Posts about mobile

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 ...

Revisiting SoLoMo in Istanbul

last time I spoke about whether do embrace SoLoMo or just embrace social, local and mobile I cautioned against the tick in the box approach and against adopting new technologies just because you're exhorted to.

But at first glance, a business running classified listings does seem to put all the right ticks in all the right boxes.

Firstly local. Classifieds are inherently local, offering a way for local businesses and individuals to offer ... stuff ... to other local people. Implementing a local strategy needs your mainstay offering to have a strong geolocation quotient and what could be more local or more geolocation than addresses and postal codes?

Then there's mobile. Most classifieds businesses have either fully or partially transitioned from print to online and if you already have an online presence, you're more than half way to having a mobile online presence.

Finally there's social. Again, there's a strong affinity with classifieds. Nothing spreads faster than word of mouth reputation and harnessing the power of social media to allow people to say "hey, I just found this really cool stuff" is a compelling case for social.

So when the International Classified Media Association, the ICMA, asked me to talk about SoLoMo at their Social, Local, Mobile: Classified Media Strategies conference in Instanbul last week it was an ideal opportunity to see whether my preconceptions to be skeptical about SoLoMo were borne out in practise or whether I'd just overdone the cynicism a bit too much.

If any industry sector is uniquely poised to benefit from the triumvirate of social, local and mobile, it's the classified listings industry. The last time I spoke about whether do embrace SoLoMo or just embrace social, local and mobile I cautioned against the tick in the box approach and against adopting new technologies just because you're exhorted to.

But at first glance, a business running classified listings does seem to put all the right ticks in all the right boxes.

Firstly local. Classifieds are inherently local, offering a way for local businesses and individuals to offer ... stuff ... to other local people. Implementing a local strategy needs your mainstay offering to have a strong geolocation quotient and what could be more local or more geolocation than addresses and postal codes?

Then there's mobile. Most classifieds businesses have either fully or partially transitioned from print to online and if you already have an online presence, you're more than half way to having a mobile online presence.

Finally there's social. Again, there's a strong affinity with classifieds. Nothing spreads faster than word of mouth reputation and harnessing the power of social media to allow people to say "hey, I just found this really cool stuff" is a compelling case for social.

So when the International Classified Media Association, the ICMA, asked me to talk about SoLoMo at their Social, Local, Mobile: Classified Media Strategies conference in Instanbul last week it was an ideal opportunity to see whether my preconceptions to be skeptical about SoLoMo were borne out in practise or whether I'd just overdone the cynicism a bit too much.

As it turns out, I think it was round about a 50/50 ratio. Most of the classifieds people in Instanbul fundamentally got the basic precepts around each of SoLoMo's constituent elements.

But there were two major flies in their respective ointments.

Firstly, as with most industry sectors, the classifieds businesses are experts in ... classified. They're not experts in social, local or mobile. They're far too busy running their business to become experts in anything other than their business. Which means metaphorical toes are dipped in equally metaphorical waters without maybe understanding or appreciating what is meant to be achieved.

Secondly and closely linked with my first point, even if a social, local, mobile or SoLoMo strategy is put in place, it's still not clear what's going to be achieved or how to measure success or failure. Many of the classifieds players I spoke to openly acknowledged that whilst they have social media dashboard and metrics in place, it's a major challenge to interpret a sea of figures and work out what this means in the context of their business area.

I'm still strongly of the belief that if applied sanely and in a way that makes sense for a business, there's a lot to be gained from social, from mobile and from local.

I'm still equally strongly of the belief that SoLoMo, even if it does have a manifesto, is too vague and wooly to be understood by people trying hard to make their business succeed and needs the basic tenets broken out and explained in language the people SoLoMo is trying to help can understand.

As usual, the slides from my talk, which will be just a tad familiar to anyone who read my last SoLoMo post, are below and my deck notes follow after the break.

[scribd id=113080713 key=key-1tr8s6lysr71tcss8g53 mode=scroll]

Slide 2 So, hello, I’m Gary and I’m from the Internet. I’m a self-confessed map addict, a geo-technologist and a geographer. I’m Director of Web & Community for Nokia’s Location and Commerce group. Prior to Nokia I led Yahoo’s Geotechnologies group in the United Kingdom. I’m a founder of the Location Forum, a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, I sit on the Council for the AGI, the UK’s Association for Geographic Information, I’m the chair of the W3G conference and I’m also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

Slide 3 There are URLs in this talk but this is the only URL in the entirety of this talk you might want to take a note of. Although if you go there right now, it'll 404 on you, later today or tomorrow, this is where this slide deck, my notes and all the links you'll be seeing will appear on my blog. That’s an upper case “I” and a number “9” at the end of the URL by the way ...

Slide 4 As you might be able to tell from the title of this talk, I like social and social media ...

Slide 5 Based on social networking theory from the 1980's, social networks and social media are one of today's dominant forces for communication on the internet and the web.

Slide 6 And even though a lot of the social networks that originally launched are no longer with us, we're a social species and social networks are here to stay in some form or other for the foreseeable future of the web   Slide 7

Whether it's a social network for your professional profile   Slide 8

... for your friends and family to share stuff   Slide 9

... for your more technically literate friends and colleagues to share stuff

Slide 10

... or for expressing yourself in 140 characters or less, probably everyone in this room knows and uses social networks to a greater or lesser degree

Slide 11

I also like local ...

Slide 12 I travel a lot, both for work and for when I'm not working. Online local sources of information, both those which are place related and via social media, are to me utterly invaluable.

Slide 13 Local is both a global and a intensely personal thing. My idea of what's relevant and local will differ entirely from yours most of the time. Local maps and local place information allow me to find the things that are important to me, like where to find a good cup of coffee in a new city, where the hotel I’m staying at in a new city is located and other more detailed information about that place.

Slide 14 Local is both a global and a intensely personal thing. My idea of what's relevant and local will differ entirely from yours most of the time. Local maps and local place information allow me to find the things that are important to me, like where to find a good cup of coffee in a new city, where the hotel I’m staying at in a new city is located and other more detailed information about that place.

Slide 15 Local is both a global and a intensely personal thing. My idea of what's relevant and local will differ entirely from yours most of the time. Local maps and local place information allow me to find the things that are important to me, like where to find a good cup of coffee in a new city, where the hotel I’m staying at in a new city is located and other more detailed information about that place.

Slide 16 I also like mobile ...

