Gary Gale

Posts about lbs

The Problem With Location Based Mobile Services

privacy or tracking. Nor is the problem one of an LBMS dying and going away. The problem isn't whether I can get a good location fix or whether the results I get are accurate or not. The problem isn't even of the value of the data we, the customer, put into a service and whether we can get it back again.

There's a problem with today's crop of location based mobile services, commonly referred to as LBMS; those little apps which sit on our smartphones and allow us to geotag status updates or photos, find relevant local place information or check-in at a place.

The problem isn't one of privacy or tracking. Nor is the problem one of an LBMS dying and going away. The problem isn't whether I can get a good location fix or whether the results I get are accurate or not. The problem isn't even of the value of the data we, the customer, put into a service and whether we can get it back again.

The Internet Connection Appears To Be Offline

No, the problem is whether we can actually use the service from our smartphone at all.

It's 2013 and I live in the suburbs of the capital of the United Kingdom and this happens all the time. Not in the uncharted wilds of the UK. Not in obscure regions of the world. But in my local neighbourhood and in the heart of London. And it's not just a problem with Vodafone, my current cellular provider. Over the last few years I've been on T-Mobile, on Orange and on O2 and all the cellular carriers seem to have exactly the same problem; one which makes a mockery of their coverage maps. According to Vodafone's map, I should be getting high or at least variable 3G data coverage where I live, but instead I get variable or no coverage at all when walking in my local neighbourhoods.

3G data coverage that drops in and out; that's the problem with today's location based mobile services.

I'm getting off of my soapbox now ...

Work+ - A Fantastic Idea For A Location Based App; Shame About The Metadata Though

mistaking the context (location) for the end game and that location is (also) a key context, but most people don't know this. Two years or so after I wrote those posts, the concept of location based mobile services and location based apps shows no sign of dying off. I see lots of new location based apps and whilst they're almost always nice and glossy, not that many of them really grab you as a neat and innovative idea. But every so often, one does come along which makes you slap your forehead, like the scientists in the 80's ads for Tefal, and mutter under your breath ... that's so obvious, why didn't I think of that?

I once wrote two posts saying that people are mistaking the context (location) for the end game and that location is (also) a key context, but most people don't know this. Two years or so after I wrote those posts, the concept of location based mobile services and location based apps shows no sign of dying off. I see lots of new location based apps and whilst they're almost always nice and glossy, not that many of them really grab you as a neat and innovative idea. But every so often, one does come along which makes you slap your forehead, like the scientists in the 80's ads for Tefal, and mutter under your breath ... that's so obvious, why didn't I think of that?

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWWbUd2CGCM&rel=0]

These days I tend to work as much out of the office than I do in the office. My needs for this are relatively few; somewhere to plug my laptop in, free wifi and a half-way decent cup of espresso now and again. Using local location based search services I can find places near me that meet these needs but it's a disjointed experience, using multiple apps to find free wifi, good espresso and so on. Maybe the recently launched Work+ can help me out here?

First impressions are good. I launch the app and connect it to my Foursquare account (the check-in feature within Work+ is a nice touch). Work+ also passes the first hurdle than many location based apps fail at; it actually works outside of the United States.

I install the app, tap on Work and then Go to launch the easy to use search interface. I need wifi ... tap. I need a table to put my laptop on ... tap. I need coffee ... tap.

Ideally I'd also like to see a search setting that says "by coffee I mean decent espresso and no, I don't mean Starbucks" but maybe I'm being overly picky here.

So I tap on Search and I get a list of places that are close by to me that meet my needs or I can view those places on (Apple's new) map. This is great. What is there not to like?

But wait, do all of these places actually meet my needs? The search results seem good, there's no duplicates or places that either don't exist or have since closed; problems which can plague location based services and which are by no means simple to solve. The results are also pretty close to where I am. But ...

  • The two hits for Costa Coffee are pretty good; as the name implies they both sell (reasonably passable) coffee and have (free-ish but time limited) wifi. Score, 2/7.
  • The same goes for Caffe Nero, another one of the big UK coffee chains. Score, 3/7.
  • Caffe Toscana is my local neighbourhood cafe. Great food and coffee ... but no wifi, at least not when I visited last week. Score, 3/7
  • Astrora Coffee isn't a cafe. They sell coffee in the raw, roasted beans and ground beans. No wifi and not really somewhere you can work; I'd imagine the staff getting somewhat bemused if someone turned up and tried to work there. Score, still 3/7.
  • Diner's Delight is as the name suggests, a local diner. No wifi here either. Score, 3/7 again.
  • Finally, The Nearest Cafe is a cafe and they do sell pretty good coffee. But again, no wifi here.

The final score ends up as 3 hits that really meet my needs, out of a possible 7.

It would be easy to take what I've just written as an indictment of Work+ but nothing could be further from the truth. Local search is not an easy thing to do. Tightly focused local search across a wide range of attributes that you can assign to a place (wifi, coffee and so on) is insanely difficult to do. It's true that Work+ doesn't score as highly as I'd have hoped in what is admittedly a very subjective search on a very limited local area. But Work+ shows the direction that local search is headed in. It's no longer enough to ask find me what's around me, we need to be able to ask find me what's around me that fits what I need to know now and more importantly get good answers to that question.

What makes the Work+ experience not quite as good as it could be isn't down to the app, which makes local search a pain free and simple process. What lets Work+ down is the lack of a complete local data set which contains not just the accepted standard place attributes of name, address, location and category but also which adds in more detailed, almost ambient or fuzzy, attributes, such as wifi, capacity (can I fit a large group of people in here?), beverage types (coffee or tea?), noise level and ambience.

Make no mistake, Work+ is a precursor to the local search and location based experiences we can expect to see in the very near future; whether the back-end data with all of the rich attributes that people want to search on will keep up with demand remains to be seen.

GeoCommunity and LocNav; One Talk, Two Audiences

You can argue that it's cheating or you can argue that there's a vague degree of ecological-friendliness but sometimes you just end up recycling and repurposing a conference talk deck for more than one conference. So it was with my keynote at GeoCommunity in Nottingham last month and my keynote at the Location Business Summit in San Jose. One deck, two audiences. As it turns out, taking this approach can yield unexpected benefits.

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.

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)

BCS North London and BCS Geospatial SG

Last night I presented a deck on Mobile Location Based Services at the British Computer Society in an event organised by the North London Branch of the BCS and the BCS Geospatial Specialist Group at the BCS headquarters in Covent Garden; the full write up is here.

BCS Logo ThumbnailLast night I presented a deck on Mobile Location Based Services at the British Computer Society in an event organised by the North London Branch of the BCS and the BCS Geospatial Specialist Group at the BCS headquarters in Covent Garden; the full write up is here.