The new way of helping lost tourists – Google mobile maps

 In location

Being an expat Australian now living in London, I seem to always be the first to spot a lost tourist with an unfolded map in my local area.

At the rate of about 2 a week at the moment, either I am approached for directions (I look friendly!) or I make the approach to lost souls and offer directions.

For the last few months, I’ve been using Google mobile maps (GMM) in real time to find their destination and show them on a map on my Nokia E71.

In most cases, the time from punching in the location to showing them on the map is under 5 seconds.

Which brings me to the question – why doesn’t everyone have GMM on their mobile?

It is one of my top 3 daily mobile applications (behind Good mobile messaging, and my internet browser) on my E71.

You can download Google mobile maps from www.google.com/gmm – go on why not do it now before your next trip to somewhere new?  The GMM application is brilliant – the latest version now has WiFi location integrated with it.  Today while I was navigating to a new church I did not realise I had turned off GPS – the WiFi location was placing me within 200m the whole trip.

Note: GMM is free to download but it does consume a bit of data while you are navigating etc so make sure you are on a decent data tariff before you start using it.

About 

Based in London, The Actionable Futurist and former Global Managing Partner at IBM, Andrew Grill is a popular and sought-after presenter and comementator on issues around digital disruption, workplace of the future and new technologies such as blockchain. Andrew is a multiple TEDx and International Keynote Speaker.