Slide 17 I like the fact that the social and local services I've come to rely on are not tied to the internet connection at home or at work and that I don't have to have access to a desktop computer or a laptop to use them. My mobile is more than a phone, it's a computer with an internet connection in my back pocket. I use my mobile all the time and I'm not alone; a recent ComScore report shows that in the US more people now spend time on Facebook and Twitter on mobile than they do on those company's respective web sites.

Slide 18 But do I like SoLoMo ... ?

Slide 19 SoLoMo is one of those fantastic acronyms that the tech industry creates on a regular basis, the aggregation and the convergence of the three things I've just talked about ... social, local and mobile.

Slide 20 It even has a manifesto for "everything marketeers need to know about the convergence of social, local and mobile". Given what I've been showing you on the last 16 or so slides, I should love the concept of SoLoMo .... shouldn't I?

Slide 21 But SoLoMo has an odd sense of deja vu for me. I freely admit this is in part down to my healthy sense of cynicism and skepticism where marketing and advertising is concerned but I'm sure we've been here before, where a buzzword or an acronym has been heralded to be the next “big thing” only for the harsh light of day and the passage of time to show otherwise.

Slide 22 Remember the "year of the map" ... ?

Slide 23 The explosion of maps APIs, first from Yahoo!, then from Nokia, Google, Bing, OpenStreetMap and many others have revolutionised maps with only a few lines of JavaScript code. Suddenly maps were everywhere, whether they actually needed to be or not.

Slide 24 Now it's true, that some amazing work has come out of the mapping API, such as Stamen's Pretty Maps that mashes up Flickr’s Alpha shapes, urban areas from Natural Earth and OpenStreetMap road, highway and path data; and which showed that you could produce maps, such as where I live on the outskirts of London and here in Istanbul, that weren't only like no map you'd seen before but were almost works of art in their own right.

Slide 25 Now it's true, that some amazing work has come out of the mapping API, such as Stamen's Pretty Maps that mashes up Flickr’s Alpha shapes, urban areas from Natural Earth and OpenStreetMap road, highway and path data; and which showed that you could produce maps, such as where I live on the outskirts of London and here in Istanbul, that weren't only like no map you'd seen before but were almost works of art in their own right.

Slide 26 It also meant that people even went so far as to link the Twitter API and Modest Maps and make maps for individuals, such as this map that Aaron Cope, ex of Flickr, made for me.

Slide 27 But in becoming widespread, digital maps started to become a commodity and for every good use of a map, the number of maps that are just plain wrong started to increase, such as this, digitally produced, totally wrong map of a local bus route in London, which has been helpfully corrected by a local resident ...

Slide 28 Or a combination of online digital maps, from Google and incorrect spatial data from the US State Department being used as a justification for a border dispute between Nicaragua and Costa Rica in 2010.

Slide 29 Then there was the "check-in economy" which was going to revolutionise advertising and local commerce through checking into a place on your location enabled smartphone. Companies such as Brightkite, Gowalla, Facebook's Places and Foursquare were hailed by the media as the standard bearers for this. Time has not been kind here.

Slide 30 Who here remembers Brightkite? One of the earlier LBS apps to take advantage of the check-in phenomenon. Wikipedia's entry on Brightkite says it all ... "Brightkite was a location based social network" ...

Slide 31 So farewell Brightkite, there's always Gowalla, Facebook Places and Foursquare.

Slide 32 Ah. "Gowalla was a location based social network". I'm having a bit of deja vu here again.

Slide 33 So, no more Brightkite or Gowalla. There's still Facebook Places and Foursquare. And after Facebook's recent IPO, surely Facebook can't get it wrong can it?

Slide 34 Actually Facebook Places lasted just over a year and for a lot of that time, it was only available in the US and automagically turned itself on when I was in Silicon Valley and turned itself off again once I got home to London.

Slide 35 So of the 4 poster children of the check-in economy only Foursquare is left and, apparently, still going strong. Maybe the "check-in economy" didn't really exist.

Slide 36 Fast forward to today and in addition to SoLoMo, there's The Cloud

Slide 37

Now the notion of storage and services hosted remotely and accessed via the internet is nothing new. You can argue that the IMAP server which holds my email and my web host provider are as much cloud services as Amazon's EC2 and S3 and DropBox are

Slide 38

But unlike the digital map and the check-in which are fairly clear and unambiguous, no-one really seems to know precisely what the cloud is; take an unscientific straw poll of 5 people and you'll probably get 5 different answers.

Slide 39 So the "year of the map”, "the check-in economy" and other buzzwords, such as hyperlocal, never really materialised and either were over-used or failed to live up to their much hyped potential.

Slide 40 So back to SoLoMo and back to the convergence of social, local and mobile.

Slide 41 It has to be said that I’m very wary of SoLoMo as a concept, though not of the converging technologies that make up SoLoMo and I encourage you all to be equally wary, as I hope you'll see.

Slide 42 Firstly the concept of social. SoLoMo encourages your business to be social. But almost everything on the internet now is already social, either as an established social network or as a component to existing ventures.

Slide 43 Although Twitter launched in 2006, it's over the last 4 or 5 years that it's become an established part of the internet. Sharing people’s thoughts and trivial day-to-day activities, through to breaking news, from celebrity news, through political events to natural disasters.

Slide 44 Ditto for YouTube, started in 2005 and acquired by Google a year later.

Slide 45 There's also Tumblr, founded in 2007.

Slide 46 And of course, Facebook, launched in 2004.

Slide 47 All of these services and plenty more besides have permanently changed people's expectations and habits of how they use the internet and how they share content with their social community. Even before Facebook's recent IPO, this one site has become a magnet for how brands reach and interact with their customers.

If you're looking to bring a social aspect to your business, how do you compete with the existing platforms and how can you compete with the massive attention that your brand rivals already have on social media platforms? Unless you're bringing something radically new to the table you'll have a hard time competing for your audience's attention. You can take the common route of literally buying attention with deals, coupons and special offers, but that's not a sustainable method of engagement in anything but the short term.

The often overlooked solution to vying for social attention is to make social a key aspect to all of your business and all of the departments that make up your business. "Doing social" can have a benefit but only if it's a core part of the way in which you interact with your customers, past, present and future. Simply having a Twitter account or a Facebook page does not a social strategy make.

Slide 48 Another truism is that there's much much more to mobile and to mobility than just Apple's smartphone offering.

Slide 49 There are a lot of smartphones about and that number continues to grow. In the last 2 years in the United States alone, smartphone growth has risen from under 30% to 50%, whilst there’s been a corresponding fall in feature phone growth, from just over 70% to meet smartphones at 50% in March of this year.

