I need assistance preparing for your location based services launch

[joe_ellsworth]

I know that This forum is not dedicated to Verizon but the people here seem to have a better idea of Verizons Brew future than the Verizon people I have been able to find. :D

We have been running a radio campaign for our http://gps-safe.com service in the Metropolitan Utah Area. As a result we have been receiving about 100 calls per week of which about 30 are from existing Verizon customers.

Of those 30 customers we have moved 10 off of Verizon service onto Nextel service simply because Verizon is not shipping a phone that has the features required to run our service. I lost the other 20 customers because they had recently signed their contracts with Verizon.

I would rather leave the Verizon customers on Verizon and still allow them to use our service by upgrading to a GPS enabled phone.

Who can I work with to get early access to GPS enabled phones which will allow us to access the GPS positions from Brew or J2ME software running on the phone? When can I tell my prospects that Verizon will provide this capability?

We are getting ready to increase our advertising investment to the point where we will be receiving over 500 calls per week and if the statistics hold consistent this will mean that we will be moving 50 customers per week off of Verizon and onto Nextel where our service can run today.

NOTE: I ran across this a GPS chip vendor http://www.globallocate.com/index.asp?page= which provides some advanced indoor capability that if provided in a Verizon phone would put them ahead of Nextel for business users who spend a lot of time inside of large buildings. I have not affiliation with this vendor so I can not vouche for their quality.

Thanks Joe Ellsworth
CTO of XDOBs.COM LLC
providers of http://GPS-SAFE.COM
800-658-8745:rolleyes:

[jmiller2]

I don't specifically know the answer to your question, but I would imagine a starting place would be (as a registered brew developer, of course) to look at the spec sheets for the pre commercial phones on the extranet. I would be REALLY surprised if there is no GPS availability -- but I believe it access to GPS is not available in earlier versions of brew (pre 2.x).

I am using 1.1, so perhaps someone who is using later versions will be able to answer your question more fully.

[yoyomeltz]

hello,
has anybody had any luck getting the location info from a brew phone?

thanks,

[MoOk]

Interesting fact:

Every single Verizon BREW device that has launched since the T720 has been GPS enabled. Not just E911 either, but full on GPSOne enabled. This is hinted at when the T720 boots up. The splash screen says "Verizon aGPS".

Also, if you are able to figure out how to access the developer menu (I cannot share that here, sorry) you will see there are all sorts of 'field tools' to test/access GPS.

Of course, the fact that the phones have the hardware means nothing if the doors aren't opened up to the BREW API -- and right now, they aren't.

So, the good news is almost ALL BREW devices in North America right now have all the hardware they need to run a GPS application like yours. The bad news is, until Verizon decides what their LBS strategy is going to be, they will never permit that hardware to speak to a BREW client, rendering it useless for anything other then E911.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. ;(

-Ben Mattes

[joe_ellsworth]

What you have reported is exactly what I have heard from Verizon and ATTWS.

All developers should have their customers contact these companies and complain about the service not being available. These companies will only only make the right move when their customers demand it or they start loosing customers.

Thanks Joe Ellsworth.
435-657-2280
joe@xdobs.com