Geovector — point your phone at the cafe, and flirt with the barista

GeoVector

Finally, GeoVector has launched. It is almost a year late, but it’s a pretty cool company based in San Francisco. It leverages a tiny compass sensor to give your cell phone new tricks.

For example, it will let you point your cell-phone at things like restaurants or cafes and then lets you call them. There are all kinds of things you can do, as we mentioned in this story more than a year ago.

The only catch is that it doesn’t work in the U.S. yet. The company signed its first deal, about a year later than expected, with Japan’s Mapion, to provide search services for mobile phones in Japan.

…Users can walk down virtually any street in Japan and point at over 700,000 buildings, retailers, restaurants, banks, historical sites to instantly retrieve information on what they are looking at, or find what they are looking for just by pointing their phone. Mapion was the original developer of Yahoo maps and provides content for AOL Japan maps and Excite Japan maps.

Soon users will point their mobile phones at restaurants to get reviews, point at billboards to shop at the advertiser’s website, point at a movie poster to buy tickets, or play a game by pointing at their friends, said John Ellenby, president of GeoVector. “With the real world as your desktop, the potential is enormous.”

Hope the U.S. telecom carriers don’t stifle this one. It’s great stuff.