eriks

I attended the Where 2.0 conference earlier this week. The topic as to address the new GeoWeb, which in short is simply mashup of content based on location. The conference highlighted strategies and different applications in this very interesting field. My thoughts and reflections on the conference are:

Lesson 1 You need data, data, data…
You can have the coolest application, but if you simple don’t have the data, the true potential is really lost. Data should be as freely available as possible, accurate and for the whole world. This is a tremendous task and my impression is that many of the big players at least partly are underestimating the necessity. In many ways most attempts are very US-focused, even though some players are starting to realize this. This is especially true for the big mapping projects, as you map is never better than the data you put into it, which is a well-known problem.

Lesson 2 Business models are the problem, not the technology.
I saw quite a few applications that some way or the other had a very cool and flashy appearance, but it was very unclear how this would produce a revenue share. Guy Kawasaki’s comment – “Okay, so you have a cool product, then what…” – is something that tends to gets lost in this hype.

The interesting analogy to the social web is thus very interesting. Before the social web matured the same problems were faced. I think the GeoWeb will pretty much face the same problems.

Lesson 3 Cellphone GPS applications are still not market ready.
This is very simple: There are not enough GPS-enabled handsets combined with the resistance from cellphone operators pretty much makes any attempt in this field highly questionable from a business perspective. If you would like to go into this field it is simple. Make sure you have a well-defined audience in which you can control their handsets and maybe even more important operators. There are some companies doing things right here and I would recommend to take a look at ULocate – http://www.ulocate.com.

Lesson 4 The privacy problem with location based.
Answer these questions: Do you really want everyone to know where you are, have been and also keep track of that. What stops your boss to install this on your cellphone? What are the long term consequences? Do we really want to live in a big brother society? Are there enough advantages to overlook the dangers?

I see this a broader debate on the web as whole. However, developers and solution architects need to start to think in these paths. The sense I got from talking to some developers at the conference and outside is that many developers tend to hide from addressing these issues. I think of a quote from the one of the managers at Google Earth (commenting something else though): “Just because you can do it, does not mean that you should do it…” Unfortunately there are a lot of developers that do this big mistake.

Lesson 5 Cellphone operators are still the main obstacle for any.
You are using someone else’s network and thus you need to ask for permission. I see very little big potential in only mashing up locations, without providing the customers with a mobile solution. The network of interest thus is the cellphone network. All that have been doing anything in that field knows that you need their permission. I think that they definitely have bigger power than they should, and a lot of work needs to be done here. I will leave this discussion simply by saying the rather obvious: If you need GPS-data via your cellphone, you must have access to it. Otherwise the user experience will be too poor.

These are the lessons I learnt at the conference. To conclude I saw a lot of cool applications, yet with very unclear purpose. What is the need to have the applications? What is the market, if any?

I was amazed listening to the big players Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! who all are kind of fumbling around figuring this out. How they are going to take advantage of this opportunity. Interesting enough I think that Yahoo! has been more successful than the others. They linked their geospatial initiative to their social web initiative, which diminished the pressure of making money on the geospatial initiative itself.

It does make less sense to launch a location based service without any cellphone application. To really make cellphone applications to take off, there is a huge need for policy making on both national and international level to erode the monopolistic atmosphere on the market. For now many companies get stuck in partnership discussions and the further development of their products is halted. Initiatives like wireless phones and wireless enabled flash cards together with proper lobbying campaigns will force the market to open up, and it can really take off.