Slide 50 It's true that most companies these days go down the mobile app route and that often means that the starting point is to focus on a single platform. Yet despite what you read in the media, often the social media, there are other platforms out there besides iOS.

Slide 51 There's Windows Phone, and despite me working for Nokia and having a potential bias here, I have to say that this platform is growing fast and offers a differentiating factor to a startup or company expanding into mobile that iOS, with it's massive array of apps, can't now offer.

Slide 52 And then of course, there's Google's Android OS as well. By all means develop, launch and keep updated a mobile app. But don't get complacent and think that your mobile strategy will be successful just because you have a mobile presence on a single mobile platform. Even if you're aggressive and target all of the mobile platforms, there's still the cost and effort involved in maintaining a mobile presence across disparate environments.

Slide 53 Although relatively recent and still somewhat fragmented from a standards point of view, HTML5 is looking to be a viable alternative option for a mobile presence and indeed, some companies, including the Financial Times, are focusing entirely on HTML5 to cut development costs and to work around the restrictions and limitations that each platform's app store or app marketplace has, particularly around revenue generation.

Slide 54 But there's more to mobile than just smartphones, there's also the growing number of tablets

Slide 55

From Apple's iconic iPad

Slide 56

Through Amazon's newcomer, the Kindle Fire plus many other table variants running Android.

Slide 57 And beyond the smartphone and the tablet, there's the connected TV, which is becoming more and more one of the every growing number of screens that vies for our attention on a daily basis.

Slide 58 Finally, in addition to social and to mobile, there's local. But local is more than just localised and relevant information, deals and coupons.

Slide 59 In just the same way in which the "check-in economy" never really materialised, the "deals economy" is not having an easy time. Groupon, once the poster child of local commerce, has had a rough ride, with vendors finding out the hard way that good deals for their customers doesn't necessarily equate to good business for a business. Indeed, the rumours of Groupon's near bankruptcy have forced the company to postpone their promised IPO. And as with social and mobile, the local marketplace is already filled to near overflowing point with competitors and it can be hard for a newcomer to vie for customer's attention against the competition.

To do local successfully, it's not just about choosing to partner with the right tool, say Foursquare vs. Gowalla or Groupon vs. Living Social and hoping that you've chosen a partner with longevity. As with social, it's not just about engaging with your audience. As with mobile, it's not just about putting the tick next to the box that say "have mobile app". It's about looking long and hard at your business and its offering and rewiring it from a local perspective in a way that makes sense for your offering and your audience. It's about convincing your staff and your investors that doing this makes sense for you and for your business. Putting a tick next to the box that says "do SoLoMo" simply isn't enough.

Slide 60 So if SoLoMo is more than just adding social, local and mobile together to be buzzword compliant, what is the success factor in all of this? The answer is content. The internet remains one of the best ways we have today to reach an audience, both as an individual and as a business and that audience is hungry for content ...

Slide 61 ... specifically for digital content. More specifically, an audience that is hungry for quality, current and relevant content. Content that can tell a great story which can boost your brand, content that explains your products and services clearly and unambiguously, content that creates loyalty, that makes your social, mobile and local presence compelling and sticky, content that builds a community around it, via comments, Facebook Likes, Tweets and so on. The harsh fact is that in the fields of social, local and mobile there's a simple equation ... no content or irrelevant content equals no business. You may have an iPhone app or a Facebook page or a deals coupon but these will never make up for a lack of quality content.

Slide 62 But to be more precise, it’s not just about digital content to connect with your audience and with your customers, it’s about local and localised content. This means that you need to reach your audience in a manner with which they’re familiar and comfortable with. Localising to a local language is a good first step but just as importantly, it’s about local knowledge. You, as business owners or employees are in a unique position to know your local area and to give unique insights that other people just don’t know. Let me give you a specific recent example ...

Slide 63 I fly in and out of Berlin’s Tegel airport because Berlin is the European headquarters for Nokia’s Location & Commerce group. This airport is as well known in the city by its airport code, TXL, as it is by its’ full name, Berlin Otto Lilienthal Airport. Last week, whilst in Berlin I was given this tee-shirt. Everyone I know in Berlin immediately understood the local reference, not only to TXL but also the hexagon on the tee-shirt, because the main terminal at Tegel is hexagonal in shape. Local knowledge, local information, local insight.

Slide 64 I fly in and out of Berlin’s Tegel airport because Berlin is the European headquarters for Nokia’s Location & Commerce group. This airport is as well known in the city by its airport code, TXL, as it is by its’ full name, Berlin Otto Lilienthal Airport. Last week, whilst in Berlin I was given this tee-shirt. Everyone I know in Berlin immediately understood the local reference, not only to TXL but also the hexagon on the tee-shirt, because the main terminal at Tegel is hexagonal in shape. Local knowledge, local information, local insight.

Slide 65 I fly in and out of Berlin’s Tegel airport because Berlin is the European headquarters for Nokia’s Location & Commerce group. This airport is as well known in the city by its airport code, TXL, as it is by its’ full name, Berlin Otto Lilienthal Airport. Last week, whilst in Berlin I was given this tee-shirt. Everyone I know in Berlin immediately understood the local reference, not only to TXL but also the hexagon on the tee-shirt, because the main terminal at Tegel is hexagonal in shape. Local knowledge, local information, local insight.

Slide 66 Now, if any industry sector can be said to have a wealth of local, digital, content, it’s the classified market. So, as I begin to wrap this up, I thought it would be a good idea to look at a case study of how one player approaches the trinity of social, of local and of mobile. I choose a classified business from a purely personal perspective. A classifieds business I’ve known as a consumer for a good many years and one who has transitioned from printed media to take on digital media ... so, with the caveat that this is very much a critique and not a criticism ...

Slide 67 I looked at Friday-Ad and for the purposes of this case study I’m looking to get my hands on a nice cheap MacBook Air. The first experience on my laptop is good. The site works out that I’m in the United Kingdom, probably via the domain name and possibly some IP geolocation. Now most modern browsers have built in geolocation facilities so I was a bit surprised to be asked to manually enter my postal code when my browser could have a pretty good idea of where I am. There’s a nice set of social icons present, with the usual suspects of Facebook, Twitter and Google+. To be honest, for an organisation with the pedigree and heritage of Friday-Ad, 1,500 likes and 425 Tweets sounds a bit low to me and it’s not clear what, precisely is being liked or tweeted about. The site, the UK site, or something else? What’s more confusing is the second set of just Facebook and Google+ icons below; this time with 22 likes and no +’s. Maybe this is for me to like of plus the UK site. Or ... not. For an end user, this is not clear at all, in fact it’s contradictory and confusing.

Slide 68

... but let’s not get bogged down in details, so I punch on my postal code and click the button helpfully labelled “Go Local!”.

Slide 69 Good. My postal code has been accepted and the site knows that I’m in Teddington in South West London. But hang on a moment. Remember those confusing social buttons? They’re still here and I’m more confused. The one’s at the top are now at zero and the ones underneath, which I previously thought might be for the UK are now for Teddington and yet the numbers are still exactly the same, 22 likes and no plus’s. I’m still confused.

Slide 70 So in an attempt to find what it is I’m being asked to like I hover my mouse pointer over the like button. But nothing happens. No clues and I’m left clueless. So I mouse over the tweet button and nothing happens here. But wait. I’m a bit of a geek and I notice that there’s a URL in the browsers status bar. I’m also geeky enough to work out that I would be Tweeting about Friday Ad in Teddington. But I wonder how many of the Friday Ad’s non geeky, or to put it another way, normal users would notice this.

Slide 71 So, after searching, I find the MacBook Air I want. It’s not really local but it’s a good price. Then I notice another set of Tweet and Like buttons. This time on the right hand in a box helpfully labelled Options. I am now officially confused. On this page there’s 3 Like buttons, 2 Tweet buttons 2 Google+ buttons, one Email To A Friend button and one Send button which I have no idea what would happen if I click it. Friday-Ad obviously has a social strategy but it’s just not clear how it works for the user and what it is that I’d be liking or plusing or recommending or sending. I have social button overload.

Slide 72 So I retreat from the laptop web experience and go mobile. My first port of call is my phone’s app store but there’s nothing I can find. This is not a bad thing as it does allow all flavours of today’s smartphone market to reach Friday-Ad. I go to www.Friday-ad.co.uk and the site notes I’m on a mobile browser and redirects me to the mobile site. This is good. Again, it knows I’m in the UK and this time, unlike on a laptop browser I’m offered a use current location option.

Slide 73

I click through the phone’s warning and I can see that the mobile site now knows where I am. Good.

Slide 74 Not let’s find that MacBook Air. OK. There’s nothing in my local area. Let’s refine the search. Oh, I see. The default is within 10 miles. So I tap the little “x” to remove the distance and tap go.

Slide 75 Still no results. But I found my MacBook Air on the non mobile site. So I tap refine search and then the penny drops. I need to tap refine search, remove the distance constraint, and then tap on refine search again. Really?

Slide 76 So eventually after some experimentation, I find my MacBook Air. And the social element, well if I scroll down I can tweet or like this ad. At least I think it’s that ad. Once again there’s absolutely no context here at all and if I want to do something with Google+ which is on the main site, well I’m out of luck,

Now I want to re-iterate this was a critique and not a criticism. Friday Ad has a business built around local content and local content with a strong and intuitive way of allowing people to interact with it. Friday Ad has a mobile presence as well and one which works intuitively and simply, leveraging browser detection to offer me the mobile site and geolocation. Friday-Ad also knows and uses the major social networks, but it’s this one piece of the puzzle which isn’t cohesive or intuitive for a non technically literate user to comprehend. But overall I think Friday-Ad does a pretty good job. Yes, there could be some more polish applied but overall the key elements of social, local and mobile are all there, even if the fit isn’t a snug one in places.

Slide 77 So please, do mobile and let your products and services break free of the desktop ...

Slide 78 Do social and build a presence and community around your offerings ...

Slide 79 Do local and bring local relevance to your content and to your audience ...

Slide 80 But unless you have money to burn, don't do SoLoMo just because you hear that it's the current trend you need to be part of. It's interesting to note that even as SoLoMo continues to be trumpeted as the next big thing that you have to invest in, there's a buzzword compliant newcomer snapping at SoLoMo's heels.

Slide 81 If recent commentary is to be believed, you now need to invest in ToDaClo ... touch and data and the cloud.

Slide 82 Buzzwords do not make a successful business, service or offering, and I leave you with the ultimate buzzword offering, which Schuyler Erlse sprung on an unsuspecting audience at FOSS4G recently.

Slide 83 Thank you for listening.

SoLoMo, Or Just Social, Local And Mobile?

One of the many things I like about writing talks for a conference is that the talk often morphs during the writing process as I research the theme and try to make the narrative at least vaguely coherent. Of course, it also helps that when you're asked to be a speaker at a conference, the organisers often want the title and abstract up to 3 months ahead of proceedings. 3 months is a long time in the tech industry and a lot can change.

Which brings me to the talk I gave a month ago at the Location Business Summit in Amsterdam and again today at the Click 6.0 Digital Marketing conference in Dubai.

I'd originally wanted to talk about the importance of digital maps in SoLoMo, the much touted convergence of social, local and mobile. The more I researched this, the more a feeling of déjà vu crept into my thinking. I was sure I'd seen a much talked about and much feted tech phenomenon turn out to be more hype than substance. Much as hyperlocal, which I approached from the point of view of a hopeful sceptic, turned out to be more hype than local, SoLoMo gave me the same feeling of unease.

For those of you who like this sort of thing (and I really need to check my web analytics sometime to see if anyone actually does like this sort of thing or whether I'm merely deluded; either one of these options is entirely plausible), the slide deck, with titles helpfully annotated into Arabic by one of my colleagues in Nokia's Berlin office, plus notes are below.

[scribd id=100297520 key=key-1uwzl4kofy5rl0j6f7g0 mode=list]

Slide 1

Welcome back. Now I’m aware that you’ve all just had your lunch but maybe, just maybe, the observant amongst you will have noticed that this slide behind me isn’t the talk that’s advertised in the conference brochure and schedule. This talk was supposed to be “The 3rd. Generation Of The Map; The Importance of Location in SoLoMo”. But during the process of writing and researching this talk, it changed and became “SoLoMo, Or Just Social, Local and Mobile?”. This is not a bad thing. My talks often morph during their creation, hopefully becoming something which is a bit more focused and relevant for a given audience. But firstly, I should introduce myself …

Slide 2

So, hello, I’m Gary. I’m a self-confessed map addict, a geo-technologist and a geographer. I’m Director of Places for Nokia’s Location and Commerce group. Prior to Nokia I led Yahoo’s Geotechnologies group in the United Kingdom. I’m a founder of the Location Forum, a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, I sit on the Council for the AGI, the UK’s Association for Geographic Information, I’m the chair of the W3G conference and I’m also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

Slide 3

As you might be able to tell from the title of this talk, I like social and social media …

Slide 4

Based on social networking theory from the 1980's, social networks and social media are one of today's dominant forces for communication on the internet and the web.

Slide 5

And even though a lot of the social networks that originally launched are no longer with us, we're a social species and social networks are here to stay in some form or other for the foreseeable future of the web

Slide 6

Whether it's a social network for your professional profile

Slide 7

... for your friends and family to share stuff

Slide 8

... for your more technically literate friends and colleagues to share stuff

Slide 9

... or for expressing yourself in 140 characters or less, probably everyone in this room knows and uses social networks to a greater or lesser degree

Slide 10

I also like local ...

Slide 11

I travel a lot, both for work and for when I'm not working. Online local sources of information, both those which are place related and via social media, are to me utterly invaluable.

Slide 12

Local is both a global and a intensely personal thing. My idea of what's relevant and local will differ entirely from yours most of the time. Local maps and local place information allow me to find the things that are important to me, like where to find a good cup of coffee in a new city ...

Slide 13

...where the hotel I’m staying at in a new city is located ...

Slide 14

... and other more detailed information about that place.

Slide 15

I also like mobile ...

Slide 16

I like the fact that the social and local services I've come to rely on are not tied to the internet connection at home or at work and that I don't have to have access to a desktop computer or a laptop to use them. My mobile is more than a phone, it's a computer with an internet connection in my back pocket. I use my mobile all the time and I'm not alone; a recent ComScore report shows that in the US more people now spend time on Facebook and Twitter on mobile than they do on those company's respective web sites.

Slide 17

But do I like SoLoMo ... ?

Slide 18

SoLoMo is one of those fantastic acronyms that the tech industry creates on a regular basis, the aggregation and the convergence of the three things I've just talked about ... social, local and mobile.

Slide 19

It even has a manifesto for "everything marketeers need to know about the convergence of social, local and mobile". Given what I've been showing you on the last 16 or so slides, I should love the concept of SoLoMo .... shouldn't I?

Slide 20

But SoLoMo has an odd sense of deja vu for me. I freely admit this is in part down to my healthy sense of cynicism and skepticism where marketing and advertising is concerned but I'm sure we've been here before, where a buzzword or an acronym has been heralded to be the next “big thing” only for the harsh light of day and the passage of time to show otherwise.

Slide 21

Remember the "year of the map" ... ?

Slide 22

The explosion of maps APIs, first from Yahoo!, then from Nokia, Google, Bing, OpenStreetMap and many others have revolutionised maps with only a few lines of JavaScript code. Suddenly maps were everywhere, whether they actually needed to be or not.

Slide 23

Now it's true, that some amazing work has come out of the mapping API, such as Stamen's Pretty Maps that mashes up Flickr’s Alpha shapes, urban areas from Natural Earth and OpenStreetMap road, highway and path data; and which showed that you could produce maps, such as where I live on the outskirts of London ...

Slide 24

... and here in Dubai, that weren't only like no map you'd seen before but were almost works of art in their own right.

Slide 25

It also meant that people even went so far as to link the Twitter API and Modest Maps and make maps for individuals, such as this map that Aaron Cope, ex of Flickr, made for me.

Slide 26

But in becoming widespread, digital maps started to become a commodity and for every good use of a map, the number of maps that are just plain wrong started to increase, such as this, digitally produced, totally wrong map of a local bus route in London, which has been helpfully corrected by a local resident …

Slide 27

Or a combination of online digital maps, from Google and incorrect spatial data from the US State Department being used as a justification for a border dispute between Nicaragua and Costa Rica in 2010.

Slide 28

Then there was the "check-in economy" which was going to revolutionise advertising and local commerce through checking into a place on your location enabled smartphone. Companies such as Brightkite, Gowalla, Facebook's Places and Foursquare were hailed by the media as the standard bearers for this. Time has not been kind here.

Slide 29

Who here remembers Brightkite? One of the earlier LBS apps to take advantage of the check-in phenomenon. Wikipedia's entry on Brightkite says it all ... "Brightkite was a location based social network" ...

Slide 30

So farewell Brightkite, there's always Gowalla, Facebook Places and Foursquare.

Slide 31

Ah. "Gowalla was a location based social network". I'm having a bit of deja vu here again.

Slide 32

So, no more Brightkite or Gowalla. There's still Facebook Places and Foursquare. And after Facebook's recent IPO, surely Facebook can't get it wrong can it?

Slide 33

Actually Facebook Places lasted just over a year and for a lot of that time, it was only available in the US and automagically turned itself on when I was in Silicon Valley and turned itself off again once I got home to London.

Slide 34

So of the 4 poster children of the check-in economy only Foursquare is left and, apparently, still going strong. Maybe the "check-in economy" didn't really exist.

Slide 35

Fast forward to today and in addition to SoLoMo, there's The Cloud

Slide 36

Now the notion of storage and services hosted remotely and accessed via the internet is nothing new. You can argue that the IMAP server which holds my email and my web host provider are as much cloud services as Amazon's EC2 and S3 and DropBox are

Slide 37

But unlike the digital map and the check-in which are fairly clear and unambiguous, no-one really seems to know precisely what the cloud is; take an unscientific straw poll of 5 people and you'll probably get 5 different answers.

Slide 38

So the "year of the map”, "the check-in economy" and other buzzwords, such as hyperlocal, never really materialised and either were over-used or failed to live up to their much hyped potential.

Slide 39

So back to SoLoMo and back to the convergence of social, local and mobile.

Slide 40

It has to be said that I’m very wary of SoLoMo as a concept, though not of the converging technologies that make up SoLoMo and I encourage you all to be equally wary, as I hope you'll see.

Slide 41

Firstly the concept of social. SoLoMo encourages your business to be social. But almost everything on the internet now is already social, either as an established social network or as a component to existing ventures.

Slide 42

Although Twitter launched in 2006, it's over the last 4 or 5 years that it's become an established part of the internet. Sharing people’s thoughts and trivial day-to-day activities, through to breaking news, from celebrity news, through political events to natural disasters.

Slide 43

Ditto for YouTube, started in 2005 and acquired by Google a year later.

Slide 44

There's also Tumblr, founded in 2007

Slide 45

And of course, Facebook, launched in 2004.

Slide 46

All of these services and plenty more besides have permanently changed people's expectations and habits of how they use the internet and how they share content with their social community. Even before Facebook's recent IPO, this one site has become a magnet for how brands reach and interact with their customers.

