Posts Tagged: location

Journal — 1 Comment
26
Feb 10

Mashup, Location and London

Last night I was at LBi in the old Truman Brewery on London’s Brick Lane for Mashup’s Location … It’s Moving On. I’ve spoken at a Mashup event once or twice before but this time the organising team threw caution to the wind and asked me to chair the panel discussion.

Prior to kicking the panel discussion off, I attempted to gently suggest some topics to my fellow panelists that we might want to discuss.

We started off with a quick review of my Theory of Stuff and how it applies to deriving value from location and location data and briefly visited Gartner’s hype curve which puts location based services on the so called Plateau of Productivity. This is a good thing apparently. I then presented the panel with a series of  ”yes, but” style trade offs to mull over.

  • Smartphones vs. other phones; 21% of phones expected to have GPS by EOY 2009, but what about the other 79% without?
  • LBS and LBMS vs. other (older) location systems (APIs and so on); LBS and LBS apps get all the publicity but what about key location APIs, platforms and services?
  • “where’s my friends” vs. creating value and creating data; ”where’s my friends” doesn’t work as a (sole) business proposition but creating value added data does — FourSquare and Gowalla are creating geotagged local business listings from check ins.
  • “where’s my business” vs. location based advertising; Tesco and Starbucks are the latest companies to launch apps to drive customers to their premises, but what’s needed to drive location based ads?
  • “where I think you are” vs. “where I say I am”; For a user, being able to be their own source of truth is imperative, but how can you reconcile this with your business needs?
  • “where you are” vs. “where you’ve been”; (AKA tracking vs. privacy) How to walk the fine line between providing enhanced relevance via a user’s location and being accused of tracking them.

I was then joined by Chris Osborne (#geomob and Ito World), Alex Housely (Rummble), Jon Fisher (Vodafone), David Glennie (MIG) and Alan Patrick (Broadsight) for an hour’s worth of lively, animated, opinionated and occasionally profane panel discussion, making the job of ring-mastering all the more challenging and a whole lot of fun at the same time.

The #mashupevent audience look on from the bowels of Brick Lane

The audience chimed in with a variety of questions, some pointed, some speculative and some downright rambling before we retired to the bar and then out to sample one of Brick Lane’s finest curry houses; it’s a shame we didn’t find one of the finest but a decent post event wind down took place anyway in the basement of an establishment which had “Spice” in the name. I think.

All in all, a geotastic evening all round.

Written and posted from the Yahoo! London office (51.5141985, -0.1292006)

Update: 1 March 2010

It seems that the topic of the Mashup* event and the buzz of publicity that the team created on social media streams, including Twitter, were sufficient to get my introductory deck onto the Featured Presentations & Documents section of the SlideShare home page.

SlideShare Home Page

Updated and posted from the Yahoo! London office (51.5141985, -0.1292006)

Journal — 2 Comments
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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20
Feb 10

I Can’t Get No Sleep

“And here we are, half past two in the morning. I can’t get no sleep”

And here we are. Half past two in the morning. I can't get no sleep.

A slight mangling of the lyrics to the Faithless classic, Insomnia, as Maxi Jazz lamented about being wide awake at 3.30 AM whereas I am most definitely awake an hour earlier. And not for the first time either.

This is what happens when I wake up and thoughts for my next location talk starts fizzing in my mind, unbidden. Sometimes the only solution is to get up, set them down on paper and head back to bed.

“I’m wide awake in my kitchen, it’s black and I’m lonely, oh, if I could only get some sleep, creaky noises make my skin creep, I need to get some sleep, I can’t get no sleep …”

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

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9
Feb 10

The Location Battle Between You and Your Phone

Whenever I talk about the privacy implications inherent in sharing your location with an app or service, I keep coming back to the idea that it’s essential to be your own source of truth for your location. This is a slightly verbose way of saying that you need to be able to lie about your location or that you need to be able to say “no, I really am here” despite what other location contexts such as GPS, cell tower triangulation or public wifi MAC address triangulation may have to say on the matter.

