All posts tagged as "Location (LBS)"

I have seen the concept (and phrase) digital footprints discussed before, and I’ve rather liked it. I am a closet ubicomp fan, after all.

The other day Tomi Ahonen wrote a long futurist vision of increasing digital footprint tracking, and I guess the social consequences of it being more or else in your control. When you have time, I suggest you read it:
http://communities_dominate.blogs.com/brands/2008/04/datamining-our.html

This got so in depth, I was suddenly struck by how similar the whole concept is to any remotely clever marketing folks of the pre- or barely-computer era. It has been eminently possible to track user behavior (purchase patterns and so forth) not just demographics, for a long time. Its traditionally been easier if you sold a wide range of products (Reader’s Digest had this range, and this business intelligence and data on customers stored on computers since the 50s).

Disregarding privacy bits, and the need to set up business relationships with other organizations, it should be even easier more recently with the internet encouraging data interchange. Even more disregarding privacy and business relations, is should be trivial with mobiles for all the reasons Tomi outlines in his post above. You can get a huge amount of information, as an operator or with access to their data, with just traffic analysis, and post-event location tracking, before you even crack into the signaling and messaging channels.

BUT, no one seems to do this. Why? Occasionally when meeting with business owners, on almost any product with high repeat-use rates, I can show off some neat, theoretical, future possibility of reporting and analysis data, mention “1:1 marketing” and eyes light up. But nothing ever seems to come of it.

And its not just my projects. My junk mail is about as poorly targeted as television advertising (the ultimate shotgun approach and the antithesis of targeted marketing possible with mobiles). And those that try to leverage user data often seem to fail in funny ways. Actually, even the mobile advertising I see is targeted almost entirely not at me, implying its not what I would call targeted /at all/.

When I do see something remotely targeted at me or a narrow segment, I notice it because it’s unique and interesting. At home we get catalogs for commercial nursery operators, because we bought a greenhouse for the back yard; HDNet is filled with advertising for high-def DVDs, 5.1 surround systems and related products, because everyone watching the channel has an HD system.

Okay, I gripe a lot. How to fix it? Well, I was all ready to blame the marketing folks for having no vision, but Barbara has an MBA, so I just had to run this by her first. She assures me that people are working on this, but aside from taking money, will and smarts, it takes money.

Yeah, I said money twice. Aside from initial investment to move from the current model (and the perception of what’s wrong with it, anyway), the data is only theoretically free. Aside from actually being charged per transition by operators, et. al. there are inefficiencies associated with all this one-off data retrieval and processing.

Once that is cheaper, then we’ll be ready to figure out how to get over legal, database design, privacy worries and all the usual stuff. Then, maybe the ubquity, awareness, contextuality, individualization and personalization of mobiles will be able to enable relationship marketing the way Tomi dreams.

Another good discussion along some of the same lines (sharing, depth, privacy, legacy data systems) is posted here with plenty of neat links worthy of saving.

Now, you tell me. How would you solve these issues? Or, if you know someone doing it today (or you are, and can talk about it) point it out and let’s discuss.

All About Symbian posted a feature on The Future of Nokia Maps, and it provided some interesting insights into what was undoubtedly expensive user research:

“Interestingly, the Maps team talked about six “experience clusters”: drive, walk, discover, collect, share and meet. As Nokia Maps evolves, we can presumably expect more functions to allow sharing (of locations and stuff [e.g. photos, videos] associated with locations) and meeting (coordinating locations between two or more incidences of Maps?)”

This goes a long way to answering the sorts of questions numerous hopeful entrepreneurs ask (such as over in LinkedIn Answers), without us having to do explicit user research.

“Drive” and “discover” are well-supported with current applications and services; “walk” is only somewhat supported. “Meet” is supported well by non-map applications such as Dodgeball.

I’m curious about “collect” and “share” as location experience clusters. Do you have any examples? Or more examples of “discover?” Or great examples of any of these?

At the Mobile Web USA conference, Yahoo bravely did a live demo of Yahoo Go 3.0. They did a sample oneSearch based on the conference location for “sushi.” (what is it with mobile search demos and sushi?) Three results were returned, in order of increasing distance, with others available beyond the cut.

The closest result was listed at 1.2 miles from the conference venue. They then got directions to the restaurant, and the drive distance was 4.5 miles. On my 0.5 mile walk back to my hotel from the conference, I passed 3 sushi restaurants.

How do we learn to trust results like this?

Yesterday at CES, Intel's Paul Otellini talked about "...an internet that is proactive, predictive and context-aware."

I do like his one definition:

"A mobile internet device is something that you carry around in your pocket, and can deliver the full internet, with no compromises," he said.

What I don't like is the prediction that it will happen in five years. I can see where, as a hardware guy, he wants to sell better chips, build out more networks and so on, but it seems that everyone has gotten into this mindset, at least for mobiles. The networks and devices today seem totally capable of being proactive, location aware and contextual.

All it takes is the will.

Operators and app makers need to use what they have available today. Pricing of unlimited internet is the only legitimate issue I see for end user adoption now, and how hard can that be to solve?

The Interactive Institute Mobility group is doing a lot of fun design research projects. One of them, Placememo (the page will only partially load), simply marks the spot and allows a voice memo to indicate the reason. They are targeting a road maintenance crew, but I've long thought that marking, say, where my car is parked in the hundred acre lot would be nice for a large number of users.

For an entirely other project, I was poring over all the SDK guides for Blackberry, and came across something really interesting. Under "Modes for getting GPS location information" (p.9 of the GPS and BlackBerry Maps Development Guide) they list three methods to get location data.

• "cell site" by which they seem to mean cell/sector/triangulation, as they mention signal strength. I should point out they mention another good point; aside from lower resolution this does not provide speed or route data.
• "autonomous" or standalone GPS only, with no network talking.
• "assisted" which uses both the mobile network and the GPS together. This is the cool one.

You might ask why they would want to use the assisted mode. GPS is better, right? Well... GPS is more precise. But its also slow to turn on. If the device or user, to save battery, for emissions control or for privacy concerns, has the GPS off, it takes some time to acquire its first location. Blackberry says this takes about 2 minutes. My (much snazzier, dedicated) GPS 60 takes 30 seconds to 1 minute.

Both of these are significantly best-case. They assume you are within the same area as last time, so the GPS can use its almanac data. The receiver has to know roughly where to expect to find the satellites, or it has to start searching in wider areas, or wait to notice which satellites it can see, and figure it out. Or wait for new data to be sent down. If you moved a long ways (say, flew to another city) when you turn the device back on, it could take 5 to 15 minutes to get a fix.

(Yes, I left out timing, ephemera updates, and much more. It gets complex in a hurry, and this is basically correct.)

Now, imagine your device used an assisted mode all the time. Your user gets off the plane, and as soon as the device is on the network, a few seconds after power-on, it can use the basic location information to give the weather, set the clock and do a lot of other useful stuff relevant to their new location. Then, the GPS can be told to go look for satellites in this part of the world, and probably has them locked in by the time the rental car is being driven away, and detailed directions are needed. Personalized and transparently useful, like any mobile service ought to be.

This is what many phone devices have been doing for quite a while, powered by companies like SnapTrack; it's now embedded in some phone chip sets. All of this coolness comes with a cost: it's far easier for the operator to insert itself into the value chain; the system can be engineered to store the location data not on the device, but on the operator's servers. Then, all the sudden, location becomes something the operator tries to monetize.

The good news/bad news for third party developers is that there is a standard method for accessing location data in Java ME; you won't be able to do it from the browser (for a while yet). Not all devices have the location capabilities turned on in Java as it takes extra code that the device is unlikely to have unless it has GPS or A-GPS.