Last week, flying from London Heathrow to Berlin’s Tegel airport I found a new addition to the increasingly detached-from-reality world of airline security … the electronic boarding pass. In principle, the electronic boarding pass is a great idea. First introduced in 1999 by Alaska Airways, checking into your flight online and putting a QR code on a graphic of your boarding pass cuts down queueing and waiting at the airport. Some airlines either send you the boarding pass as an SMS message, as an email attachment or as a time limited web URL. Some airlines provide an app on your phone; British Airways falls into this category and their app covers Windows Phone 7, iOS, Android and Blackberry.

With this in mind, consider the following electronic boarding pass, taken from last week’s flight.

This boarding pass gets checked three times between the time I arrive at the airport and the time my posterior makes contact with seat 11C. The first time is at security when the QR code gets scanned; if the QR code is valid, I’m granted access to the airside part of the terminal at Heathrow, but my passport isn’t checked so as long as the QR code says it’s valid, I’m through. The second time is at the gate. Again, the QR code is scanned and this time it’s cross checked with my passport; so not only is the boarding pass valid, but I can prove that the name on my passport and the name on the boarding pass matches. The third and final time, is when I actually board the plane and the cabin crew visually check that the boarding pass is actually for that flight.

Now consider this version of the boarding pass. The QR code is able to be scanned and it contains exactly the same information as the previous one. It will get me through the first two boarding pass checks but apparently it won’t allow me onto the aircraft. Why? When boarding last week’s flight the member of the cabin crew who checked my boarding pass told me she needed to “scroll your phone” and “check that your boarding pass isn’t a photo“. the underlying assertion here being that if I wasn’t using a boarding pass on BA’s own mobile app, I couldn’t board the flight.

If your eyes are crossing from concentration at this point, you’re not alone. I still haven’t been able to comprehend what the difference is between a valid QR code, which is itself a graphic image, in BA’s mobile app and a screen shot of the QR code, which is, err, a graphic image. I have an even harder time comprehending how this makes the theatre of airline security any safer for me or for my fellow passengers.

What you may not have noticed is that Nokia maps doesn’t just work on your desktop or laptop web browser or on Nokia smartphones, as Electric Pig nicely pointed out, Nokia has invaded the iPhone too. Point your iPhone or iPad at the Nokia Maps for Mobile Web at m.maps.nokia.com and you’ll see something like this …

… a fully featured version of Nokia Maps that does search, satellite views, GPS and location fixes, navigation, even public transport and, of course …

… places. And it’s not just iOS devices that the new Mobile Web maps supports, Android users can have this too as can Blackberry users.

That’s not just geo-tastic, it’s geo-egalitarian.

Recently, Charles Stross, one of my favourite sci-fi authors, gave a keynote at USENIX 2011 on Network Security In The Medium Term, 2061 To 2561. Not the most obvious of keynote titles to talk about maps or magic. But as part of his keynote, which is well worth reading in its entirety, he talked about how far technology has come in just the last 50 years and where it might go before the next 50 …

… we’re currently raising the first generation of kids who won’t know what it means to be lost – everywhere they go, they have GPS service and a moving map that will helpfully show them how to get wherever they want to go. It’s not hard to envisage an app that goes a step beyond Google Maps on your smartphone, whereby it not only shows you how to get from point A to point B, but it can book transport to get you there – by taxi, ride-share, or plane – within your budgetary and other constraints. That’s not even far-fetched: it’s just what you get when you tie the mutant offspring of Hipmunk or Kayak into Google, and add Paypal … it’s magic: you have a little glowing box, and if you tell it “I want to visit my cousin Bill, wherever he is,” a taxi will pull up and take you to Bill’s house (if he lives nearby), or a Greyhound bus station, or the airport. (Better hope he’s not visiting Nepal; that could be expensive.)

In today’s full on rush to monetize, to not get caught up in a patent suit and to either spot or be the next big thing, it’s easy to lose sight of just how magical the technology we take for granted is.

Consider, just for a moment, how much computing power and connectivity today’s sensor packed smartphones have in them. As I’ve mentioned before, just one of my phones has more CPU power, more storage and more connectivity options than the first computer I ever used as part of my day job, with the added bonus that it fits in my pocket and doesn’t require it’s own dedicated power supply and air conditioned room, which would restrict mobility somewhat.

Add to all of that that I’m writing this post using the Blogsy app on my iPad while on holiday in Spain, which is connected to a web server somewhere in the United States (I’ve no real idea where) over a data connection running via one of my phones which is also acting as a mobile wifi hotspot and which also tells me the GPS coordinates, accurate to 4 metres, of where I am and which appear in the sort of geotag I put at the end of my posts.

When I was in my (much) younger years, I grew up with 3 terrestrial TV channels, no PC’s, mobile phones or web sites and when London still had an 01 dialling code and so, from where I’m sitting, there’s something distinctly magical about all of this and its oh so easy to lose sight of that.

