Category: Thoughts

So it seems where is as mainstream as its possible to get with most popular online services rolling location into their products to improve the quality of the service, be that finding friends, the location of interesting restaurants or where is the best place to buy a Nikon camera.

As noted here on previous occasions, it is very easy to become fixated on location as the next big thing, and indeed there is much media coverage of the “battle for place” since the introduction of the Facebook places API, however location is still only one of the numerous contextual signals that make a service valuable.

This point was made very real for me on my way home from the officer earlier this week..

I have become a regular user of Borisbikes, the  “Barclays Cycle Hire Scheme” to give it its official title, which allow registered users to pick up a bike at a local pick up point and drop it off at a destination elsewhere. There happens to be a bike docking station just a hundred metres from the Google Office and another just outside the railway station I use 2 Km away. Perfect…

But as users of the system will know, there are not always bikes available to pick up or more subtly empty docking locations to leave leave your bicycle at your destination. Fortunately Transport of London, the people behind the Borisbikes, have made available a real time feed of docking site status via an API, allowing applications like the Android Cycle Hire Widget to be developed.

So now from the comfort of my desk or where-ever else I may be in London just by looking at my phones home screen I can see if there are any bikes available nearby and then check if I will be able to drop the bike of at my destination. Key to making this happen are of course my location and the real time feed of docking site status;  the where and when.

When I reach the railway station I dock my bike hopefully!!  and then check another app on my phone, this time for the time and platform for the next train to take be home. Again when is clearly important here, but now added to the contextual mix is a personalisation signal in that I have previously stored the station closest to my home in the app.

OK so this is not quite the personal jet-pack we may have hoped was the transport of the future, but making the relevant information available at the relevant time and place really does make a difference !

Written and submitted from the Google Offices, London (51.495N, 0.146W)

Unfortunately I’m a few thousand miles away from trying this app but I do have my access key!

Last week London finally got its bike hire scheme something that just cries out for a location aware real time application to help users.

So just in time Little Fluffy Toys have released their widget for Android phones that no only tells you where the closest hire point is, but also updates the number of bikes available in real time.

This is neat is so many ways, making use of location – tick, using a government data feed  – tick, crowdsourcing of location status – tick.

Can’t wait to try this out when I get home !

Written and submitted from the Boulder Marriott (40.016N, 105.260W)

By popular request here is the presentation I gave at last week’s GI-Forum in Salzburg. A great conference which I recommend if you are able to attend next year, 1000 GI people in one of Europe’s most attractive cities = success !

Not sure the slides will make much sense on their own, but please get in touch if you have any comments.

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

If so, can you tell  me what’s wrong with this answer taken from a question asked in the House of Lords via the excellent theyworkforyou website…

UK: Coastline

House of Lords

Written answers and statements, 23 June 2010

Lord Laird (Crossbench)

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is the length of the United Kingdom coastline in miles at (a) low, and (b) high, tide; and what are the lengths of the coastlines of (a) England, (b) Northern Ireland, (c) Scotland, and (d) Wales.

Baroness Hanham (Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, Communities and Local Government; Conservative)

Information provided by Ordnance Survey for Great Britain and by Land and Property Services, an agency of the Department of Finance and Personnel for Northern Ireland, indicates that the lengths of the coastlines at mean high water (MHW) and mean low water (MLW), (mean high water springs [ordinary spring tides] and mean low water springs in Scotland) are:

These coastal lengths include all offshore islands, and land areas which are above MLW.

The precise length of coastlines will vary from time to time due to natural and gradual changes arising from coastal erosion and silt deposition.

Written and submitted from Warsaw Airport (52.177N, 20.974E)

I finally got the chance to watch the Apple WWDC keynote last night in my living room on the Apple TV, now that statement qualifies me as an Apple fanboy in itself.  I have seen many stevenotes over the year, even one in person at a Macworld in New York a few years ago, but his performance at this years WWDC was quite brilliant.

So for anyone who makes presentations what tips can we learn from the master.

1 ) Steve always begins his presentation by setting the context, framing the market for the new product announcement. This he does by quoting some very carefully chosen and very selective statistics..so for example iPhone has 28% US smartphone share, compared to windows at 19% ? and Android at 9%, the next slide however drops Windows and compares mobile browser usage with iPhone having  a massive 58.2% compared to Androids 22.7% – I wonder what happened to all those windows smartphone users ?

2) Steve is the master salesman his description of the iPhone 4 is a work of genius, “a quarter thinner for something you did not think could get any thinner”, the retina display so high resolution your eyes cannot see the pixels anymore – quite brilliant.

3) When things go wrong Steve keeps his cool because he knows his stuff, this keynote will be remembered as the one when the wifi broke. There has been much debate as to why, but the end result was that Steve’s demos did no work very well. Rather than panic Steve unlike many CEO’s was able to diagnose the issue on stage and explain it, and then later on make a joke of it asking people to switch off their own wifi devices so he could continue with the demo.

4) Make people believe something is new by selling it better, so Facetime offers the ability to carry out a 1 to 1 video conference using two iPhones 4’s on wifi, "we have been waiting a long time to make this happen", eh no.. I remember calling my wife over the vodafone 3G network using a pair of different Sony Ericsson phones five years ago. Video calling did not really take off, the technology and the public was not really ready for it.

To make the public ready it needs to be sold not on the basis of technology, which the early vodafone live very much was, but the emotional strength of human communication. Compare the vodafone PR shot here with a still from the Facetime video ..

A lonely businessman away from his baby, stuck in a hotel room –  now that’s a market..

There are two really significant technology advancements that are of note and that may not have got as much attention as facetime or the retina display..

Firstly the iPhone 4 is the first quad band iPhone supporting the 900Mhz HSDPA band used extensively in the UK but not previously supported on iPhones. Wonder why your iPhone 3G coverage was often worse than other smartphones ?

Secondly supplementing the digital compass the 3-axis gyro will allow devlopes o crate much better augmented reality applications, potentially solving many of the pose problems suffered by the current generation of smartphones. In the future who knows maybe some clever software will turn the iPhone into a simple Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) which could allow indoor navigation applications ?

So once again the great snakeoil salesman has got me and I will be taking delivery of an iPhone 4 of thursday as my home phone to sit alongside by Nexus One work phone.

Now which network….

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

I’m writing this sitting in the back of the room, waiting to make a presentation during the annual Space Show in Toulouse, the closest Europe comes to having a city whose sole export is technology

Seems, like I have been running around almost constantly for the last month, but tomorrow I have made a little time for myself to brew a pot of coffee sit down and watch all of the Geo Developer presentations on youTube from last months Google I/O conference in San Francisco.

If like me you missed the event this is a great opportunity to catch up with things like the Latitude and Places API, developing mobile apps using the v3 Maps API and of course my favourite the new Styled Maps feature.

Kick back and join me before the football starts !