Categories
LBS

The half-life of an LBS app..

Is around 5 years ??

Well I would estimate that is the case from the imminent closure of Plazes, one of the earliest Location Sharing applications developed back in 2004.

I used Plazes on and off for a few years starting on my first real smartphone the Nokia N95 and for a while it powered the Where Ed function on this blog. Plazes was acquired by Nokia in 2008 and it’s technology was rolled into the ovi platform, although Plazes.com continued as a stand-alone service.

This week Nokia announced the closure of the service, offering users the ability to download and export their location history. This is an important step and one which Nokia should be commended for, your location data is your data and in the spirit of data liberation you should be able to take it with you wherever you want to go..

So why is plazes closing, my personal view is that location sharing as a discrete service is just not that compelling, your location is a useful piece of contextual information whose real value comes from it’s integration with other personal data.

Knowing I’m currently in Calgary, Alberta is interesting..

Knowing I’m in Calgary, it’s 5pm, I’m flying out to San Francisco at 9pm, it’s raining and there is a Tim Hortons my favourite Coffee Shop on the quickest route based on the current traffic conditions is actually valuable.

Written and submitted from the GeoAlberta Conference (51.059N, 113.979W)

Categories
LBS

Discount for the LBS Summit Europe 2012

I am once again speaking at the LBS summit in Amsterdam this year.

The conference is the closest Europe gets to something like the Where conference, and is the must attend conference for the location and mobile marketing industry. There’ll be lots of in-depth discussion, interesting debate and great networking opportunities with over 150 senior execs from the LBS eco-system.

To get all the info on this event, get the brochure here –
http://www.thewherebusiness.com/locationsummit/conference-event-brochure.php

As a speaker I am entitled to invite 5 of my friends, clients or colleagues along at exclusive discounted rates!  So, just quote my name when booking and get the exclusive discount, saving you an extra €100 on the current listed rates when you register.

The code is only good for 5 people, so be quick if you want to make use of it.

To qualify for this saving, simply quote LBS12SPKR when registering at
https://secure.thewherebusiness.com/locationsummit/register.php

Categories
LBS Thoughts

My Location Business Summit Slides

If your follow my twitter stream you may well have picked up on posts with the #locbiz tag, highlighting the Location Business Summit in Amsterdam. This I think is the closest Europe gets to the Where 2.0 conference and once again was an illuminating event, with some great talks by Nokia, Vodafone, SimpleGeo, Gowalla etc. Congratulations to Lucy for putting together a great agenda and Jonathan Raper (@MadProf) the excellent MC..

As always my slides are not that useful without commentary, but you might find something of interest !

Written and submitted from the Cape Town International Convention Centre (33.916S, 18.427W)

Categories
LBS Thoughts where 2.0

A smartphone without location is just not smart !

Last week location tracking almost hit the mainstream following Pete Walden’s presentation at the Where 2.0 conference, organised by O’Reilly who where also key in promoting the story..

Both Gary at www.vicchi.org and Peter at geothought.blogspot.com offer a more nuanced and thoughtful commentary than  the near hysterical reactions of the blogosphere and tech press.

At worst Apple is guilty of a lack of transparency, yes the collection of anonymised location data is mentioned in the ridiculously long terms of service and despite the fact there is a location services on/off switch in your iPhones preferences the fact that low accuracy location was collected came as a surprise to most users. I think Android is a little more explicit in the sign up process for your new Android phone you are asked to allow location date to be collected, however perhaps the industry as a whole needs to be even more clear and open in stating the benefits of collecting this data.

Location data is too important to become “ick” !

The only way we can stop it becoming so is by highlighting the benefits of the technology, so that people can make the informed decisions to opt in or not.

I’m not sure of Apples motivation although it sounds like they are trying to build their own location database rather than tracking people in the same way that Google and Skyhook have done in the past, but without wanting to sound glib in general terms any form of location based service needs to know where your device is..

Remember the old days when you used to have to type your postcode/zipcode into your phone to get a local map to be displayed, clearly we can’t go back to those days, we expect our smartphone to know where it is… is not really smart without that information !

That information comes through a number of technologies GPS being the most well known, but also databases of wifi and cell tower locations and ultimately if all else fails your devices IP address are used to provide device location. Most of us expect our location to be known nearly instantly when we want a map displayed or we want to geocode a photo we have just taken, for this to happen with any reasonable level of accuracy your location technology needs to be awake, running as a background process on your device.

Actually most of us if we think about it don’t have an issue with this other than perhaps the drain on device batteries, as the vast majority of location aware apps on our phones don’t share the location information, they are just used to establish the users context.

