Some 4 years ago (actually 3 years and 10 months but let’s round up for the sake of convenience) I wasn’t really looking for a new role, but the opportunity arose to come and lead and engineering team for Yahoo! Now, four years later, it’s time to move onto another role, but more of that in a moment.

When I announced that I was leaving Yahoo! Geo I was taken aback at the reaction that it generated. Let’s rephrase that … I was taken aback, shocked, stunned and very deeply chuffed into the bargain. Techcrunch’s MG Siegler wrote about it under the brilliant headline Yahoo’s Director Of Geo Engineering Locates The Exit. Numerous friends, colleagues and geo-acquaintances offered congratulations and asked where next on Twitter, on Facebook, in blog posts and by the more old fashioned method of email. I didn’t expect any of this reaction, but it’s that reaction that, at least in part, prompted this blog post.

By the way, you shouldn’t believe everything you read in the media about working at Yahoo! It’s been an amazing experience and one I would willingly repeat if I had the opportunity to go back and do it all again. Before I joined Yahoo! I thought I had a pretty good handle on how the internet worked and how web applications and APIs worked. I didn’t but I did learn an awfully large amount from people do.

Outside of the company, there’s also a popular misconception that there’s an uneasy cold war going on between Yahoo! and, in the geo space at least, their immediate competitors; Microsoft, Google, Mapquest and so on. True, there’s some major cultural differences between the organisations but there’s also much mutual respect for what each of our geo neighbours gets up to.

So how were the last 4 years? They went something like this …

The Highs

• The people
• The launch of Yahoo! GeoPlanet at Where 2.0 in 2008
• Live blogging furiously at the back of the main hall at Where 2.0 in 2009 as Tyler Bell launched Yahoo! Placemaker.
• Speaking on Ubiquitous Location, The New Frontier And Hyperlocal Nirvana at Where 2.0 in 2010.
• Co-founding and organising WhereCamp EU, bringing the WhereCamp unconference to London in 2010.
• Did I mention the people?
• Appearing on the once mighty ValleyWag as the result of a tweet about a wifi point called ‘valleywag’ at a Yahoo! All Hands meeting at the Sunnyvale based Yahoo! mothership.

The Lows

• People leaving the company as a result of the Microsoft bid; the unsuccessful Microsoft bid, something that never actually happened.
• Reorganisations and new VPs; far too many of them. Six reorganisations in the space of twelve months and six VPs in the space of four years is too many by my reckoning and meant you spent more time rewriting your strategy than you do actually delivering and shipping product.
• Teams that ship successful products in spite of the company not because of the company
• Appearing on the once mighty ValleyWag as the result of a tweet about a wifi point called ‘valleywag’ at a Yahoo! All Hands meeting at the Sunnyvale based Yahoo! mothership.

I might have already mentioned the people at Yahoo! I met and worked with. Now would be a suitable point to mention them by name …

The Geo Technologies team, past and present: Bob Upham, Martin Barnes, Walter Andrag, Mike Dickson, Holger Dürer, Bob Craig, Roman Kirillov, Eddie Babcock, Samira Swarnkar, Rob Halliday, Rob Tyler, Chris Gent, Steve May, Ali Abtoy, Andrei Bychay, Chiho Kitahara

The YDN team: Sophie Davies-Patrick, Chris Heilmann, Anil Patel, Havi Hoffman & Stacy Millman

The Yahoo! alumni: Tyler Bell and Mark Law (ex Geo), Aaron Cope (ex Flickr), Tom Coates and Seth Fitzsimmonds (ex Brickhouse, Fire Eagle and Geo)

But now the Yahoo! years are behind me and after taking this week off to rest and do family stuff over the course of the UK Half Term school break I’ll be ready to join my new team and start to get to grips with my new role as Director of Ovi Places with Nokia.

Although it would be very tempting to think that my move to Nokia is in some way a result of the recently announced partnership between Yahoo! and Nokia that’s not the case. Nokia and I started the long conversation which ended with this blog post at the beginning on 2009; it took a while to get to this place.

So whilst I’m going to Nokia, I’ll continue to use my core set of Yahoo! products, tools and APIs … YQL, Placemaker, GeoPlanet, WOEIDs, YUI, Flickr and Delicious. Not because I used to work for Yahoo! but because they’re superb products.

Here’s looking forward to the rest of 2010; it could be geotastic.

He may no longer be Mr. President but apparently George. W. Bush had a curious grasp of the world’s geography.

Keeping with the theme of President of the United States, this highly colourful view of the world comes from the mind of a Mr. Reagan. Allegedly.

First there’s how the Swedes see Europe; Britain is characterised by inventing soccer, inventing hooligans and beer (all three of which may be related) amongst others. The other European countries don’t fare much better.

Heading South and slightly East is the self styled Chosen Nation of Hungary. While the descriptions are mostly one or two words, they’re not that flattering.  Britain is simply jobs, while other member states are characterised as tourist hordes, pizza, last minute hotels and beer land.

“Eddies,” said Ford, “in the space-time continuum.” ”Ah,” nodded Arthur, “is he? Is he?”
“What?” said Ford. ”Er, who,” said Arthur, “is Eddy, then, exactly, then?”
…
Why,” he said, “is there a sofa in that field?”
“I told you!” shouted Ford, leaping to his feet. “Eddies in the space-time continuum!”
“And this is his sofa, is it?” asked Arthur, struggling to his feet and, he hoped, though not very optimistically, to his senses.

Jump onto Eddy’s sofa for a moment and fast forward to a possible 2015.

After the location wars of 2010, the problems of mutually incompatible geographic identifiers have been solved with the formation of the Global Places Register. Founded by a fledgling startup on the outskirts of Bangalore, the GPR offered an open and free way for individuals and corporations to add their town, their business, their POI. All places added became part of the Global Places Translator, allowing Yahoo’s WOEIDs to be transformed into OpenStreetMap Ways, into long/lat centroids, into GeoNames ids or even, for the nostalgic, Eastings and Northings.

… the rest of the article is on the OpenGeoData blog.

The variety of reasons are both personal and based on my departure from Yahoo! at the end of this week and that the Telematics conference is coincident with my first week with [redacted]; I don’t yet have a clearly articulated story with regards to [redacted] and I don’t just want to retread the Yahoo! location and place story.

However I do plan to be speaking at the Location Business Summit USA in San Jose in September and in the same month I’ll be chairing the first w3gconf in the UK. All of which provides ample scope for a modicum of geotasticness.

The geographic information industry is undergoing radical change. Stimulated by technology and social developments, the balance of power between existing and new players is shifting. Government policy is also undergoing transformation with the publication of the UK Location Strategy, INSPIRE, the Marine & Coastal Access Bill and a new business model for Ordnance Survey. The economic strictures under which the public and private sectors will need to operate, as the UK attempts to handle enormous public debt, are also certain to drive changes in market dynamics.

There can be little doubt that in 5 years the industry will look very different to how it does today.

As the industry association, the Association for Geographic Information (AGI) needs to be sure it can continue to deliver its central mission to serve and represent our current and future members through these changes. In order to do so, we need to better understand what these changes are likely to be and how they will impact the geospatial industry and its customers

Which is a nice way of saying that we were asked to look forward 5 years hence and try and predict how the UK geospatial industry would change. I had two issues with this.

Firstly, we don’t have a terribly good track record for predicting how the future of a given technology will turn out …

“There’s no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home” … Ken Olsen, founder and CEO of DEC in 1977

… and …

“I think there is a world market for maybe 5 computers” …Thomas Watson of IBM in 1943 (apocryphal)

Secondly, I have a slight issue with the phrase geospatial industry which, to my mind at least, conjures up images of people dealing with maps and not the geo industry as a whole, although to be fair, I’m not precisely sure what the geo industry actually covers but it’s more than just maps.

So rather than not participating I chose to conveniently ignore the spatial specialisation an instead, attempt to play pin the tail on the (geo)donkey instead with the following paper submission:

AGI Foresight Study – Teaching Human Geography to the Internet (Gary Gale) Scribd Edit

When it was launched in early 2009, Latitude was the receipt of some fairly harsh press from the informed tech media and from the uninformed traditional media and I argued for some latitude in the discussions on, err, Latitude.

Latitude kept on getting compared to Yahoo’s Fire Eagle and the main gripes seemed to be:

1. Latitude is a consumer application built into Google Maps, not a platform
2. Latitude doesn’t have an API
3. Latitide’s privacy model is opt-in but all or nothing

So now Latitude has an API and everyone’s happy. Right?

Wrong. The previous gripes have been done away with and replaced with three more gripes.

1. Latitude needs to run in the background and so will either drain battery life or won’t run in the background on an iPhone at all.
2. Latitude now has granular privacy controls but these are on the back-end so Google will know your location prior to federating it to location consumers via the API.
3. Latitude needs a Google account to use.

There’s a lot of inconsistency here.

1. Latitude, as part of Google Maps, already runs in the background on handsets that support that. The iPhone doesn’t, yet, but that’s an iPhone OS issue not a Latitude issue. Short battery life is a feature of almost all smartphone class handsets, Latitude or not.
2. Latitude gains granular privacy controls but they’re on the back-end so this is a bad thing. Fire Eagle has granular privacy controls and they’re on the back-end but this has never been a source of complaint.
3. Latitude needs a Google account to use. Correction. Latitude has always needed a Google account to use, so this is a bad thing. Fire Eagle has always needed a Yahoo! Id to use, and yet this is something not seen as a contentious issue.

One of the criticisms that was levelled at Fire Eagle was lack of a definitive consumer application at launch; a not unfair criticism. Latitude’s taken the inverse approach, launching with a consumer application and then opening up an API almost a year later.

Time will tell which of these two location sharing platforms will dominate or whether they will be usurped by another unseen contender.

Most of the time … but not all of the time.

The hey presto bit of the process seems at first glance to be relatively trivial but isn’t. Just ask anyone who’s had to implement a system that handles place names. Actually, the hey presto part is actually two discreet processes in their own right. First of all we need to identify a place, or whether indeed there’s a place at all; this is usually called geoidentification.

identify; verb; establish or indicate who or what (someone or something) is

This is the thing that determines that there is a place in “I’m in London today” but not in “I do love Yorkshire Pudding“.

Once a place has been identified, we need to work out if there’s more than one place of the same name (which is more than likely as we’re stunningly unimaginative where place names are concerned, duplicating and reusing the same name all over the world) and if so, which one. This is usually called geodisambiguation.

disambiguate; verb; remove uncertainty of meaning from (and ambiguous sentence, phrase or other linguistic unit)

Some places are pretty easy to disambiguate; as far as I know there’s only one Ouagadougou and that’s the capital of Burkina Faso. Some places should be easy to disambiguate, least at first sight; take London, that should be easy. It’s the capital of the United Kingdom. Well that’s true but it could also be the London in Ontario, or the one in Arkansas, in California, in Kentucky or any of the other 22 Londons that I’m aware of.

The gentle art of disambiguation is critical to the act of geocoding, geoparsing, geotagging and any of the other words the the location industry chooses to tack geo on as a prefix. Get disambiguation wrong and you fail on two counts.

Firstly, you’re showing your audience that you don’t know or don’t care about what they’re trying to tell you. Secondly, you allow your users the opportunity to specify the same place in a multitude of conflicting ways.

This is part of the problem of GeoBabel; your place is not my place.

So far, so theoretical, but let’s look at a concrete example of this. A few weeks back I added my Twitter account to the Twitter directory site wefollow.com. The first thing you’re asked to do is to supply your location, or to “Type Your City” as wefollow.com phrases it. So I type London and the site starts to attempt to disambiguate on the fly; so do I mean “London, United Kingdom” or “London, Ontario“? But wait, what about the other options?

Which “London” is the one tagged by 436 people but with no indication of which country? What’s the difference between “London, United Kingdom“, “London,UK” and “London England“. Space and punctuation, or the lack of it, is obviously important to wefollow.com here. So let’s try and give the system some help and start to type United Kingdom …

Oh dear. The “London, United Kingdom” still shows up but because I’ve put a space in there I don’t get offered “London,UK” anymore but I do get offered the London in the lesser known country of “Uunited Kingdom” and also “London, Ub2“, which one assumes is the UB2 postal code which specifies the London suburb of Southall.

Your place is not my place.

To be fair, I’m not singling wefollow.com out for attack here; this is just one of many examples of sites who try to use geographic lookup but end up making life difficult for their users (but which London do I pick?) and for themselves (now, how many users in London in the UK do we have?). I’d happily offer to help them; if only I could find any contact information anywhere on the site …

After a wonderful couple of years doing geomob, and the people powered success that was WhereCampEU, I’m afraid to say that I am stepping down to make way for some new blood.

That does mean that there is an opportunity for one or more of you to step up and continue geomob in the spirit it started – free, non corporate, disrespectful and focused on people doing things.

Get in touch if you want to take on the mantle, until then geomob is on hiatus.

Its been a blast

As both Chris and I found out, organising the WhereCamp EU event that took place in London earlier this year was an exhausting, if ultimately rewarding, task. Imagine doing that every other month?

I hope this isn’t the last we hear of Geomob; it’s been a major contributor to the Geo community in London and has, indeed, been a blast. It also gave me my very first Geo themed public speaking engagement and for that I’ll always be both profoundly grateful and profoundly embarrased at my first stumbling efforts.

If you’re thinking of taking up the role of Geomob organiser, I encourage you to do so; it’s a battering, weary, exhausting and sometimes thankless task in the run up to a meetup. Then you see the audience waiting expectantly , watch the speakers, listen to the Q&A session and before you know it the evening’s over in a rush; you won’t regret it.

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?