If you're looking to bring a social aspect to your business, how do you compete with the existing platforms and how can you compete with the massive attention that your brand rivals already have on social media platforms? Unless you're bringing something radically new to the table you'll have a hard time competing for your audience's attention. You can take the common route of literally buying attention with deals, coupons and special offers, but that's not a sustainable method of engagement in anything but the short term.

The often overlooked solution to vying for social attention is to make social a key aspect to all of your business and all of the departments that make up your business. "Doing social" can have a benefit but only if it's a core part of the way in which you interact with your customers, past, present and future. Simply having a Twitter account or a Facebook page does not a social strategy make.

Slide 47

Another truism is that there's much much more to mobile and to mobility than just Apple's smartphone offering.

Slide 48

There are a lot of smartphones about and that number continues to grow. In the last 2 years in the United States alone, smartphone growth has risen from under 30% to 50%, whilst there’s been a corresponding fall in feature phone growth, from just over 70% to meet smartphones at 50% in March of this year.

Slide 49

It's true that most companies these days go down the mobile app route and that often means that the starting point is to focus on a single platform. Yet despite what you read in the media, often the social media, there are other platforms out there besides iOS.

Slide 50

There's Windows Phone, and despite me working for Nokia and having a potential bias here, I have to say that this platform is growing fast and offers a differentiating factor to a startup or company expanding into mobile that iOS, with it's massive array of apps, can't now offer.

Slide 51

And then of course, there's Google's Android OS as well. By all means develop, launch and keep updated a mobile app. But don't get complacent and think that your mobile strategy will be successful just because you have a mobile presence on a single mobile platform. Even if you're aggressive and target all of the mobile platforms, there's still the cost and effort involved in maintaining a mobile presence across disparate environments.

Slide 52

Although relatively recent and still somewhat fragmented from a standards point of view, HTML5 is looking to be a viable alternative option for a mobile presence and indeed, some companies, including the Financial Times, are focusing entirely on HTML5 to cut development costs and to work around the restrictions and limitations that each platform's app store or app marketplace has, particularly around revenue generation.

Slide 53

But there's more to mobile than just smartphones, there's also the growing number of tablets

Slide 54

From Apple's iconic iPad

Slide 55

Through Amazon's newcomer, the Kindle Fire plus many other table variants running Android.

Slide 56

And beyond the smartphone and the tablet, there's the connected TV, which is becoming more and more one of the every growing number of screens that vies for our attention on a daily basis.

Slide 57

Finally, in addition to social and to mobile, there's local. But local is more than just localised and relevant information, deals and coupons.

Slide 58

In just the same way in which the "check-in economy" never really materialised, the "deals economy" is not having an easy time. Groupon, once the poster child of local commerce, has had a rough ride, with vendors finding out the hard way that good deals for their customers doesn't necessarily equate to good business for a business. Indeed, the rumours of Groupon's near bankruptcy have forced the company to postpone their promised IPO. And as with social and mobile, the local marketplace is already filled to near overflowing point with competitors and it can be hard for a newcomer to vie for customer's attention against the competition.

To do local successfully, it's not just about choosing to partner with the right tool, say Foursquare vs. Gowalla or Groupon vs. Living Social and hoping that you've chosen a partner with longevity. As with social, it's not just about engaging with your audience. As with mobile, it's not just about putting the tick next to the box that say "have mobile app". It's about looking long and hard at your business and its offering and rewiring it from a local perspective in a way that makes sense for your offering and your audience. It's about convincing your staff and your investors that doing this makes sense for you and for your business. Putting a tick next to the box that says "do SoLoMo" simply isn't enough.

Slide 59

So if SoLoMo is more than just adding social, local and mobile together to be buzzword compliant, what is the success factor in all of this? The answer is content. The internet remains one of the best ways we have today to reach an audience, both as an individual and as a business and that audience is hungry for content ...

Slide 60

... specifically for digital content. More specifically, an audience that is hungry for quality, current and relevant content. Content that can tell a great story which can boost your brand, content that explains your products and services clearly and unambiguously, content that creates loyalty, that makes your social, mobile and local presence compelling and sticky, content that builds a community around it, via comments, Facebook Likes, Tweets and so on. The harsh fact is that in the fields of social, local and mobile there's a simple equation ... no content or irrelevant content equals no business. You may have an iPhone app or a Facebook page or a deals coupon but these will never make up for a lack of quality content.

Slide 61

But to be more precise, it’s not just about digital content to connect with your audience and with your customers, it’s about local and localised content. This means that you need to reach your audience in a manner with which they’re familiar and comfortable with. Localising to a local language is a good first step but just as importantly, it’s about local knowledge. You, as business owners or employees are in a unique position to know your local area and to give unique insights that other people just don’t know. Let me give you a specific recent example …

Slide 62

I fly in and out of Berlin’s Tegel airport because Berlin is the European headquarters for Nokia’s Location & Commerce group. This airport is as well known in the city by its airport code, TXL, as it is by its’ full name, Berlin Otto Lilienthal Airport.

Slide 63

Last week, whilst in Berlin I was given this tee-shirt. Everyone I know in Berlin immediately understood the local reference, not only to TXL but also the hexagon on the tee-shirt ...

Slide 64

... because the main terminal at Tegel is hexagonal in shape. Local knowledge, local information, local insight.

Slide 65

And as a recent study has shown, there’s an Arabic speaking market right here in the Emirates and surrounding nations that is ready and waiting for localised content, localised commerce and localised services. In April of this year, a study by Plus7 polled over 4000 local phone owners giving a unique insight into what people are looking for on their mobile device. More interestingly, the study showed that consumers usually look for information on the mobile web and via mobile apps before they purchase a product or service. Although most of the people surveyed preferred cash on delivery for products and services, mobile e-commerce is increasing across the region. Sagar Shetty, co-founder and Director of Plus7, commented that

“Although mobile advertising is still in its infancy in this region, this study demonstrates that the uptake of mobile internet and e-commerce is quite high. The adoption of smartphones, 3G networks and data plans provides a ripe environment for advertisers looking to reach consumers through a variety of platforms including mobile browsers and apps. As usage increases, mobile advertising will play a key role in the development of the mobile ecosystem.”

Slide 66

So please, do mobile and let your products and services break free of the desktop ...

Slide 67

Do social and build a presence and community around your offerings ...

Slide 68

Do local and bring local relevance to your content and to your audience ...

Slide 69

But unless you have money to burn, don't do SoLoMo just because you hear that it's the current trend you need to be part of. It's interesting to note that even as SoLoMo continues to be trumpeted as the next big thing that you have to invest in, there's a buzzword compliant newcomer snapping at SoLoMo's heels

Slide 70

If recent commentary is to be believed, you now need to invest in ToDaClo ... touch and data and the cloud.

