Our friend Vaibhav Sharma of TheSymbianBlog recently attended a Q&A session with the Ovi Maps folks, where he learned all sorts of cool things about Ovi Maps and where they’d like to take the service in the near future. He also got a tip about an upcoming service, dubbed ‘Ovi Journeys’. Reportedly, Ovi Journeys is going to be the evolution of SportsTracker (which explains why SportsTracker has been left to die lately), and will probably be written on top of the new Ovi Apps on Maps setup. From the description, it sounds like Ovi Journeys will be somewhat of a hybrid between SportsTracker and Nokia vINe.
I think this is a brilliant idea, and I can’t wait to see the official announcement to get more details. However, I have some thoughts on how I hope this goes down.
First off, I think it’s imperative that there be a way for people to continue to use SportsTracker as-is. Nokia should definitely continue to update the application, but I think it’s really important that users be able to use it for tracking workouts, as it’s clear there’s a real market for such a concentrated application/service. This could be a setting in the application itself (maybe a few checkboxes on what information to record?), but it needs to be there still, and not be tossed to the wayside for the photos/vids/etc media aspect.
Second, I think this is a big reason Nokia bought the team at Dopplr. From what I can see, this is basically a rebranded Dopplr service, automated. Supposedly, Ovi Journeys will run in the background on your phone and record where you go, photos and videos that you take, as well as music that you listen to, etc. It’s easy to suggest that they’ll also integrate the recently added Good Things aspect of Ovi Maps, so that you can create Good Things on your phone from your Ovi Journeys app.
James Whatley came up with an awesome use-case in the comments of TheSymbianBlog, where users could create location packs (for lack of better name). From James…you could trace other people’s journeys, you could create journeys for other people to trace…I’d love to do a Soho one, i.e.: You come to London, you don’t know what to do one day and you can log on and track ‘the bars of soho’ via @whatleydude’
Completely brilliant. What do you think of the idea behind Ovi Journeys? Keep in mind that it hasn’t been officially unveiled yet, but what other use-cases can you think of where this would be extremely useful/cool?
