WaveMarket today announced the first off-deck launch based on it’s Veriplace Location Aggregation platform. Shipping company uShip is using the location aggregator to allow consumers precisely track their shipments in real time. To be honest, the actual uShip service is of secondary importance to me – the Location Aggregation platform is an extremely hot tool.
Wavemarket has been operating in mobile location since 2001, and it has been working with carriers pretty much the entire time. As a result, it currently has solutions and deals in place in America, Europe, Latin America and Asia. So when Wavemarket talks about it’s location aggregator, it’s worth listening. The idea behind Veriplace is this: it is a web-based service which allows carriers and developers to locate tens of millions of phones (so Wavemarket claims) on carrier networks. It’s an opt-in service at user-end – the phone owner can choose to allow or deny location access every time a service tries to locate their phone. The end effect is that any mobile developer can tap into a world-wide network of location-enabled phones, and do it without being intrusive.
From the release:
“The Veriplace platform will revolutionize how people think about location-based services, offering developers a web services API that empowers them to locate tens of millions of phones on carrier networks, all while offering end-users complete privacy and security controls for their location information. uShip is creative company that seized the opportunity to increase the value of their services by leveraging Veriplace” said Tasso Roumeliotis, WaveMarket CEO. “uShip is an innovator in shipping and transportation services; a great example of how developers on the Veriplace platform can leverage this unprecedented access to location data to their own competitive advantage.”
“Innovation and transparency have always been two primary tenets of the uShip marketplace,” said Matt Chasen, CEO of uShip. “Veriplace’s open access platform lets us foster a whole new level of trust and transparency between shipping customers and service providers. Getting setup and running with Veriplace was incredibly quick and easy — we’re thrilled to be the first developer partner to utilize this innovative platform.”
What we think?
Wavemarket opened Veriplace to developers back in May – and this is the first result. It’s great to see a service which was previously only there to allow carriers to provide LBS for their customer become available to all developers in all mobile channels. There’s a good article on the original launch here, which astutely observed that it hoped the results of this service wasn’t “another social network“. I’m glad to see that it’s not. uShip might not be immediately useful to everyone, but it shows just a glimpse of the kind of applications we could see coming out of deals with Wavemarket.
Read the story on GoMo News.