Slide 71

Buzzwords do not make a successful business, service or offering, and I leave you with the ultimate buzzword offering, which Schuyler Erlse sprung on an unsuspecting audience at FOSS4G recently.

Slide 72

Thank you for listening

Now The Metropolitan Police Want Your Phone's Data

At The Airport, Not All QR Codes Are Created Equal

bags X-Rayed or searched and on engaging flight-safe mode on your mobile phone/tablet/e-book reader/laptop.

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.

Another day, another flight, another addition to the ever growing and increasingly arcane number of steps that you need to go through in order to get through an airport and actually take off on a plane. I've written before on the world of airport security, be it having your bags X-Rayed or searched and on engaging flight-safe mode on your mobile phone/tablet/e-book reader/laptop.

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.

Berlin Boarding Pass - Original

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.

Berlin Boarding Pass - Copy

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.

Farewell Ovi Maps, Hello Nokia Maps (On iOS And Android Too)

retirement of the Ovi brand and the observant map watchers amongst you may have noticed that pointing your browser of choice at maps.ovi.com now automagically redirects you to the new, shiny maps.nokia.com.

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 ...

In May of this year, Nokia announced the retirement of the Ovi brand and the observant map watchers amongst you may have noticed that pointing your browser of choice at maps.ovi.com now automagically redirects you to the new, shiny maps.nokia.com.

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 ...

Nokia Maps on iOS

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

Nokia Places on iOS

... 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.

Nokia Maps on Android

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

Almost Losing Sight Of The Magic Of (Mobile) Maps

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 ...

Often maligned and ignored, sometimes science fiction writers are bang on the mark. The cognoscenti of the high brow literary world often dismiss science fiction as being not proper writing or even worthy of the label of literature. But sci-fi authors are often as not as uniquely placed to think about today's technology as they are to extrapolate on tomorrow's.

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.

Talking About A Sense Of Place

last week's mashup* Digital Trends event, I chatted to Paul Squires of Imperica about my location trends in more detail than the mashup* format would have allowed for. The write-up from that interview is now up on Imperica's web site and, thanks to them adopting a Creative Commons  license, I'm able to reproduce it here.

As a precursor to last week's mashup* Digital Trends event, I chatted to Paul Squires of Imperica about my location trends in more detail than the mashup* format would have allowed for. The write-up from that interview is now up on Imperica's web site and, thanks to them adopting a Creative Commons  license, I'm able to reproduce it here.

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.

Privacy Area "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 Are Here "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. Photo Credits: Mark Barkway and Isma Monfort on Flickr.

The BA Mobile Boarding Pass; So Right And Yet So Wrong

KLM from Amsterdam's Schipol airport. The system was quick, easy and worked, even though some of the staff at Schipol seemed a bit confused by me whipping out my mobile when they asked for my boarding pass, rather than the conventional printed boarding pass. At the time, I wondered when British Airways would follow suit. Now more than a year later, they have. Now to be fair, this system may have been in place for a while, but if it was it escaped me. Maybe I missed an email or some junk mail about this, but the first I heard of it when when I saw that the BA app on my iPhone had a new version and after some poking around to see what was new I saw the option for a mobile boarding pass.

While boarding passes on your mobile handset have been around for a while in one form or another, I only came across them just over a year ago while flying on KLM from Amsterdam's Schipol airport. The system was quick, easy and worked, even though some of the staff at Schipol seemed a bit confused by me whipping out my mobile when they asked for my boarding pass, rather than the conventional printed boarding pass. At the time, I wondered when British Airways would follow suit. Now more than a year later, they have. Now to be fair, this system may have been in place for a while, but if it was it escaped me. Maybe I missed an email or some junk mail about this, but the first I heard of it when when I saw that the BA app on my iPhone had a new version and after some poking around to see what was new I saw the option for a mobile boarding pass.

KLM Mobile Boarding Pass

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.

BA Mobile Boarding Pass

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.

Flight Safe Mode; The Sequel

This is mercifully brief follow up to my previous post on British Airways proscriptions on enabling flight safe mode on your mobile phone and hails jointly from the departments of "be careful what you ask for, it might come true" and "they didn't really mean to say that ... did they?" ...

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.

Takeoff!

"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.

Cartoon Credit: Rob Cottingham at Noise To Signal

Geolocating Yourself? In Europe, You're Not Alone

recent study by Orange and TNS, makes for some interesting reading for the location industry. Although it should be taken with a large pinch of salt from the pot labelled lies, damned lies and statistics, the study's report shows the significant increase in use of geolocation services within the mobile space.

Pushpins in a map over France and Italy

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.

Exposure 2010, the recent study by Orange and TNS, makes for some interesting reading for the location industry. Although it should be taken with a large pinch of salt from the pot labelled lies, damned lies and statistics, the study's report shows the significant increase in use of geolocation services within the mobile space.

Pushpins in a map over France and Italy

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.

Photo Credits: Marc Levin on Flickr.

Flight Safe Mode

As part of the security and safety announcement that gets made each time you get onto a plane these days, there's invariably a bit which goes something like this ... "all electrical equipment should be switched off during taxiing, take off and landing and all devices with a flight safe mode should have this enabled now".

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.

Broken

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".

Photo Credits: Camilo Rueda Lopez on Flickr.

Roughly Halfway Between England And France

As a race and as a society we just love our boundaries and our borders; go here, don't go here, this is yours, this is ours. We put up border controls, we tax dependent on what side of the street you live on, you need the right visa stamp in your passport to pass onto this piece of land, which looks identical to the one you're currently standing on but because of a line drawn on a map its ... different.

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.

Halfway Between England and France

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.

Reaching The Limits Of Unlimited

Consider for a moment the word unlimited; it's an adjective and, if you'll pardon the condescension, it means the following:

  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.

Impossibility #1 : Reaching the limits of unlimited.

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?