Unless of course, you’re one of the generation who grew up with on demand movies, smartphones, bazillions of TV channels, chatting with your friends on Facebook and with GPS in your phone and can’t really see what the fuss is all about; in which case, just indulge me when I say that today’s technology is magical and tomorrow’s probably will be for you too.

A Sense Of Place

It’s going to be mobile’s year.

In fact, it has been “mobile’s year” for many years. Analysts have predicted that the following year will be the golden year of mobile, ever since WAP started to become generally available on small, monochrome screens.

This year, it might just be mobile’s year. Widespread adoption of geolocation, tablet computing and apps are transforming mobile from simply a mobile telephony handset, to truly mobile, experiential, computing.

The handset vendor that has been part of “mobile’s year” ever since the early days of such predictions, is Nokia. The journey from small, blue phones with Snake to technologically complex, Ovi-enabled devices has been fast and, at times, tough. Leading this continued evolution from the point of view of location, is Gary Gale.

Gale, as Director of Ovi Places, is continuing a life-long fascination with maps. From a deep fascination with Harry Beck’s Tube map as a child, he now runs a business which aims to meet – and exceed – the consumer expectations of what mapping can offer to mobility. These expectations are both, from the consumer’s perspective, urgent and complex.

Currently, location is often externalised, as demonstrated by the “world of check-ins” offered by Foursquare, Facebook Places, and elsewhere. Gale feels that location will simply bed into a wider context over time, leading to less specifically location-based applications, but more apps with location features. “The applications that we have, will do a much better job at predicting the information that we need, and delivering it – so it becomes less of a case of ‘app fatigue’. Currently, if you want to find a piece of information, you go to one app. It shows where the information you want to find is, so you swap over to another app, but then you realise that you’ve forgotten the time that the place you want to go to opens, so you have to go back to the previous app to find out. You then go back to the map app, and you find that it has lost the context, so you have to go through it again. It’s an immensely boring experience. Combining those pieces of information into something of use, is the challenge.”

“Industry commentators have been excited about the number of apps downloaded through app stores. It’s a nice infographic, but how many of them are usable? How many of them are used and reused on a daily basis? The challenge is less about the 30 billion mark; it’s much more about making my life easier.”

While Gale acknowledges that location is important – it’s rich, timely, and vital – but the important piece to remember here it is context. Gale’s view, which might challenge some current startups, is that as location does not fundamentally make an app in itself, it should also not be a rationale for a business.

Smartphones continue to occupy a minority share of overall mobile ownership, although this is growing quickly. As more and more consumers exchange their old handsets for sophisticated, GPS-enabled devices, the way in which we understand and use geo-locative data will change. We are still scratching the surface.

“Despite the meteoric rise of the check-in economy, a lot of people are very uncomfortable with the concept of sharing their current location with a company. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable premise, as a lot of the ways in which this is messaged, is ambiguous and unclear. My fear is that there will be a big tabloid media crash involving this technology; all of a sudden, this is brought to the public, and they will sit up and take notice. In a high-profile divorce between B-list celebrities, if one claims that they weren’t somewhere and the app says that they were, then the press would have a field day. It would be thrust into the public’s attention. The challenge for the location industry as a whole, is to make sure that that doesn’t happen.”

Gale points out the undercurrent of apps that, without the consumer knowing it, sends their location data back. While such references are often buried in a terms and conditions page that we all have the tendency to ignore until clicking Accept, the point is made that location information sharing is still oblique, with an insufficient level of clarity and understanding on the part of consumers.

This mismatch of delivery and experience extends to geotargeted advertising. As Gale’s history includes leading Yahoo’s UK Geotechnologies group – which developed the world’s first geotargeted advertising network. However, as he illustrates, geotargeting means, and results in, different outcomes in different environments. Different countries treat IP addresses in very different ways; regional IP allocation based on the Baby Bell network allows for reasonably precise targeting in the US, where many European countries make targeting more difficult, due to dynamic allocation. Such variations, and their impact on message delivery, are lessened with a greater degree of location information – although not without its dangers. “You have a trinity of mobile phone triangulation, GPS lock, and public wi-fi points, for information. They’re pretty accurate. Even without GPS, when someone is running a map application on an iPad even without GPS, just through just public wi-fi, you’re able to work out where you are. The key is to engage the customer, so that they think it’s a really handy feature, rather than “that’s creepy, how the hell did they know that?” – and that’s a big challenge.”

“People are happy with ads on mobile and the web, as they either consciously or unconsciously understand that there isn’t such a thing as a free lunch. What they’re less comfortable with, is the perception that there is someone watching them at that precise minute in time. That’s not the case; with the vast majority of information, apart from that which you sign on and participate in things, is utterly anonymised. You are just one point in a mass from which you can draw trends and plot nice graphs. There is a perception of ‘hell, how did I know that?’ and that’s very scary.”

