Buddy-finder: a proposal for a novel entertainment application for GSM

Since the first deployment of cellular phones, we have witnessed an almost global revolution in the development of wireless communication. This success has been evident for the GSM technology, whose popularity has exploded during the 1990s thanks to its affordable price, digital quality and a pervasive innovative application as SMS. However, the same positive condition seems to lack in the next generations of wireless communication, as UMTS, thus slowing down their market penetration. Therefore, both mature and recent mobile technology could benefit from the introduction of a novel application able to shake the market. To this aim, mobile location could be used to facilitate the diffusion of many novel services for cellular systems. We present in this paper, an innovative location based application that involves only a minor impact on the current GSM architecture, while offering to customers an appealing means to obtain multimedia entertainment.