Irish Health dot com in association with The Asthma Society of Ireland and sponsored by Sanofi Aventis have developed an iPhone app for pollen alerts/forecast
colourful commercial & easy to use but only available to walled gardened iPhone owners.
There is plenty of free data on the web from all sorts of folk that do not have web apps or sites built for one platform alone. The world wide web which provides much of the data on the internet was & is supposed to be open, standardised and accessible. (read Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee)
Pollen count data is available for free from the best guys in the business to tell us if there is a L M or H pollen count in our region, the meteorologists in Met Éireann. They share this data for free on their website and on its mobile friendly website http://mobile.met.ie
There is no need for a high end smart phone. If the guys at Irish Health dot com, The Asthma Society of Ireland and Sanofi Aventis wanted to spread the news on pollen counts they could do far more by spending a lot less by pumping Met.ie data to RSS feeds and Twitter and free SMS services. This Apps4Saps love affair will end in a quickie divorce, its the W@P of our age. Data wants to be free (in the non economic sense of the word) and walled gardens via carriers, protocols or hardware are doomed to failure.
When the sponsors learn that the segment of mobile web (not apps) market they reach is by far the smallest subset of phone users perhaps they will rethink their approach and exclusivity of service.
Posted via email from web lab