More Than The Map

The other side of this coin, in terms of experience, is the quality of the information being presented. If your location can be pinpointed, then it means nothing unless there is good information – a good context to surround it. Gale makes the point that we are now at the point where it’s commonplace to use a GPS-enabled smartphone to find your way around a new place, where previously it used to be an A-Z, and latterly printouts of online maps. Neither are really seen in public any more, resulting in an expectation of not only “the now”, but “the what” and “why”. “We have had to go from the static, updated-twice-a-year view of the world, to a view where people have come to expect that the map which they are experiencing, is accurate, all of the time. If there’s a new housing development, footpath or a closed road, they get quite frustrated if they can see it with their own eyes, but the map doesn’t show that. There’s a fundamental change in the way in which we undertake mapping as a professional discipline.”

“The map’s not enough any more. You want a rich experience on the map, to avoid this disjointed app experience from earlier. You want the information represented on the map, to be available to you in a very easy-to-consume form which gives you the key facts that you need, and also to have it updated and be relevant. If you are looking for a place to get a cup of coffee, you want to know where those places are; you then need to know what time it opens; whether it serves food; whether there are nearby transport facilities. We expect that experience, no matter where we are. It’s a global marketplace, but everywhere in the world is local to somebody. It could be your local neighbourhood, or having got off the plane in a new city, you want to find somewhere to go out.”

“You expect that information to be made available in the same level of timeliness and freshness and accuracy as we do in your own local neighbourhood. That’s a significant swing from the two-editions-a-year, to a new place which has just opened up, and it should be on the map on my handset.”

Behind all of this, is place. “The spatial map still remains one of the best ways of visualising information. It’s visceral, visual, and the best way to impart this information. The map is not going anywhere, other than forward. People have predicted the death of the map, but it’s still the best way of representing that data.”

The point is strongly made that “hard data” – such a full address – is no longer enough, in terms of how to present location information. Our interaction with maps is similar to the historical use of search engines: based on hard syntax. “You have to know about informal places; you have to know about colloquial neighbourhoods, which don’t formally exist, but everyone knows where they are – like in London. Soho, Chinatown, the West End… are all ambiguously and vaguely defined, but everyone knows where they are. And you have to be able to understand that. But you also have to be able to understand in the same number of languages that there are in the world. People expect these services to respond to them in their mother tongue. You have to build internationalisation and localisation in, from the ground up. That’s a massive challenge for the industry. There’s still work to be done.”

As we finish, Gale makes the point that capability still needs information. While the UK and many other developed – and developing – countries have an abundance of mapping data to offer, this is not necessarily the case for every country. Essentially, this is about a quality, consistent experience – and for app developers, geotargeting-based businesses, and mapping agencies, to listen to consumers that pick holes in it. “They have the right to say that they were on location, and the experience was appalling. That will act as a significant nudge, in the direction of making the ability to have a complete map from different sources. People are coming to the conclusion that there needs to be a bit more sanity in this.”

Gary Gale is Director of Ovi Places at Nokia. Gary blogs at garygale.com, and he is @vicchi on Twitter.

I fly on British Airways almost every week. While they may be the self proclaimed World’s Favourite Airline, they’re not the best there is. But flying British Airways means I get to fly out of Heathrow’s Terminal 5, by far the best terminal at that airport. It means I get to use the BA lounges, thanks to BA’s frequent flyer program. It means I get to fly direct to most destinations rather than having to change flights. So I fly BA most of the time.

So I’m a fan of the BA mobile boarding pass. It’s quick, simple and like KLM’s version, it works. But just compare the two airline’s version of the mobile boarding pass experience.

KLM has taken a very low barrier to entry approach; their version works with pretty much any phone capable of either receiving an MMS text message or capable of receiving a URL to the boarding pass which can then be downloaded over the phone’s data connection. That’s it. If you’re flying KLM and have a smart phone you can use KLM’s mobile boarding pass. If you have a feature phone, you may still be able to use KLM’s mobile boarding pass as basic smartphone functionality gradually gets introduced to the feature phone market.

British Airways has taken a somewhat different approach. You can only use the mobile boarding pass on an iPhone or on a Blackberry (though an Android version is promised soon). If you have a handset from another manufacturer or another phone OS then you can’t use the service. Even if you have one of the approved handsets the service is still only available to passengers who are members of BA’s Executive Club frequent flyer program. If you don’t fly that often or don’t want the possibility for more junk mail through your mailbox, then you can’t use the service.