When however we start to share this information then we potentially do get to the point of “ick”, if there is not completely transparency and control over the process. Clearly if I chose to share my location derived by all this technology via Facebook or Twitter I have in theory made the conscious decision to tell my friends, follows and potentially the world world where I am at that point in time. For those who do share location in this way, there is a value in doing so, perhaps further developing their social networks for example, for users of the check-in services like foursuare there is additionally the potential of a financial incentives of discounts and offers from business owners.

Increasingly location based services are beginning to go beyond the manual checkin model to suggest location to check into automatically, Google Latitude for example has an option to do this, and in the near future many services may be customised based on your implicit location automatically derived. Again this has the potential to produce the “ick” response, but this ultimately is the most beneficial use of location technology.

Let me provide an example, just over a month ago I received this text message as I was getting up to go to work…

“Red Tsunami alert (8.8m, depth:24.4km) in Japan Yamagata 11/3 05:46UTC, Pop100km:31000, tsunami 860cm, Kamaishi www.gdacs.org – JRC”

This was an automatically generated SMS warning of the Sendai or Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami generated by the GDACS project of the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission. If you have not already done so I would strongly suggest you sign up to it. The GDACS system take feeds from a number of geological and meteorological agencies around the world and produces automatic warnings related to the occurrence of natural disasters that have the potential to impact human life.

My reason to sign-up and at least share my email address and mobile telephone number was clear, like any parent I don’t want to be one day sitting on a beach somewhere with my family wondering why the tide has gone out .. this is the sort of information you need pushed to your device without question. As it stands the GDACS system is very useful, but it could be much better. On the 11th March I was at home in London, so the Sendai quake and tsunami had no direct impact or need for any immediate action on my behalf. I have family in Tokyo however who we did immediately call, who had just got over the quake and wondering how we knew..

Imagine a development of GDACS which could offer much more specific warnings bassed on a knoweledge of the users location, that would offer a clear reason why you might want to share your location full time with a third party ?

Of course more mundane application which warned me if my travel plans where going to be impacted or if the camera lens I was looking for was actually in stock at a nearby store could also make use of this information.

There can be real value in sharing location, but unless as an industry we clearly state what these are, and we are transparent in how this information is collected we run the risk of scaring off users under an avalanche of media scare stories.

Of course it’s interesting that this data has been collected by mobile network operators for years and has been made available to law enforcement agencies and the security services when requested for years, and this data unlike most of the emerging location aware services is not anonymous !

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)

Categories
LBS Thoughts

LBS Are we there yet ?

Last week I presented at the “Location Business” summit in Amsterdam, and it was interesting to reflect on just how far the LBS market has developed over the years.

One of the points I made was that we are on familiar ground, it seems every year since about 2001 has been the “year of location”, so I posed the question – this year “are we there yet?”.

Well clearly a lot has changed in the last ten years, devices are now very powerful, despite what they may think the mobile networks operators are no longer major players (bottlenecks) in the value chain, and with hybrid location technology from the likes of Google and Skyhook location determination is straightforward and ubiquitous .

More than anything else this last point and the fact that location is exposed through simple operating system level functions or via modern browsers means that it is trivial to add location to any application almost for free. This has fuelled the massive interest in bringing location into social applications, from Facebook to Twitter, foursquare to yelp, people are at last central to location based services.

I tried to make the point that actually places only really exist as a reflection of society..

Place = Location (points of interest) + People

As Gary Gale pointed out in another one of his seminal presentations there is still a “lot of stuff” we need to better understand about managing places.

Surprisingly there was little focus on the years “hot topic” of Augmented Reality, other than an inspirational presentation from Claire of Local AR stars Layar.

Overall a very enjoyable conference, in many ways not so different to ten years ago but now with a few clear areas of areas of agreement.

  • Location is now mainstream – no really.
  • “social” is as an important contextual signal as location.
  • There is little money to be made with pure location outside a few niche vertical apps, it’s real value comes from it’s ability to better customise content specific to individual users.

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)

Categories
AGI LBS Thoughts

The Weasley Clock and Google Latitude a mashup waiting to happen

In the UK there is a saying about waiting ages for a bus and then two come along at the same time. In the world of location based or context based computing it’s not exactly the case that there is little happening, but yesterday produced two interesting stories.

I had the pleasure on presenting at the AGI North Where2.0now event in Harrogate. It was a great event, but there was much joking from those who travelled from London and Southern England how far we had travelled.

Well now it’s possible to track exactly how far if you should choose too, as a Google Latitude user I can look at my history and see where I have travelled over a period of time.

