Belinker: see where your friends are while touring

Tourists often split up to wander about independently in new surroundings and pre-arrange a rendevous location. Sometimes they need to know each other’s locations while roaming.

Belinker is a Chinese-developed cell phone webservice that can help these highly mobile tourists.

You key in your location, say “@MArtGallery”, to Belinker, and your travel partner(s) know where you are. If they are logged in, you will know where they are. The Shanghaiist reports that the service is to be launched in Shanghai on 14th July, 2006, and is targeted to foreigners.They also state that Belinker appears very similar to the US service at Dodgeball.com. At Dodgeball you text message to 36343 (’dodge’) for example “@MArtGallery” then click send. All you friends will then know where you are.

Now what about extending this concept to a map-based, cell-phone where points on the screen show the location of all those in the tourist group? Experiments are already in progress where near real-time GPS locations of people are fed to a a Google Earth/Map display (see Where’s Tim).

This entry was posted on Monday 10 July 2006 at 12:01 am and is filed under mobile phone, GPS, DURING the visit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.