Posts Tagged: context

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21
Mar 10

Geo on the Horizon at Horizon Geo

Last Friday I ventured north to Nottingham, along with Ed Parsons, Steven Feldman and Muki Haklay to attend the one day Supporting the Contextual Footprint event run by the Horizon Digital Economy Research institute at the University of Nottingham. Along the way I discovered a manner of tracking my journey that I’d hadn’t previously considered, but that’s covered in a previous blog post.

The focus of the Horizon event was to discuss the infrastructure needed to support location in its role as a key context and to identify any research theme that came out of the discussions; a classic case of the ill defined and fuzzy interface between the commercial world and that of academia.

The day was split into three thematic tracks:

  • The Location Challenge
    • What are the challenges specific to the capture and management of location data?
    • What is the state-of-the-art in the technologies available to store, query and present location data?
    • How do we understand location in context, especially in real-time, on the move?
  • Whose Data Is It Anyway?
    • What data should be considered “personal”?
    • Should I “own” data about me, such as where I am, my home electricity usage, my bank transactions?
    • How can users be enabled and encouraged to manage this data?
    • What technologies are available to do this?
    • How, when and by whom should “personal” data be exploited?
    • What checks and balances should be in place to protect all stakeholders, including both citizens and service innovators?
  • Can Crowds Be Authoritative?
    • Crowd sourcing is a powerful technique for data collection enabled by modern handheld devices, but how far can user-contributed data be trusted?
    • What are the processes required in order to meld crowd-sourced data with existing, authoritative, datasets?
    • What are the legal implications of generating, combining and using such user-generated datasets?
    • For example, what environmental details could citizen sensors collect?
    • How might this change our understanding of the live state of the world?

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18
Mar 10

Mistaking the Context for the End Game

This is a post about location (for a change); but it doesn’t have to be about location as it’s all about mistaking a vital element for the end game itself. I should explain.

I recently got contacted by a gentleman in the US who was looking to register a lot of domain names, in a manner which recalled the rush to buy domain names in order to make a profit as the dot com boom rushed headlong to become the dot bomb bust and which resulted in the unlovely pass-time of domain squatting.

After seeing a lot of mention of location, location based services and location based mobile services in the media, the position of location based services on Gartner’s most recent hype curve and seeing a lot of acquisition activity in the location space, he was looking to register domain names with LBS in them.

The reasoning went that what he termed geo domains, such as london.com and newyork.com command a high premium then, given that location’s star is in the ascendent, adding the three magic letters of LBS to such domains, such as londonlbs.com or newyorklbs.com, will also command a premium, albeit a slightly lower one.

In agreement: Some macro experiments: Gummi Bears

Let me count the number of ways that this reasoning holds a degree of water, however small. We were certainly in agreement that location, geo, place and semantic understanding of these concepts, via techniques such as entity extraction, are going to be significantly important in 2010, for several reasons:

  • The economic downturn has either bottomed out (if you’re cynical) or is starting a tentative upturn (if you’re optimistic) and history has shown that investment starts to turn to new and promising areas in such circumstances.
  • Gartner have flagged LBMS as just cresting from the “slope of enlightenment” to the “plateau of productivity” in their last hype curve (see slide 14 of one of my recent decks), although I’d argue that Gartner should really be flagging the concept of location rather than just LB(M)S as there’s far more to location than just the services that fall under the LBS or LBMS umbrella.
  • While only with 21% of total market share for mobile handsets, smartphones are benefiting from the headlong convergence of location sensor enabled devices, although the forecasts for such devices reaching critical mass in market share have so broad a range of timelines as to be pretty much useless for making any concrete projections.
  • The public’s approach to location is moving away from Big Brother style hysteria and knee jerk reactions to acceptance of revealing one’s location providing a suitable value proposition is made; the check-in phenenomena that is Gowalla and FourSquare are good exemplars of this in action.

Disagreement

However, let me also count the number of ways in which we differ significantly on the importance of the keywords “geo“, “lbs” and “lbms” in domain names.

