Firstly there’s the UK audience at GeoCommunity, the Association For Geographic Information’s annual get-together and all round geo shindig. GeoCommunity is probably the closest the UK has to California’s Where 2.0, but with a very different audience and a very different accent. The AGI still draws the bulk of its membership from the GIS heartlands of the GI community, although in recent years the association has dramatically expanded its reach into the web, mobile and neogeography domains.

The Location Business Summit, on the other hand is firstly in San Jose in the heart of Silicon Valley and secondly has a very pronounced American accent and draws the bulk of the audience from the Bay Area where web and mobile, both from a developer and from a business perspective, hold sway.

One deck, two audiences.

The slide deck is above, plus there’s a PDF version with the talk notes.

As previously mentioned, the GeoCommunity audience hails, in the main, from the GIS heartland. A talk which deals with context, with search, with relevance, with LBS and with maps and mobile got a great reaction and fitted well with the other closing keynote from the British Library’s Kimberley Kowal who put together a gorgeous deck full of beautiful maps, ancient, old and not so old. Steven Feldman has put together a list of these cartographical wonders, if you’re interested. Following up old maps with new, digital maps seemed to be a good segue and bridge between printed maps and digital maps. After the talk, people came up to me and said nice words and overall, the reaction seemed to be that this was an area of geo and location that didn’t normally appear on their professional radar. That’s a sweeping generalisation of course but it was also immensely gratifying.

Fast forward to today; not in the UK but slap bang in the middle of San Jose. Same talk. Same deck. Same sentiments. But a vastly different, though equally good, reaction from the audience. This time the questions and comments focused not on the map, not on LBS but on what the next major step in sensors would be after GPS and on what sources of data LB(M)S needs and lacks.

One deck, two audiences. Even in the same industry, albeit the vague and nebulously fuzzy grouping that we call the location industry, two very different audiences can give two very different reactions. One day, reaction will probably be the same, but today, geo and location really is a very broad church indeed.

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?

The location challenge session was a basic introduction to geo and to location, just to get everyone on the same page. A small wry cheer from myself and Ed was caused by the mention of slippy maps after half an hour of pure GIS but the session was also notable for reminding us that GPS isn’t just the domain of the US NAVSTAR system, though it’s the one we’re most familiar with and which is considered pretty much synonymous with GPS (the Wikipedia entry for GPS redirects to the NAVSTAR entry). But there’s also the Russian GLONASS, the Chinese COMPASS and the European Galileo systems chafing at the heels of NAVSTAR and threatening it’s hegemony. We also touched on the accuracy of satellite navigation systems, ranging from the fictitious, with Dan Brown asserting that “(GPS) is accurate within 2 feet anywhere in the world”, even when in the toilet in the Louvre, to the technically feasible, with accuracy of 1 cm being touted as possible. Though no one in the room was able to articulate precisely what use 1 cm GPS accuracy would be.

The low point of the session was a rambling and tedious sales pitch from Oracle which can be summarised concisely as “there’s an explosion of (geographic) data coming, you need to buy our (highly priced) servers in order to cope with it”. It’s a shame no-one’s told Flickr about the need for Oracle servers as they’ve been making MySQL and commodity Linux servers cope with an explosion of data for a while now.

The high point of the session was a (rather hip looking) Doctor who’s name escaped me who’d managed to do something that eludes many commercial concerns. They’d managed to put together a prototype, intelligent car pooling and routing service, complete with web, mobile and SMS interfaces, together in just a few weeks. Oh and it worked as well; this was not only deeply impressive but illustrated the positive social and community facet of this thing we call location.

An an erstwhile privacy nerd, the session on whose data is it anyway? was fascinating, defining and categorising a whole range of what can be considered personal data:

• access data (name, address, phone number)
• direct data (photos)
• intrinsic data (fingerprint, genome)
• state data (location, activities)
• transactional data (finance, journeys, purchases)
• interaction data (things I say and do)
• indirect observation data (energy usage)
• things I create data (emails, texts, documents, photos)
• things I’m given data (emails, texts, documents, photos)
• things I’ve seen data (documents, tweets, locations)

With all of this data being out there, in a variety of data sinks, both personal, governmental and commercial, the concept of a distributed, durable, scalable and trusted personal data store was floated as a theoretical solution; much emphasis should be placed on the word theoretical by the way. A worthy theoretical concept, the notion of if you need to know about me, ask my PDS, is alas one that the majority of the audience who hail from a commercial background, view as interesting but flawed and not viable in the real world.

The high point of the session was a recommendation to read Paul Ohm’s Broken Promises of Privacy; the low point the need to Lynne Truss to visit the room unannounced to pounce on the person who thought that “Who’s Data is it Anyway?” was acceptable for a title slide.

The final can clouds be authoritative session started aptly withe a quote from Wikipedia and paired Muki Haklay from University College London against Glen Hart from the Ordnance Survey. Whilst the pairing may have been unintentional, following a strong proponent of the crowd sourced OpenStreetMap with a pointed, if tongue in cheek, talk from the OS made comparisons difficult to avoid. Stephen Feldman’s write up of the day has more insight on this final session and is well worth a read.

Acronym of the day goes to BHP, which left the audience looking perplexed until it was revealed as a Bloody Hard Problem. Days like this are essential to draw academia away from a pure research perspective and to get representatives of commercial organisations and academia talking on common ground … that in itself is a BHP which Horizon goes a long way towards solving.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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)

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous