There has been a lot of talk about the delivery of location-based content to PDAs and mobile handsets lately. The idea is to use people's physical locations to provide products, services, and, of course, advertising within a context when this information might be the most useful and effective.

One such service comes from Earthcomber, which, as the name implies, offers an eponymous system that leverages a handheld user's location to convey certain predetermined types of information to that individual.

According to the company, Earthcomber matches a user's interests with places nearby. Customers see only the places that have their favorite things. So a business listing is not displayed unless the business offers a product or service that matches what the user is seeking.

Earthcomber found Jim Brady says, "Earthcomber remembers all the things you want to do, experience, eat, see and hear. You don't have to stop and do a search. All you have to do is turn it on and tap the screen, and Earthcomber goes off and looks for all of your favorite tings."

So if you love rock climbing, for example, there's no reason your handheld shouldn't be looking for great places to climb, and ATMs on the way there. With Earthcomber, you "can really get down to specifics—find me some hot chai tea, not just a coffee shop," says Brady.


Earthcomber Start Page

Nuts & Bolts
You go to the Earthcomber website to sign up for the service, which is free. At the site, you select a group of favorite things that you want to know about and tell it what area of the country you will be in. You then download a map of that location from over 3,500 maps that cover every county in the United States. Once the application is on your handheld, you can then change the favorites and interests you want to find.


Identify Interests

If your PDA or smartphone is Global Positioning System (GPS) enabled, Earthcomber will constantly sweep the landscape for your favorite things and notify you when those favorites are within range. For those who's handhelds don't integrate GPS, you simply tell Earthcomber your location by tapping on the map.


Earthcomber Coming

Favorites can include restaurants, stores, services, attractions, hobbies, National Historic Register sites, and more. Earthcomber can also notify users about the closest library, post office, shopping mall, hospital, or police station, as well as direct you to the nearest park, mountain summit, hiking trail, lava flow, glacier, waterfall, swamp, among other natural features.

View Listing

A Longer Description

When you are near a favorite place, the location lights up as a hot spot on the map. You can configure the application to cover up to 100 miles of territory at time.

Earthcomber lists over 1.5 million points of interest and 10,000 businesses. It expects the number of businesses to grow to 300,000 by the end of the month through a deal with an online yellow pages website.

The company plans to make money by signing on businesses to be listed in the service, with the most coveted listings coming from national brands that have locations all across the country. Although none have come onboard yet, the company told PDAStreet it is confident they'll see Earthcomber as a good opportunity.

Earthcomber is currently available on Palm OS PDAs and smartphones. It expects support for Windows Mobile handhelds to come about sometime next year.