Of course, it’s never quite as straightforward as that and here’s why. The two location based mobile services that are getting a lot of coverage at the moment are FourSquare and Gowalla. They both rely on their users checking into a location by saying “here I am” and as a neat side effect they’re generating a geo-tagged set of local business and POI listings, thus verifying and adhering to my Theory of Stuff. But more about that in my next post, for now let’s concentrate on their user’s location.

Much has been made of FourSquare’s approach to checking in; you’re presented with a list of places nearby, generated according to your A-GPS location, for you to check into. But you can also search for places and check into them as well. Some commentators view this as a failing in their model, allowing for someone to check in to a location and maintain their Mayor status, from their comfort of their own sofa. Now granted if you wish to game FourSquare this will allow you to do so, but it also allows you to be your own source of truth. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve stood in the middle of the concourse in London’s Waterloo Station and Waterloo has not been amongst the choices of place that FourSquare presents me to check into, yet I’ve been able to do so by searching for the place and then forcing FourSquare to accept that “yes, I really am here“.

Gowalla takes a different approach and relies entirely on the accuracy of the A-GPS system on my phone. If your phone doesn’t agree with you on the matter of location then you can’t check in, as the screen capture below shows.

I’m currently in California visiting the Yahoo! mothership; at the time when I took this screenshot I was seated in Yahoo! Building E, which already exists as a spot in Gowalla. My iPhone disagreed with me and insistent I was some 120 meters away in the middle of the Lockheed Martin parking lot on nearby Moffett Field and as a result it just wouldn’t let me check in. FourSquare, also taking its cue from the A-GPS on my iPhone had the same problem but was quite happy to let me override this and check in to its version of the Yahoo! Building E place.

So which approach provides the best user experience? I’d strongly argue that the Gowalla approach frustrates users by effectively saying I know better than you, whilst FourSquare’s approach, whilst able to be gamed and abused, allows the user to insist that they do know best in these circumstances. Only time will tell which approach will succeed, but being your own source of  truth continues to be of major significance when sharing your location with the world at large.

Written at the Sheraton Hotel, Sunnyvale, California (37.37159, -122.03824) and posted from the Yahoo! campus, Sunnyvale, California (51.5143913, -0.1287317)

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Journal — 3 Comments
6
Feb 10

It’s Time to Stop LAMB (Location Based SPAM) Before It Even Exists

We all suffer from SPAM, the unwanted and unsolicited commercial bulk emails that are the reason we have Junk Mail filters and folders in our email clients and servers. A quick glance at the Junk folder for my personal email account shows over 300 of these since the beginning of February alone.

If you use some form of instant messenger, be it MSN, Yahoo!, ICQ, AOL or any of the others on the market, you’ve probably come across SPIM, Instant Messaging SPAM. Then there’s also mobile phone SPAM via text messages, comment SPAM, the list goes on and on.
We’re poised to start seeing a new form of SPAM raise its ugly head. Let’s call it LAMB for now, Location Based Advertising SPAM.
“If you build your application with features based on a user’s location, make sure these features provide beneficial information. If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store.“
This is a good first step in locking down potential abuses of a technology before it has a chance to get out of control. The reason we have SPAM and all the other variants in the first place is that the underlying technologies were designed in an open manner with no control mechanisms in place to thwart unsolicited and unwanted messages and content. But we need to go further than this.

The first time you use a location aware app on an iPhone, it asks your permission in nice, unthreatening language; it “would like to use your current location“. What this actually means is that it wants to use, and continue to use, your precise location to the finest level of granularity that the A-GPS system on the phone is able to deliver at the time it’s being requested.
There’s no way of halting this process temporarily, of being your own source of truth for your location (AKA lying about your location) or of controlling this on a per application basis. You can only reset asking this permission for all apps and for the entire phone via the Settings app. Although some well behaved apps such as TweetDeck do allow you to disable use of location information altogether as as well as on a per Tweet basis.

