Where Sci-Fi Meets The Net

By Jennifer L. Schenker

The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy is a series of best-selling books that grew out of a 1978 British radio series. It revolves around researchers and travelers armed with mobile electronic devices who roam the galaxy, beaming in on-the-spot reviews of places visited and tips on everything from mixing a galactic cocktail to fighting space monsters, which are instantly available to anyone. British author Douglas Adams says the guide was simply a narrative device back then. But now that advances in mobile Internet phones are making an interactive hitchhiker's guide to Earth a real possibility, Adams is cashing in big time.

The hugely popular Hitchhiker novels have sold 15 million copies since 1981, and Adams has turned them into a British TV series, a set of record albums and CDs, a computer game, a Disney movie due out in 2002 and an Internet company called h2g2, which is building an online collaborative guide to "life, the universe and everything" through the participation of volunteer researchers in 90 countries. Like the fictional guide, the site offers unconventional tourism advice and entries on a huge range of subjects, from Homer Simpson to Homer's Iliad. The mobile guide www.h2g2.com/onthemove) which gives people a way to tap in while traveling, can be accessed through 22 mobile operators on four continents, including AT&T Wireless and Sprint's PCS networks in the U.S. Says Adams, who divides his time between a home in Santa Barbara, Calif., and h2g2's London headquarters: "Going wireless is a huge step toward where we want to go with this." And where is that? A quantum leap forward in the customization of personal services offered over the wireless Net.

h2g2 aims to make the most of what Internet analysts call the mobile Internet's killer application: combining "personalization"--services geared to a specific user--with "localization"--those linked to a certain place. h2g2's mobile division plans to introduce services that are tailored to where a caller happens to be at a particular point in time. New positioning technology means that mobile operators will soon be able to pinpoint a person's location to within 12 yds., helping h2g2 give more precise answers to a request like "Please recommend what to see and do in London."

It could work like this: you wake up one weekend morning, turn on your mobile phone and ask h2g2 for advice on what to do today. The service locates you geographically and, based on what it knows about your personal likes and dislikes, suggests a list of possible activities in your area. If you choose an art gallery, h2g2 can guide you there and even tell you about paintings as you view them. You can then stroll to a cafe and input your review of the art show and your comments on the cafe's service. While sipping coffee, you chat with other h2g2 members, who point you to a nearby beer festival. You don't worry too much about your phone bill because use of h2g2 earns cost-saving loyalty points.

Such services are only months away, and in the meantime, a growing number of mobile users are tapping into h2g2's Internet site for tourism advice, music reviews and entries on health, politics and history. The same topics are featured on other Internet sites; h2g2's appeal is that it tries to offer an unconventional approach to virtually every subject, taking cues from Adams' own sense of humor and irony. Unlike the motivations of sites that attempt to build forums and communities as a way of getting people to stay on their sites and buy more products, creating the guide is h2g2's raison d'etre. Soon h2g2 plans to introduce a premium service allowing users to receive a "smarticle," a text-based phone message summarizing sightseeing tips for a particular area, saving mobile users search time and reducing phone charges. h2g2 will make money through subscription charges and by taking a cut of mobile operators' airtime revenues, says the firm's chief operating officer, Ted Bissell. h2g2's website already boasts 55,000 regular members, with three to five times that number of people surfing the site. About 5% are accessing h2g2 through mobile phones.

How far can Adams' novels be stretched? Babel Fish--a device he describes that can be inserted into the ear to give the listener instant translation of all languages--doesn't exist. But h2g2 has licensed the Babel Fish name to a service run by search engine Alta Vista, which offers computer-based automatic translations of text in seven languages. There are plans to use that service to provide multiple-language versions of h2g2 within the next year.

Just how useful is h2g2 at this point? The guide is still patchy, largely as a result of the haphazard way that information is collected from the travels of subscribers. For example, the online guide to France contains a review of a pizza-and-pasta joint in the little-known town of Saintes in the Charente-Maritime region, but there is nothing at all on Lyons or the renowned restaurants there. And an entry for India that purports to be a list of the world's best curry houses bizarrely includes none from that country at all, while listing two in Australia, one in Canada, one in Germany and 26 in Britain.

You won't find anything about the Forbidden City or the Great Wall in the section on China, but the guide does contain useful advice about navigating the Beijing subway and bus systems. It also contains tips on drinking in Australian pubs (never leave your glass on the bar upside down unless you're prepared to duke it out with everyone in the place) and on early-morning bird watching in Sydney. And where else could you learn to navigate your way between two locations in Antarctica? "From personal experience gained while drunk and freezing, I would like to mention that if one is returning to McMurdo Station following a party at Scott Base, the road is the fastest, warmest and most direct way back to town," says an entry from Tim Smith. "Never stray from the trails--there are snow-covered crevasses concealed on each side, and people have died falling into them."

Adams thinks the beauty of the Web is that "people can add to the guide, argue with it, correct it--it's more like a real conversation, so you can trust what is on it." The global travel industry is starting to take a leaf from Adams' book, preparing to offer up its own, more staid travel guides via mobile phones. For example, Thomas Cook, a global travel agency formed in 1831, recently started offering guides to the top 25 tourist destinations via wireless application protocol (WAP) mobile phones, and plans to add international rail, ferry and bus schedules. Eventually, it may start targeting niche communities of mobile-phone users such as snowboarders or golfers with tailored mobile-phone services, says Richard Roberts, head of mobile commerce at Thomas Cook's London headquarters. "The principle of getting feedback, engaging in conversations and the creation of community interest is exactly the right thing we should be facilitating," Roberts says. If Adams and travel-industry gurus are right, wireless Internet phones will increasingly be used by people to make entries or access guides while at ski slopes, golf courses, holiday resorts and restaurants. And before long, their views and tips will be instantly available to everyone on Earth, just as they were to the fictional galactic hitchhikers in Adams' books.