As you would expect this is a service you need to opt in to, and by default your history will not be kept. But if you chose to store you history is makes a fascinating record of your travels here for example is my trip to Harrogate yesterday.

latitude

Tracking and storing you location is nothing new, John McKerrell has been doing so for a couple of years using his mapme.at service.

At the conference yesterday he showed the coolest piece of geo hardware seen since the Garmin GPS45, a location clock powered by mapme.at

If you have ever read any Harry Potter you will be familar with the idea of the Weasley Clock, a magical clock owned by the Weasley family which shows not the time but the location of members of the family and if they are in “Mortal Peril”.

Visit Johns blog to read how he has built a working Weasley clock using a Arduino kit, mapme.at and great imagination.

So cool !!

Written and submitted from my home (51.425N, 0.331W)

Categories
Android iphone LBS

Contextual Computing and The Informed Traveller

landt

I’m speaking next week at the Location and Timing Forum who are holding a special meeting on the informed traveller, in other words providing contextual services to travellers.

Next week the meeting is at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, so I won’t really be needing much in the way of contextual services to get me there ..

But in all seriousness I have become to rely at least on the mobile mapping services on both my Android and iPhone to get me to meetings, where once I might have printed off a map from a web mapping service, or in the more distant past used a street atlas, I now just use my phone.

This is of course the most obvious and simple application, the real innovation will come when in addition to location the other context clues about the individual traveller such as time and history are also used in applications.

Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.

Categories
LBS Ordnance Survey Thoughts

iPhone OS 3.0 loves location.

As Brady from O’Reilly pointed out early this week, the new iPhone 3.0 software and new iPhone 3G S have some major improvements that will further accelerate the development of exciting new location aware applications.

The iPhone now joins the two Android powered HTC phones in having a high quality networked assisted GPS, a digital compass and of course ubiquitous network access, the necessary building blocks for a phone to access information based on its location.

Accuterra Mobile
Accuterra Mobile

We can expect to see more applications that use these capabilities to present information is truly innovative ways like wikitude and sky map, and of course applications which put the phones location core to their functionality, the ZipCar app demoed at WWDC is a great example of this, and you can imagine a range of security or e-commerce application which may be enabled by location in this way.

Imagine your credit card transaction verified in part by the fact you are in the same location as the vendor..

At the same time more traditional mapping users are served by applications like
AccuTerra Mobile which although one of many trail tracking applications aimed a walkers, is generating a buzz because of its high quality topographic mapping data.

This is an obvious market that in the UK we could expect to see an Ordnance Survey partner develop a similar application, indeed it will be a test of the new innovation friendly strategy of the OS to see if a similar application is developed in the UK.

After many false dawns Location based applications are really now with us, and so very accessible, with the new Mapkit framework in iPhone OS 3.0 and similar functionality on Android developing simple mapping based apps has never been more straightforward and crucially with integrated  Application Stores easy to reach potential customers.

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

Categories
LBS

My Presentation from Being Digital

I have has a number of requests to share my very short slide desk from this weeks, Being Digital Event.. so here it is –

Congratulations to Simon, Tony and Emma on a great event.

Written and submitted from the SPOT Image User Conference, Toulouse.

Categories
conference LBS Thoughts

A different perspective of London

I gave a presentation at the Digital Cities Seminar yesterday and was fascinated by some of the maps Sir Terry Farrell showed as part of his presentation which will be featured in his new book Shaping London.

It is always refreshing to look at how people other than cartographers choose to represent geospatial information, the image below taken from Terry’s presentation show the Thames Gateway, the area of urban redevelopment east of London, and takes its inspiration from Beck’s Underground map.

 

Thames Gateway
Thames Gateway

 

 

Beck’s map (or plan ?) is truly iconic and the map of the Thames gateway uses the Circle Line from it both to provide a geographic anchor for the map and to provide relative scale. I always find it amusing to remind people that one of the most famous maps in the world is the product of a graphic designer based on the principles of laying out electrical circuit diagrams.

 

 

Becks Tube Map
Becks Tube Map

 

 

In my presentation I made the point that we are increasing moving to a time when maps are customised to an individuals needs, and will become task focused delivered on mobile devices and as a result transient. Indeed for many tasks where a map was once needed a location aware application can provide users with the information they need without a map display.

Just step back and think about this one button from the “infamous” National Rail app for the iPhone.

 

Next Train Home
Next Train Home

 

Press it anywhere in the UK, and it will tell you the time of the next train home, and when you would expect to arrive. As a geospatial professional think about all the functionality and data that is hidden behind this simple button, and the analogue sources of information you would need to have access to to provide the answer.

As a Geographer sometimes it hard to accept, but it is still true, that it is often not about the map !!

Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.