I’m still a fan of BA’s mobile boarding pass, even though it’s only available on short hail flights to Europe at the time of writing. BA may state that “the days of pockets full of paper are nearly over“, but only for a very small percentage of their passengers who have the right phone and who are Executive Club members … and that seems to be missing the whole point about why you’d actually want and use a mobile boarding pass, which is to reduce the amount of paper you need to carry and offer the service to the widest number of passengers you can.

Update: 17/11/10 – the Android version of the BA mobile app just updated itself on my Nexus One and now contains support for mobile boarding passes.

On this morning’s flight from London Heathrow to Berlin’s Tegel the usual flight safety announcement was made, but with a couple of significant, if contradictory, changes.

“All electrical devices should be switched off during take off, landing and when the engines are running, some devices may be used after take off, please see High Life magazine for more information. If your mobile phone has a flight safe mode, it should be enabled now, before switching off the device and ensuring it is stowed in an overhead locker“.

We’ll leave aside for one moment that I’m pretty sure the engines are running during the flight so are we allowed to use flight safe enabled mobiles at all or not? But are we now not even trusted to have a switched off mobile phone in our pocket anymore and it has to be out of reach in the overhead locker?

Normal geo-related bloggage service will be resumed soon. Promise.

In the UK, France, Spain and Poland, geolocation services occupy the 3rd, 2nd, 1st and 2nd slots respectively for most used mobile services. While the report only breaks geolocation down into two categories, streetmap/GPS and social networks, it’s not difficult to see how the perception that location is finally going mainstream is worth some merit.

It would have been nice to see a deeper breakdown by mapping service and social network but, in Europe at least, location and place seem to be making significant strides towards ubiquity.

Coverage of the report is available in a variety of places online including the EIN presswire as well as an overview of the study from Orange UK.

This makes sense; in the case of an emergency, the airline wants you concentrating on the emergency, not your laptop or your phone. It may also be the case that the phone may in some way interfere with the flight systems. Opinion on this is divided but the former seems a more realistic option than the latter.

The bit about the flight safe mode is certainly the case with Virgin Atlantic, Lufthansa and KLM, all of which I’ve flown with of recent. But British Airways seems to be taking this one step beyond, now insisting that not only do you switch things off but for mobiles, you enable flight safe mode and then switch it off as well into the bargain.

Isn’t this taking things just a bit too far in the name of safety? It’s called flight safe mode for a reason. It’s safe. For flights. How much further will BA take this? “Please engage flight safe mode, switch the phone off, take the battery out and then, after placing the device on the floor, smash it with your heel and place the fragments in the bag provided taking care not to injure yourself“.

While lots of the animal kingdom are equally territorial, no one species has managed to invent a whole series of rules and regulations and to employe an entire bureaucracy to ensure the rules and regulations are correctly implemented and patrolled.

But most of these lines of meaning are ignored by the fellow denizens of our planet and our technology ignores them too these days. On mainland Europe, each country has its own set of cellular networks, whose signals overlap with those of neighbouring countries along the myriad of borders that make up the European Union. This happens to me around twice a week as I shuttle back and forth between London and Berlin, but because I’m at around 33,000 feet, on a plane, with my mobile either switched off or in flight safe mode, it passed unnoticed.

But put a big mass of water in the way, like the English Channel (or La Manche as our French neighbours say) and travel much more slowly, say on a ferry and something much more interesting happens.

Roughly half way across the Channel and the French mobile signals weaken and signal strength starts to drop off. At the same time, the first faint signals from their UK counterparts start to gain in strength and, if you’re watching carefully, your mobile gets confused for about 5 minutes, swapping back and forth between UK and French networks until, as you get closer to Dover, the UK signal strength overwhelms the French ones. If you’re watching carefully, you can see it happen, right before your eyes. If it helps, it’s like another, technological border and your mobile phone is the passport, allowing you passage from a French roaming network back to your UK home network.

1. not limited; unrestricted; unconfined
2. boundless; infinite; vast
3. without any qualification or exception; unconditional

Except in the world of mobile data or mobile broadband, where unlimited means, in a vaguely disturbing twisted, inverted, doublespeak sort of way, the exact opposite.

Vodafone, my current UK mobile provider, helpful tells me that I have unlimited data, subject to their fair use policy which promptly redefines unlimited as very much limited indeed and your limit is 5GB per month. That’s a lot of data. Even being the compulsive photo uploader, web browser, Foursquare and Gowalla check in, Twitter and Facebook poster and checker that I am, I’m hard pressed to go above 500MB per month let alone 5GB.

So I was both vastly amused and somewhat shocked when this text arrived on my iPhone on the way home from work last night.

A quick call to Vodafone luckily cleared this up as being a glitch in their billing systems and I would not, as stated be charged, nor had I gotten anywhere near the 5GB limit of unlimited.

I found the whole process rather amusing in hindsight but shouldn’t the mobile companies either come clean about what unlimited really means or just don’t sell unlimited data as a concept at all and just sell a, 5GB in my case, data limit?