What we really need is to see is a way to set location granularity, including no location information at all, on a per app basis in much the same way as Fire Eagle currently does. And for all apps on all location aware platforms, not just Apple’s and the iPhone’s.

Some may argue that requiring such a degree of choice and intervention by the user may raise the barrier to entry to such a degree that an app doesn’t reach such a large audience. It’s a valid argument but as part of the location industry, I believe that we need to find the middle ground between irking the user once per app and letting LAMB loose on the world which has the possibility of irking the user multiple times per hour.
Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

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Journal — 5 Comments
1
Feb 10

The Theory of Stuff

Once again, this is not the post I set out to write. The one I set out to write was called “In Search of Location’s Sweet Spot” and it’s sitting in draft and not yet posted. That’s because before I can submit that post I need to write this one as a warm up act.

Just like Anne Elk (Miss), I have a theory. I call it my Theory of Stuff. I’m sure that other people, far more learned and erudite than I, have articulated such a theory but I’ve yet to come across any evidence for this and for now at least, it remains mine and it contains three buckets, looking something like this:

On the far left hand side we have the stuff bucket. Whilst stuff may sound vague, it’s entirely intentional. Stuff is defined as a collection or set of items, things or matter. Though I was focussing primarily on location data and location based mobile services, this applies equally well to other businesses and markets. It could be stock, inventory, left handed widgets or a plethora of other things.
On the far right hand side we have people bucket. The exact number of people doesn’t matter, for small businesses the number will probably be small and for large businesses the number will be, err, larger. These people are your customers, your audience. Hopefully they have money as well.
And then in the middle we have the secret sauce bucket. Again, it doesn’t matter what this is but it’s very important to look at what the secret sauce actually does.
  • The secret sauce is a bidirectional pipe that connects stuff to people.
  • It allows you to expose your business’s stuff to the people who are your customers, hopefully adding value along the way.
  • It also allows you to extract money from the people in exchange for access to your business’s stuff. In the Internet industry we call this monetizing your audience.
In order for your business to succeed, you need to have all three of these buckets in place. Have people and secret sauce but no stuff? Fail. Have stuff and secret sauce but no people? Fail. You get the idea.
Take a look at every business that is succeeding, especially those that are online and where the stuff bucket contains data, and you’ll see that they have all three buckets in place. Take a look at those businesses which have failed or are failing, especially those that are online, and you either see one bucket missing or there’s just not enough of it.
Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

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24
Sep 09

Location and Privacy – Where Do We Care?

As part of this year’s AGI GeoCommunity ‘09 conference, I took part in the Privacy: Where Do We Care? panel on location and the implications for privacy with Terry Jones, Audrey Mandela and Ian Broadbent, chaired and overseen by conference chair Steven Feldman.

Our location is probably the single most valuable facet of our online identity, although where I currently am, whilst interesting, is far less valuable and  personal than where I’ve been. Where I’ve been, if stored, monitored and analysed, provides a level of insight into my real world activities that transcends the other forms of insight and targeting that are directed at my online activities, such as behavioural and demographic analysis.

Where I’ve been, my location stream if you will, is a convergence of online and real world identity and should not be revealed, ignored or given away without thought and without consent.

In the real world we unconsciously provide differing levels of granularity in our social engagements when we answer the seemingly trivial question “where have you been?“. To our family and close friends we may give a detailed reply … “I was out with colleagues from work at Browns on St. Martin’s Lane, London“, to other friends and colleagues we may give a more circumspect reply … “I was out in the Covent Garden area” and to acquaintances, a more generalised reply … “I was in Central London” or even “mind your own business“

As with the real world, so we should choose to reveal our location to applications and to companies online with differing levels of granularity, including the ability to be our own source of truth and to conceal ourselves entirely, in other words, to lie about where I am. 

Where I am in the real world should be revealed to the online world only on an opt-in basis, carefully considered and with an eye on the value proposition that is being given to me on the basis of revealing my location to a third party. My location is mine and mine alone and I should never have to opt out of revealing where am I and where I’ve been.

