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Barcelona has always been pretty pioneering with new technologies… The Barcelona City Council has been experimenting for a while now with mobile services and recently launched a “Barcelona Mobile” campaign to sensibly citizens and tourists on public services to be accessed from your mobile phone. (check out the video here, it’s great fun!)

Barcelona City Council offers you a new service which allows you to have all the information about the city on your mobile:

• MERCÈ 06 City Festival program (ended last week)
• What’s On: the Grec festival, your team’s match, children’s activities, the theatre, exhibitions and concerts.
• Directory: a guide to restaurants, hotels, etc.
• Barcelona city map -> exists already online and is excellent!
• How to get there: a tool how to get somehwere in Barcelona by underground, bus or just walking.
• Usefull numbers: firse service and emergency numbers

Now I’m happy all these services are becoming available on the mobile phone, in the end that’s what we all want, however I tried some of the services and the information is very poor. For example only 7 hotels were mentioned and the places I was searching for didn’t appear… well probably more time is needed to index everything. The map thing is pretty cool and advanced, connecting this to a LBS system with services is going to be peanuts later on.
The SMS service costs only 0,30 Euro/sms which is reasonable but knowing about my mobile web browsing bills from last months, I’m not attracted to use the Barcelona mobile web service a lot.

However, walking through the city and checking for (public) available WiFi acces points in Barcelona learns me there are currently a lot of these public acces points available a bit everywhere, so… Martin, isn’t this something to connect to with FON? Also, wouldn’t all these services be quicker and easier to build and be found through tools like Plazes.com once their mobile beta goes public? With a bit of promotion and marketing the best ‘plazes‘ in Barcelona can be tagged easily and become accessible through the mobile as another valuable option.

What about other cosmopolitan citizens? How are the mobile services in your city? It would be great to map some of the coolest urban mobile services…

3G, agenda, Analysis, art, Art Culture, Barcelona, culture, Experience Design, fon, guide, martin varsavsky, mòbil, móvil, mobile maps, mobile public services, Mobile Search, mobile services, plazes, spain, usability, user generated content, wi fi