  • For the purposes of branding and marketing, a good domain name is still an essential facet of a company’s digital engagement strategy. We’re seeing a similar rush towards securing the right name on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter as we saw in the glory days of the .com boom, though by no means to the same degree and by no means as blindly headlong.
  • But for the purposes of informing the type of information a user is looking for location is a key context and not the end game in itself, indeed I’d be happy to see the LBS and LBMS acronyms go away as they focus attention far more on the technology and far less on the context, experience and results that a user craves.
  • A significant percentage of online users equate the browsers icon on their desktop with the internet (hence the longevity of Internet Explorer 6 as a dominant browser). In the same vein, their prime source of searching for information is frequently a search engine, which is typically their browser’s home page.
  • People tend to use a search engine to look for information rather than by typing a domain name into their browser’s address bar (which explains why one of the dominant queries that Google handles is “google” or “google.com”); the search engine is becoming the internet in much the same way as the desktop browser icon used to be “the internet”.
  • Whilst a user may type a well known brand name into their browser’s address bar, frequently without the TLD, this still equates to a search as the browser either appends .com automagically or examines the entered URL for syntax and passes it onto the user’s default search engine for handling.
  • Again, whilst geographical keywords are much sought after for search marketing purposes and command a high bid price as a result, I’ve not seen any evidence, either from research or anecdotally, to show that a geographical URL has benefit in the same way. Indeed from looking at www.london.com, the site is a hotel booking aggregator, with suspect use of Transport for London’s Tube roundel logo and in the small print warns “This site and domain are not affiliated with or owned by any government or municipal authority“. It’s not a site I’ve even even been aware of nor known anyone use, ditto www.sanfrancisco.com and www.sanjose.com, two cities I frequently visit both as a tourist and for business.

So while the location industry may have embraced the terms geo, location based service, location based mobile service and their acronyms, these are vague and not well known outside of the industry, which is the target demographic. I can’t see a need for use of the domain name system in this way.

Location is a key context that informs the user and helps to provide relevance, it’s not the end game both in function or in the names and terms that describe it. I think Ed Parsons, Google’s Geotechnologist summed it up rather neatly when he recently described location as equivalent to DNS … “normal people use it every day but they (don’t have to understand it) or see it’s value” and I find the comparison to DNS particularly apt in this circumstance.

Photo Credits: hypercatalecta and Werner Kunz on Flickr.
Written at home (51.427051, -0.333344) and posted from the Yahoo! London office (51.5141985, -0.1292006)
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22
Feb 10

Contextual Location (and Echoecho Redux)

I recently wrote about echoecho, an SMS based location sharing service and rather dismissed it as another PlayTxt or DodgeBall, both of which are now shuttered, and argued that EchoEcho fails my Theory of Stuff.

Nick Bicanic, the CEO of Purpose Wireless, the company behind echoecho was good enough to look me up and drop me a long email commenting on my blog post and — very politely — pointed out that I might want to revisit my opinion of the service. An edited version of that email to me formed the basis of his latest blog post on the topic of location as a context.

Trapped in an echo of light

So have I done echoecho a disservice? Quite possibly … to find out I (re)installed it on my iPhone and onto my BlackBerry.

(intriguing aside 1: it’s a novel experience to have to install onto two devices to test out a service. Not a bad thing. Just different).

As Nick pointed out “it’s not all that fair to describe a new service by saying what it isn’t – so let me tell you what it is. echoecho allows you to ask and answer the question where are you? as easily and simply as possible … that’s it … think of it as a cross between a permission based SMS and a tweet – the idea is that it becomes as easy and ubiquitous as SMS.”

After playing with echoecho (and according to Nick it is all lowercase and not WikiWord style) I really like the service. It’s simple, it’s elegant, it’s very easy to use and I can see myself using this with friends and family. Heck, if my Mum actually remembered to turn her mobile on then she could use this and use it easily. Yes, it’s restricted to a range of smart phones (iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and so on) but the same applies to a whole plethora of LBMS.