Deliciousness: ringing phones, suicide linux, Flickr plugins, editing, zoomable maps and upsidedownness

social bookmarking deliciousness, from down the back of the internet.
  • Got a colleague who keeps wandering away from their desk and leaving their mobile phone behind, which then keeps on ringing? Maybe they need one of these signs left on their desk. Maybe.
  • Fancy a challenge? How many times a day do you type the incorrect command at the shell? Once, twice, three times a day? More? Maybe you should give Suicide Linux a try; it helpfully turns any mistyped command into rm -rf / thus helpfully erasing your root file system. Concentrate now.
  • The WordPress Flickr Manager is a wonderful plugin which integrates your Flickr photostream into blog posts. Alas it doesn't work with WordPress 2.9. Until now.
  • Posting the same article to multiple blogs severely impacts your search engine ranking results. How did I not know this? It's stopped at least one person from using the Posterous autopost function.
  • Sometimes, just sometimes, sub-editors trim just a little bit too much from an article prior to publishing.
  • We're used to online slippy maps being able to zoom in and out; but zooming in and out of paper maps? That's something else indeed.
  • What's happens in Vegas stays in Vegas; but sometimes it stays on FourSquare as well.
  • Photo of the year so far; the Space Shuttle Endeavour, caught in silhouette from the International Space Station. That phrase alone sounds like it's been lifted wholesale from an Arthur. C. Clarke novel.
  • ˙uʍop ǝpısdn ǝdʎʇ oʇ pǝǝu noʎ 'sǝɯıʇǝɯos ʇsnɾ 'sǝɯıʇǝɯos

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

Today's social bookmarking deliciousness, from down the back of the internet.

  • Got a colleague who keeps wandering away from their desk and leaving their mobile phone behind, which then keeps on ringing? Maybe they need one of these signs left on their desk. Maybe.
  • Fancy a challenge? How many times a day do you type the incorrect command at the shell? Once, twice, three times a day? More? Maybe you should give Suicide Linux a try; it helpfully turns any mistyped command into rm -rf / thus helpfully erasing your root file system. Concentrate now.
  • The WordPress Flickr Manager is a wonderful plugin which integrates your Flickr photostream into blog posts. Alas it doesn't work with WordPress 2.9. Until now.
  • Posting the same article to multiple blogs severely impacts your search engine ranking results. How did I not know this? It's stopped at least one person from using the Posterous autopost function.
  • Sometimes, just sometimes, sub-editors trim just a little bit too much from an article prior to publishing.
  • We're used to online slippy maps being able to zoom in and out; but zooming in and out of paper maps? That's something else indeed.
  • What's happens in Vegas stays in Vegas; but sometimes it stays on FourSquare as well.
  • Photo of the year so far; the Space Shuttle Endeavour, caught in silhouette from the International Space Station. That phrase alone sounds like it's been lifted wholesale from an Arthur. C. Clarke novel.
  • ˙uʍop ǝpısdn ǝdʎʇ oʇ pǝǝu noʎ 'sǝɯıʇǝɯos ʇsnɾ 'sǝɯıʇǝɯos

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

O2 in Positive Customer Service Shock?

O2, the UK Telefonica brand and soon-to-be-loosing-the-iPhone-exclusivity-to-just-about-anyone mobile operator, have a reputation which is, to be honest, just a little bit crap. Their coverage in the rural wilds of Central London, especially around Soho and Covent Garden, seems to be scaled for a single user and a web searchfor "o2 customer service problems" throws up such gems as "O2 customer service consists of PAY UP OR ELSE" and "O2's customer service has to be the poorest I have ever come across".

So we'll leave aside for one moment the fact that I have to pay an additional £20.00 for a measly 10MB of data when abroad via O2's Data Abroad 10 bolt on and accept that I ordered this to be added to my account so I could use data on my iPhone when in the US for this week's Open Hack NYC.The first mailed response from O2 didn't inspire confidence."Hi, Thanks for getting in touch. We'll look into your query and get back to you as quickly as we can, normally within 24 hours."So I waited and less than 24 hours later I got this"Good Morning Gary. Thanks for emailing us about adding the 10Mb Data Roaming Bolt On to your account.Gary, you'll be pleased to know that I've added the 10Mb Data Roaming Bolt On to your account effective from your next bill onwards (10 October 2009).  You'll be charged £17.02 excluding VAT (Value Added Tax) per month for this Bolt On.If you want to add the above Bolt On on a different date, please reply to this email and we'll help you further."Data roaming on; WIN. Data roaming on from the date of my next bill and after the event in New York; FAIL.So I asked them, nicely."I'm having to travel at very short notice so I really need this up and running from my first day out of the country which is this Wednesday, October 7th. Can the bolt on start date be brought forward to this day?"That automated reply came back again"Hi, Thanks for getting in touch. We'll look into your query and get back to you as quickly as we can, normally within 24 hours."I'd expected a cut-and-paste response that they could only start services such as this on the first day of a new monthly bill, which basically means minimal work for them and maximum inconvenience for the customer. Then this morning I got this, which was emphatically not what I was expecting."Good Evening Gary. Thanks for emailing us as you want to pre-phone your Bolt On start date. I've pre phoned your Bolt On start date to 07 October 2009 as requested by you. Important - When you email us please provide: your date of birth, postcode and mobile number as it helps us answer your query faster"So fair play to you O2; I'm not entirely sure what pre-phoning is and a bit surprised that you expect me to provide personal data including my date of birth and postal code in every email, but I went into this dialogue with you with zero expectation of success and you pleasantly surprised me. Now if we can just fix that "No Service" in Central London ...Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

Paperless Boarding Passes

State of the Map conference; I'd checked in online from my hotel room but had no access to a printer. KLM's online check-in system offered me the option of having my boarding pass on my iPhone, which duly arrived as a link in an email.

British Airways allegedly offers this service out of London Heathrow though I've yet to see it being used and there's no evidence of any scanners at the gates at Terminal 5 or Terminal 4. British Midland and Lufthansa are also operating trial programs and now Continental Airlines are offering a trial at San Francisco. When moving around Schipol the system worked incredibly well even though some staff seemed not to have heard of it and looked a bit confused when I showed them my phone after being asked for my boarding pass. Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

Now that the so called smart phones, such as the BlackBerry, the Nokia N series and the iPhone, are becoming more and more ubiquitous, so airlines are ramping up their paperless or electronic boarding pass programs. I came across this recently when flying KLM out of Amsterdam Schipol when returning from the State of the Map conference; I'd checked in online from my hotel room but had no access to a printer. KLM's online check-in system offered me the option of having my boarding pass on my iPhone, which duly arrived as a link in an email.

British Airways allegedly offers this service out of London Heathrow though I've yet to see it being used and there's no evidence of any scanners at the gates at Terminal 5 or Terminal 4. British Midland and Lufthansa are also operating trial programs and now Continental Airlines are offering a trial at San Francisco. When moving around Schipol the system worked incredibly well even though some staff seemed not to have heard of it and looked a bit confused when I showed them my phone after being asked for my boarding pass. Posted via email from Gary's Posterous