Month: December 2006

Time magazine and web 2.0

Time magazine cover Time Magazine, the popular choice of travellers at airport bookstores every year publishes it’s Person of the Year special. In the past Time has recognised such figures as Winston Churchill, Ronald Reagan, The Apollo 8 astronauts, John F. Kennedy, and last year Bono, Bill and Melinda Gates.

This year in an inspired piece of journalism, Time has chosen You (us) the users of the internet who together are exploiting the small contributions of millions of other people and are collectively taking control of the information age. The cover of the magazine has a mylar screen in which you are supposed to see a reflection of yourself – does not quite work but a great idea.

As one would expect there is of course mention youTube, Flickr, wikipedia and the impact of blogging on mainstream journalism – this is all great so see presented to the wide readership of Time magazine, but key to me was the opinion that users were now filling the gaps left my mainstream content providers, and the default position was that such information would be shared with little restriction.

Within the niche that it Geographic Information we are of course beginning to see this happen also, with “free the postcode”, Openstreetmap, platial and of course the impact of Google Earth. There is of course enormous scope for community generated geographical information, after all we are all experts about our neighbourhoods, in many ways we are only beginning to see the potential of this which will develop I’m sure as rapidly in 2007 as it did in 2006.

Written and submitted from the BCS London Office, using its members broadband internet connection.

GIS

OGC and the “Mass Market”

Just returned from the latest Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Technical Committee meeting hosted by BAE systems in San Diego, where for me a important milestone was reached with the formation of a Mass Market working group, with a remit to work on “joining the dots” between the established GI standards community and the rapidly developing mass stream GI market as represented by the GYM offerings.

OGC Logo

Hats off to Raj Singh for putting the creative effort in to developing this so far.

In this respect the attendance of the senior Google Geo staff in the form of John Hanke, Michael Jones and Brian McClendon was very important. Indeed Jones was interested in seeing how OGC could aid the standardisation of KML and clarify its relationship with GML – note these are early days but at least the right people are beginning to talk.

For OGC I think these are really important activities, OGC needs to embrace and recognise the needs of the mass market, as I pointed out in my presentation maybe there is now a new requirement for interoperability, above the levels of W*S services at the mapping API level.

In working with mass market players, OGC as an organisation, will need to recognise that some of it processes and behaviours will also have to change, like it or not the perception of the OGC as bureaucratic and slow moving is a common one, but also one which can change.

OGC has played a very important role is developing the “professional” GI market, its expertise would also have massive value to the mainstream – important progress then !

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

Apple Google Maps LBS Thoughts

What the iPhone might mean for LBS ?

Post author By Ed Parsons
Post date December 9, 2006
2 Comments on What the iPhone might mean for LBS ?

According to almost everybody on the internet, at 10am PST on the 9th January next year, at the Moscone Center Steve Jobs will introduce the iPhone, perhaps one of the most anticipated products ever from Apple.

There is much speculation as to what the phone will look like and its functionality, and this tends to focus of the “ipodness” of the phone – to me what is interesting are two things is particular, the potential that the iPhone will be should SIM free and that it might contain as well as a camera a GPS.

Actually I think the fact that the iPhone is likely to be sold SIM free and not tied to a network contract is the most important part of the whole iPhone story, – If this does turn out to be the case it will a direct attack on the already crumbling “Walled Garden” model of the operators – a major deterrent in the development of LBS so far.
iphone
In the walled garden, you buy a phone at a subsided price from the network operator in return for a service contract, and less obviously a set of applications and services selected and controlled by the operator. So if you want to make use of a music download service, you must use the operators one, likewise want to use LBS then you the one the operator provides.

Of course it is possible to buy phones today SIM free, but the marketing behind Apple and the buzz the iphone will create will I believe shift the market more towards an “open” model, where greater innovation in LBS applications can take place. There is clear precedent for this, just think what the online market might look like if we where all still accessing the net through CompuServe or AOL’s or even Apples eWorld (Anybody else remember that ?) environments.

A couple of months ago there was much excitement when hackers noted the latest version of iPhoto suggested support for co-ordinate metadata to be attached to photos – now what if the source for the photo was the camera in a “smart” iPhone and the metadata came from an onboard GPS chip-set – again this could lead to a future potential market of tens of millions of LBS capable devices.

Well it has me excited !!

Written and submitted from the BA lounge at Heathrow airport, using the BT Openzone wifi broadband internet connection.