(intriguing aside 2: the installation on my BlackBerry kept on repeatedly prompting me to view permissions and once viewed and saved prompted me to view and save permissions. Repeat until bored. A hard reboot of the handset fixed this finally. I don’t envy people doing BlackBerry development).

Echo Tunnel

But let’s go back to the Theory of Stuff for a moment; where does the money come from? It’s a free service so you can’t (directly) monetize the People. You’re not tracking your audience’s location (and Nick assures me they’re not) and there’s no additional data to derive, such as local business listings or a set of geotagged POIs, which is a (mostly hidden) side effect of FourSquare and Gowalla who seem to find themselves the poster-child(ren) of LBMS at the moment.

So at face value, much as I admire the simplicity of echoecho, I initially came to the conclusion that the service fails the Theory of Stuff but with a caveat. If there’s something clever going on under the hood that’s not immediately apparent to the casual observer or if there’s a way of getting People to make Stuff through the service then echoecho might pass the Theory.

Nick agreed with me, “Clearly if the app is free then the money can’t come from the app. But that’s a failure only in the most immediate literal sense. By that logic every freemium model is a failure during its free stage“.

All of the above has shown that there’s a need for at least one caveat to the Theory of Stuff, which should state that the Theory should only be applied if there’s an attempt to monetize. echoecho isn’t and should, for the time being at least, be exempt.

But there is definitely something clever going on under the hood, a bi-directional open API location sharing service. It’s that platform that echoecho is built on top of and it’s that platform that I’m going to be watching very closely indeed to see what comes out of Purpose Wireless. And of course I’ll be looking to apply the Theory of Stuff to that offering.

Photo credits: katachthonios and sayzey on Flickr.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

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12
Feb 10

Location is a Key Context, But Most People Don’t Know This

Like a lot of people, I get most of the information I use, both personally and professionally, from the web; from RSS feeds, from keyword search alerts and from Twitter. The genesis of my recent Theory of Stuff slowly accumulated out of this mishmash of feeds, alerts and status updates.

Firstly I read about EchoEcho, a new location based service which promises all manner of good stuff by showing you where your friends are regardless of which location based service they currently use. Let’s leave aside for one moment that the service independence of this app seems to be based around the concept of getting all your friends to use EchoEcho and then consistently getting them to report their location. Let’s look at something far more fundamental than that, the strong sense of location deja vu harking back over two years ago.

Haven’t we been here before? Hindsight seems to have proven that concepts such as “who’s nearby” and “show me where my friends are” aren’t, on their own, enough to build a business around. The brief flare of enthusiasm over services which tried this approach such as PlayTxt and DodgeBall were soon extinguished as users, fickle as they are, got bored and moved onto the next big thing.

Then there were two articles looking at “checking in“, both looking at FourSquare and Gowalla but each one coming at it from wildly differing ends of the experience. On the one hand, there was Business Week quoting the eye watering “I don’t feel complete unless I check in” from FourSquare, Gowalla and Yelp addict Diane Bisgeier. Though the article focuses on this as a San Francisco and the Bay Area phenomenon, this has crossed the Atlantic with vigorous checking in going on in the UK and in mainland Europe. I may even have contributed to this, from time to time.

A totally contrasting view was shown by Andrew Hyde who was fed up of “the needless ego boost” of saying where he was and “committed location based suicide” by deleting his accounts from FourSquare and Gowalla. We’ll leave to one side the irony that this was done very publicly and with an accompanying blog post.

All of the above moved Thierry Gregorius to lament that “if ‘normal’ people don’t see the point of location-based services, how can the geo-industry claim being mainstream?“. A valid point but one which confuses the very visible front end view of location, as seen in LBMS and the less visible back end view of location. Ed Parsons summed this up succinctly by comparing back end location with the DNS system, which “normal people don’t see the value of but use every day“.

