I saw Mojeo presented at the Mobile 2.0 Event in San Francisco Monday as part of a Launchpad presentation spotlighting new services. I wasn't too impressed with the presentation which was brief and lacking in details, but I did jot down "mojeo.mobi, location based search - any phone, add mashups". Today I took a look at Mojeo.mobi which is the mobile site and the PC site, www.mojeo.mobi. I found a clever and useful but definitely beta service that has the potential to be that killer application for the mobile web that we all dream of.
The premise of Mojeo is simple, it's a mobile portal that keeps track of your current location. When you click on one of the links on the portal - which include Google Local, Yahoo Local, Fandango, Upcoming, Weather.com and Yelp to name most of them - Mojeo passes your location to the target site which uses it deliver location aware information. So without having to reenter your location information, Fandago shows what's at theaters near you, Weather.com presents a forecast for your city, etc. Mojeo has a simple REST API that lets any site receive location information as either an address or latitude and longitude.
So how does Mojeo find your location. According to the FAQ,
"Ideally, we use GPS built into your mobile phone to figure out your exact location. But sometimes the phone does not have GPS, or you have not enabled that feature on your phone. In these situations we try to guess your location by asking the Internet where it thinks you are using a map of Internet addresses. This Internet lookup can be very accurate, or very far off."
The part about GPS is a bit of a fantasy, I'm not aware of any carrier outside of Japan that will share location information with an unaffiliated web site. In the US, no carrier shares location data with any site, not even their closest partners.
So for now, Mojeo uses IP address lookups as mentioned in the FAQ entry, they also use the area-code of the phone number that you give them as part of the (optional) sign up process and finally they let you enter your zip code at anytime to change your location.
So how does it work in practice? Pretty well once you convince Mojeo where you are. I first tried Mojeo without registering. When I used my phone's built in browser, Mojeo though I was in Kansas (I'm actually in San Francisco). Apparently my phone's IP address is registered at Sprint/Nextel's home office in Kansas. Using Opera Mini, Mojeo said I was in Oslo! Once I entered my zip code though, Mojeo had no trouble passing my location to Fandango, Yelp, Google Mobile etc.
I also tried registering, first from the phone and then from my PC. When I registered from the phone, Mojeo sent me a text message with a numberic pin which I then had to enter into a form on Mojeo. Once I did that, Mojeo knew I was in San Francisco. Registering with the PC was potentially even easier as the SMS contained the Mojeo url with my phone number and password embedded in the query string. Unfortunately, the SMS was not in a format that was clickable. There is apparently a trick to sending a URL in a text message to a Nextel customer. Some sites like Google, Microsoft, 411Sync and Flurry know how to send the clickable sort of SMS but Ask, Treemo and Mojeo don't.
It turns out that no matter whether you register or not Mojeo will revert your location back to the IP based one (Kansas or Oslo in my case) the next time you visit the site. Mojeo really needs to remember your last location and not override it unless you tell it to. Other than that I found Mojeo stable and usable. As it works now I don't see any advantage to registering, however.
Warts aside, this idea of the portal as location broker is a great concept. When the carriers finally loosen up and let users opt in to passing their
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posted by Dennis Bournique
November 9, 2006 @ 8:57 pm
7 View Comments
