Nokia Research Centre in Bangalore, India, is piloting We Meet, an SMS application that determines the user's location without GPS. Instead the app determines location based on Cell Broadcast Service (CBS) messages.
Nokia created the app for emerging markets where the mobile Internet has not fully taken off. The app serves as the basis of a simple location-based service (LBS) and mobile social network by allowing users to chat with groups of other users and share location with the rest of the group.
We Meet uses SMS as its mode of communication. It is a Java app that should work on most Nokia Symbian Series 40 and 60 phones. Unsupported phones can use We Meet through a text command interface to communicate with the app.
One of the benefits of We Meet is that it lets the user send a single message which is relayed to all members of a group. Users can create multiple groups for different types of messages.
Nokia is developing a web client application to support We Meet.