It was these three themes, “who’s nearby” as a raison d’etre alone, maintaining an audience by check-ins alone and selling location based services to a wide audience that made me sit down and write up my Theory of Stuff. The full text of this is in a previous post, but the short version of the theory states that in order for a business to succeed you need three things, some Stuff, be it data, inventory or something else, some People, your audience and some Secret Sauce which allows you to connect the audience to the stuff in a bidirectional manner. So how do these three themes fare against the theory of stuff? Surprisingly and thankfully, they all seem to validate it.

The concepts of “who’s nearby” and “where are my friends” on their own, fail the theory of stuff. 

You have People, and in some cases a very large and quickly growing audience. You have some Secret Sauce which connects those People via their locations. But because there’s no Stuff to start with and the secret sauce isn’t bidirectional, no Stuff is created. The effect of this is that monetization opportunities are non existent or severely limited and the service isn’t sustainable. Both PlayText and DodgeBall are no more and the omens aren’t looking good for EchoEcho as a result.

Then there’s FourSquare and Gowalla, both of whom seem to have been inspired by Google. Cast your mind back to when Google announced the concept of Street View which was met with sneers and derision from some. Before Street View even went live it was written off as a loss leader, a waste of time and money and it would be Google’s white elephant.

Others of us in the location industry took one look at a Street View car and noted that the cameras weren’t just pointing parallel to the road surface to take photos of surrounding buildings. They were also pointing at the road and up at the road signage which, when combined with the fact that the (GPS, cell tower and wifi triangulation equipped) StreetView cars actually had to drive down the streets in question, would provide Google with their own mapping data that was also capable of powering routing and direction algorithms. A short while later and Google completes enough of North America to remove the need for TeleAtlas mapping data and makes massive savings on data licensing into the bargain.

Street View passes the Theory of Stuff by providing new Stuff to be connected and monetized by their existing Secret Sauce and the People who make up their substantial audience.

It would be easy to dismiss FourSquare and Gowalla as more up to date versions of the “where are my friends” service. While they seem to have created the current cultural phenomenon of checking in, which may well be their lasting legacy, both services have their own quirks (FourSquare’s Mayors and Badges and Gowalla’s items) and need to show they’re capable of holding onto their existing audience and growing it, substantially. 

So this surely means that both FourSquare and Gowalla fail the Theory of Stuff? Not necessarily. Just as StreetView generated valuable Stuff for Google, so both FourSquare and Gowalla are also generating a detailed set of local business listings and points of interest, all of them neatly categorised and geotagged as a bonus. That’s a lot of very valuable Stuff. This doesn’t seem to have been something that’s been noticed or commented on as much as it should be. If both these services can retain their audience and if they connect them with all the Stuff that is being captured and generated via Secret Sauce then they can most definitely pass the Theory of Stuff.

The idea that location is analogous to the Domain Name System is slightly more challenging to fit into the Theory of Stuff’s model but it’s still possible.

In the previous two themes, location has been the dominant factor in the provision of a service (PlayText, Dodgeball, FourSquare and Gowalla) or location data has been generated in order to create Stuff (FourSquare and Gowalla). In the DNS theme, location is not the prime reason for a service to exist, it’s a context, part of the Secret Sauce, that helps the service provide its users with relevant information. This was highlighted by Kevin Marks and JP Rangaswami in last year’s excellent The Impact of Context on the Mobile User Experience discussion at the Heroes of the Mobile Screen conference in London. Of course, you still need Stuff and People in order for this to work; Secret Sauce on its own is not a recipe for success.

As nomadic devices have proliferated, the difference between The Web and The Mobile Web have vanished; it’s just the web, regardless of how you experience it. A parallel can be drawn here with location. As location becomes more and more ubiquitous so the whole concept of a Location Based (Mobile) Service will also vanish, at least as a label. Location will just be a context. And there’s nothing wrong with that; quite the reverse, as the location industry will have achieved their aim of ubiquity, of providing a service and information that everyone uses but which no one actually bothers to think about it being there.

Photo Credits: Angelsk, dpstyles and leff on Flickr

Written and posted from  Yahoo! campus, Sunnyvale, California (51.5143913, -0.1287317)

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous