Real Life, Now With Mobile Technology

I distinctly recall sitting on the floor in the back room of my tiny grade school library, watching very 50s looking films of the smart city (and home) of the future. Among the neat-o technologies were what I'd now call sensing and predictive stuff. Like, when you are on the way home, the oven starts heating up, and the air conditioner comes on, or whatever.

Aside from home atomic reactors, this required, most of all, some enabling technologies: s sense of location, with velocity so there can be prediction that you are indeed on the way home, and about when you'll get there, plus a communications channel to tell the house.

Now, of course, we all have this (even without GPS, the location sensitivity of the network is plenty for this), and yet... nothing. Sure, there's plenty of location-enabled devices sold in the U.S. and Europe, but LBS means "navigation services on your phone." Use of these services is basically as offered, it's a GPS receiver taped to the side of your phone. And it's not universally loved; check out the LBS use rate in asia.

The newer releases of Nokia Maps have a pedestrian mode (instead of just assuming you are a very slow car when walking). But aside from some neat tickles on the edge with location tagging, this is just a much better satnav system taped to the side of my phone. With really nice tape.

Marc Naddell (VP Partner and Development Programs at Navteq, soon to be Nokia) at the recent S60 Summit talked about the challenges of LBS as almost entirely the challenges of nav. A little about "meta data" but more on global growth and improving accuracy (and presumably trust).

I have exchanged a few emails lately with Andrew Shanahan (here he is interviewed by someone else). He's one of the people who, I think, is bringing bout the future world we've been waiting for. He produces "locative media" projects, which combine a conventionally consumed media format (i.e. audio) with another key, usually GPS-enabled location sensing. The best known of these is 230 Miles of Love, a series of several dozen comedy sketches about the M6 (in the UK) intended to be listened to through your GPS nav device, as you drive on the motorway.

I think this is the answer. Not just the product, but the attitude. Right around now there are enough enabling technologies, and a cadre of clever individuals and small groups around the world are going to realize it and bring us the long-promised rocket packs and robot helpers. Technologies in mobile devices, of all sorts, can help connect us to the world; camera-based search, or AGPS location services or barcode tagging or audio awareness or radio proximity will serve to make the metadata THE data. Information about the real world will become primary, and the services currently perceived as core (the radio service, the geocoding service) will become enabling technologies for a digitally-enhanced real life.

It might not be far enough to be called "grassroots," but the next tier of folks down the chain are already where I get most of my favorite software (mobile or desktop), and increasingly are providing interesting content. And note I said "software" before content. This is not just an opportunity for social media creation, even when it's a largely content based product.

So, to all the developers and content creators, with a good idea: get to it. Seriously. Don't wait for iPhone to have GPS, or for a plethora of WiMax devices, or for NFC readers to achieve sufficient penetration in the U.S. market. And certainly do not wait for your operator, or carrier or device manufacturer to build out a tool kit to enable whatever social networking or automation task you want. Some technology, somewhere, in common usage already does at least roughly what you need. I'd love to have seen the Movingaudio content work on every mobile phone, but I am much happier to see it out in the world, being consumed, today.

Some of this innovation is bubbling up; but my search/bookmarking skills aren’t keeping track of it.

Within the last couple of weeks there was an announcement of an application that helped you reach appointments. It worked with your current location, calendar, and traffic status to ping you with a notice of when you had to depart in order to make your next appointment.

Like you stated; no new software needed just a unique approach to integrating existing functionality to address a business, not technical, solution.

Sorry for not providing the link to the solution.

Sorry for the delay. I’ve been living out of a tent for the last week, and my internet was slow. Naturally, in this day and age, I still had internet access of some sort.

Anyway, good point. This place I worked about 12 years ago had a product actually called Meeting Maker that could be made aware of where things were, so schedules accounted for travel. It even knew people had to eat, so if you wanted to skip lunch you had to tell it. This was invaluable for the sales team, as they drove to rural hospitals all about Missouri, so driving times were non-trivial to them.

I haven’t seen as smart a system since then. That same office also had other neat stuff, like an (internal) IM client, before we knew enough to call it “IM.” Sometimes it feels like things are going backwards.