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LBS Services, The Daughter, The Doll and the Wife!

by mobileman (09/05/2007 - 15:05)

The classic example of why LBS services may not have reached their market potential yet is a story I first told at a CTIA event over 5 years ago. It happened to me about a week before the show and has the perfect metaphor for the state of LBS services. It has been re-told by pundits and even published in trade magazines. Indeed many now tell this story as though it happened to them! So now without further pre-ample is the LBS story of the daughter, the wife and the doll.

We were going “through the woods and over the hill” to grandmother’s house. In this case the woods were 180 miles of New York State Thruway and the hill was the Catskills Mountains. The car was packed for the weekend with me, my wife and three kids.

The youngest at the time was about 3 and she was never far from her beloved “dolly”, a ragamuffin doll that is stocked at every Toys-R-Us.

You see, we were now seasoned experienced parents. We learned that favorite dolls have a way of going missing and therefore getting our child to bond with one that was easily replaced seemed like a good idea. We even had bought 4 copies of the original one and stored them in our house, just in case!

Getting a three year old to go to sleep without her comfort doll is not a pretty sight.

About 2 hours into our trip our worst fears were realized! My daughter called out for her dolly. I looked at my wife and she looked at me and both of us said, “I thought you ……”. The family is now in dolly Defcon 4 mode. We stop the car on the side of the highway and do a complete search with no luck.

We continue our journey with a now distraught, crying child. All I have to do (in theory) is find a Toys-R-US and buy a new doll. This is the solution that our doll standardization efforts should have yielded.

Being a wireless guy, I decide that the easiest way to find a Toys-R-US is to use the search function on my WAP deck (at 70 miles an hour!). I was able to find a page on the toy store but it had no location information.

The crying seemed to increase and the leers from the front passenger side got more serious.

My next technological solution was to guess that Toys-R-US probably had a 800 phone number that is 1-800-toysrus. This worked! (you can try it) I felt as though my technological manhood had been restored! I navigated the 78 step voice response system to finally get the prompt that promised to tell me where the nearest toy store was. It then said “ Please enter your zip code…”.

For those of you who have not been on the NY State Thruway recently (or ever), it should be no surprise that that State highway authority seemed to have forgotten to put zip code signs next to each exit.

Okay, I am not deterred, technology will get us out of this problem, I assure my

increasingly skeptical family. All I have to do is figure out what zip code we are driving through, then call the 800 number again, navigate the 78 step voice system and voila!, I will have the location of the nearest Toys-R-US.

The fact that it was now 8:45pm and most Toys-R-Us stores close at 9:00 pm was just a minor glitch.

The next exit came up and I got off. I told everyone confidently that I will ask the toll taker what his zip code is and we will be in good shape. My daughter wailed even more desperately in a demonstration of lack of confidence.

With all my self- assurance, I paid the toll and started to ask the toll taker the zip code question. I was cut off with a still painful elbow to the ribs. My wife leaned over and had this conversation with the toll taker.

“Do you have a Toys-R-US in this town?”, “You do, great!”, “Can you give me directions?”, “ 1 mile, turn right and you will see it?.”, “Great!, Thanks!”

Humbled, I drove the precise directions to the store and bought the doll and put my internet enabled phone away for the rest of the weekend!

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Tag: doll,traffic,NewYork,car,wife,LBS

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My review of some LBS services

by mobileman (08/31/2007 - 15:01)

My Favorite LBS Services

This is the big travel weekend, so a short review of my three favorite LBS services seems in order. In the New York metro area there are four main destinations, each with its unique lingo. For the Labor Day weekend people leave “The City” and go either “Upstate” (which for City dwellers is anywhere that is more than 1 mile north of the Bronx!), “Out to the Island” (which is what you say if you go to Long Island but don’t have a place in the Hamptons), “Down the Shore” (that’s the Jersey shore), or “in the mountains” (either the Poconos or Catskills – Since there are no coal miners in the city – the phrase “in the mountains is curious)

For travel directions it is hard to beat the Verizon navigator service for ease of use and value. I used to carry a handheld Garmin unit (cost ~$500, plus map updates). It worked fine, but was one more item to carry. I also had to spend extra money on map updates and remember to download the right detail maps before I went on a trip. For the VZW Navigator feature, I pay about $10/month and the maps and local details are all network based. The voice and map directions are great and they have saved me several times (even walking in “The City”). The cost has a breakeven of over 4 years with the purchase of a standalone unit. It is a good value.

Another feature that I have long trumpeted as the first killer LBS app is rolling out as VZW Chaperone service. This is the long awaited kid finer service. You can locate your kids on a map and get an alert if they leave a specific area. This is a great feature for the pre-teen age group.

Lastly, once you reach your destination you will need to look up restaurants, movies and other local services. My choice for that service is the still un-matched Vindigo service. Vindigo has been around seemingly since the dinosaurs roamed the earth (in Internet time). It is still a great service, albeit you need to know where you are since it does not have LBS hooks with the phone. For destination travel (pleasure or business) it still works well for finding that seafood place or reading a review of a movie before you suggest it to your fellow vacationers. It even can provide you directions and traffic conditions along the way. If this service ever integrated true LBS location it would rock.