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

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20
Aug 09

Deliciousness: more bacon, UK geek location, your PIN number, birds tweeting, Ohio as a piano, OMG and WTF and UNIX turns 40.

A semi regular, almost weekly, trawl through the latest stuff on the interwebs bookmarked on Delicious.

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27
Jan 09

An Unscientific View of Location Usage in London

With the Yahoo! Geo Technologies sponsored, London #geomob meetup coming up this week, this weekend I took a look at how many companies were actively using location within London. No easy task. After much web searching this weekend I took a trawl through those companies tagged as being in London in CrunchBase, the database of tech companies that TechCrunch operates.

Not strictly scientific but then again this is more about gauging a trend than being strictly empirical.

crunchbase_thumbnailMinor detour; in CrunchBase you can search for companies by location with London being flagged as a popular city. For the first page of London companies this works fine, with all the companies being shown within the boundary of the M25 on an embedded Google map. But on the second page it would seem that rather than geocoding the company address, CrunchBase are either doing keyword matching on tokenised text, picking up London Ontario or using the address of a parent company in the continental US. Whatever is happening it looks very odd when a company with an address in London WC2 is shown in Kansas.

The executive summary is that one of the prime drivers, and one presumes source of direct or indirect monetisation, is real eastate and property search, either as a direct USP for a site or as a side effect of a social network community. Another is that Google Maps API integration continues to dominate, both from a geocoding API perspective and as a geospatial presentation layer. I’m also particularly pleased to see innovators within this domain recognise the benefits and appeal of integrating with Fire Eagle, with the disclosure that I’m both a massive fan of Fire Eagle and work for the group within Yahoo! which provides the geotechnology which underpins the Fire Eagle platform.

Adviva

Online ad network offering geotargeted campaigns.

Archlight Media Technology

Operates Zoomf, a property search engine allowing searches tailored to a range of geo granularities from city to postcode district, though not to postcode sector or unit.

Cheapflights.com

Flight price search and comparison engine; allows geo search by country, city, resort and airport name and IATA code.

Chinwag

Not a location user per se but a media community platform which is particularly strong in championing LBS/LBMS and location in general.

Dopplr

Travel sharing platform with Fire Eagle integration.

Dothomes

Real estate search engine allowing searches tailored to range of granularities from city to postcode district, but again not to postcode sector or unit.

Mapness

Online travel journal sharing platform. Places/locations are geotagged within each entry via the Google Maps API.

My Neighbourhoods

Service allowing users to find out more about the area in which they live. The service would appear to support full postcode search, which implies PAF licensing, but searches are truncated to postcode district. Biased towards property search, which is supplied via Nestoria.

Rightmove

The “UK’s number one property website”; property searching can be selected by county, city/town/village, borough/suburb, postcode district (again full postcode search is claimed but not implemented) and some POIs. Searches can also be constrained at a distance from the focus of the search.

Rummble

A location based discovery tool and social search platform which is integrated with Fire Eagle.

School of Everything

Social networking platform which attempts to match tutors with pupils by subject and location.

Where Are You Now?

Travel based social networking platform, which is directly competing with TripUp, HereOrThere and TravelMuse, allowing ‘friends’ met whilst travelling to keep in touch.

Here Or There?

Travel based social networking platform, using Yahoo! Maps based location identification and geotagging.

WorkHound

Job and recruitment inventory platform; offering job searches by county, city/town/village, borough/suburb and postcode district. Searches can also be constrained at a distance from the focus of the search.

Nestoria

Home and property search engine which aggregates content from property portals. Used by Google as a Maps showcase and Yahoo! as a YUI showcase. Nestoria has also recently launched where-can-i-live.com which uses OpenStreetMap as the preferred Maps API and presentation layer.

GeoPostcodes

A ZIP and postcode search engine which offers geocoded databases of localities, ZIPs (to district level), admin hierarchies and subdivisions and centroids in 60 countries. As an example the Jan 2009 update for the UK, with ~37,000 records is on offer for EUR 29.95/GBP 28.00/USD 39.00.