Disney Mobile and Helio

It looks like social location-tracking is rapidly becoming the must have feature in a mobile phone. Here are a few more companies that are buying into the "see where your friends are" service.

Disney Mobile has their "Family Locator" feature which allows for anyone who shares the plan (e.g. anyone in the family) to see where other members are. It displays the GPS coordinates of the phone you're looking for as a red dot on a map and also includes an accuracy gauge and a nearby street address. To protect privacy, the user must enter a PIN to be able to view anyone else's location.


Helio has "Buddy Beacon" though they don't go into much detail on their site about how it works. It allows you to broadcast your location to your friends so you can "Turn it on when you're up for a party" but "switch to cloaking mode when you're going low profile." It sounds like your Buddy Beacon follows you around, constantly updating your location to your friends until you turn it off. All locations show up on a Google Map.

It would be interesting to get more detailed information about the design of these products and how they relate to Cluster, but as I don't know anyone who has Helio or Disney Mobile, that would prove to be a bit difficult. What I can say is that Disney seems to have addressed the privacy concerns by really locking down the information whereas Helio has gone with an open-door policy, leaving it up to the user to guard themselves. Cluster's design falls between the two.