If like me you love Family Guy, you will love this, and if you don’t find it funny , well it’s an interesting business model !
Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.
Month: September 2008
I’ve been thinking over the last few weeks that at last LBS (Location Based Services) is becoming a real market, what with the release of iPhone 2.0 and the imminent release of the first Android phone with its location platform. It has taken much longer then any of us would have expected, but applications using location are finally becoming mainstream.
At the same time however I have also been thinking that the term itself may no longer be appropriate. Actually location is just one signal that application and service developers can use to understand context, ie what is happening at any point in time to an individual and therefore what information is most relevant to them.
I quite like the term “context based computing” to describe this, as it encapsulates what we understand as LBS today but also extends into the future use of other types of sensors and devices to provide services relevant to specific activities we carry out in our daily lives.
A great example of the type of service I mean is the soon to be released fitbit, which was a runner up in this weeks Techcrunch 50 event. Fitbit is a small device which measures your activity during the day and night and reports back to your computer whenever you are in wireless network range of it, building up a profile of the calories you burn, how much time you sleep and the quality of your sleep.
Very neat !
Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.
Categories
Semantics and the GeoWeb
I went along to a very interesting and well delivered presentation in front of it must be said a rather disappointing audience at the British Computer Society in London yesterday evening. “Make Mashups Correct, Complete, Relevant and Revisited” was a presentation originally given by Jonathan Lowe of Giswebsite LLP at Where 2.0, and as Jonathan is a great presenter I was really looking forward to it.
The presentation actually focused on the currently rather specialised area of semantic spatial databases and their potential in powering the mash-ups of the future. He high-lighted some of the darlings of the semantic database industry freebase and True Knowledge, who have developed technology that really demonstrates well the benefits of semantic databases.
The benefits come from having a much more structured data modelling approach than we have become used to on the web, the demo of freebase here is a great example of this, but such a strongly typed approach is also the major weakness of semantic databases at the moment.
Who defines and categorises data into these types and who builds the relationships between database elements. The wiki approach that freebase uses is a great start but ultimately will it scale ?
Semantic databases will become the future way we interact with information online only when their development and maintenance can become automated, in the same way that the creation and analysis of the web indexes behind web search is automated.
In the meantime that make some great demos
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.