 2.0 regarded as the way that business embraces the strengths of the web and uses it as a platform. Web 2.0 can be of different flavor, Flickr is the great example on sharing photos and videos by photographer, tag, time, text, and group, and recently it features great for exploring photos and videos by place, i.e. location. Eventually, it turns out there is a convergence of LBS and Web 2.0.

Following the trend of LBS/Web2.0 convergence in our project we develop a software platform for a new location-based service with social networking capabilities, Geo2Tag. With this piece of software a user is getting a unique experience of tagging and sharing of his/her current authentic entourage including all types of information around like sights, sounds, voice, video, any sort of media. Just in one click a user can share the media in real-time with customized clusters of fellows all around the globe.

The idea behind Geo2Tag is pretty simple. User’s media content is associated with his/her current GPS coordinates thus forming a tag. Then a tag (containing user’s media and GPS coordinates) is uploaded to the Geo2Tag server from where it can be acquired from any type of mobile or fixed device attached to the Internet via Google maps or special logic called Geo2Tag data channel.

Geo2tag data channels are user-driven and created and managed by users. Geo2tag data channels are normally associated with GPS coordinates, meaning a user can have an access to data provided by other users in accordance to terminal’s location and subscription. Geo2tag data channel can be of different type:

• Public open channel. Any user can subscribe to this type of channel.
• Customized channel. A private channel created by a user (channel creator). Other users can be authorized by channel creator to read and post to channel.
• Broadcast channel. All subscribed users read information from this type of channel.
• Community channel. Similar to customized channel.