Issue No 35 August 2010
conference report
Mobile Social 2.0 Dennis Crowley, CEO of Foursquare, gave a perplexing account of the phenomenal growth of their company from launch in March 2009 to 750,000 active users a mere 12 months later. It was perplexing because it left me thinking that most of their users needed to get a life. However, Foursquare (and competitors such as Gowalla) do seem to be a catalyst for “positive behavioural change” in their users, getting them out of their homes and into the real world. Originally the concept was that you checked-in to see where your friends are, useful but limited – a kind of twitter with location. They then started building in “game mechanics”, adding rewards for certain actions and achievements. For instance, people arrange parties for Foursquare users where you get a “digital badge” if more than 100 Foursquare users attend. Is it me, or does the badge concept sound like going back to the cubs or brownies? However, there is a local advertising angle to this – become the most frequent visitor, described as the “Mayor”, at the local coffee house and the trader gives you a free latte; or pick up a cash-back voucher for introducing three friends to your favourite pizza restaurant. Won’t work here? Don’t be so sure – in cash-strapped times, small businesses are looking very hard for innovative ways to bring in new customers. Crowley is admirable for not taking himself too seriously, exposing some of the more bizarre entries in Foursquare such as the offer of a 15% discount on medical marijuana in Beverly Hills for the mayor of the store. However, with Tim O’Reilly as an investor and a rumoured $80m stock market valuation this is no joke.
OpenStreetMap around Port au Price interpreting and geotagging twitter feeds of information about people trapped under the rubble in the days immediately following the quake.
Technology snippets The security software specialists, Quova, were exhibiting for the first time. Their stock in trade is fraud prevention using a database of the geographical locations of IP addresses to help identify suspect transactions. It is their software that stops you using the BBC iPlayer to download programmes when you are abroad before they have been screened there! Quova can see opportunities for using their services in hyperlocal geo-targeted marketing and decreasing transaction abandonment on the web by recognising the users location and automatically presenting information in the correct language/currency. My favourite piece of new technology was the AR Drone from hands-free wireless car kit designer, Parrot technology, based in Paris. This is an autonomous lightweight “helicopter” less than one metre square, powered by four small but powerful rotors and with video cameras for forward and downward vision. The drone is controlled by the accelerometer in an iPhone and supports live streaming from the video cameras using wifi. Designed for the consumer market, it provides the user with an augmented reality experience of flying (indoors or out) and currently supports some basic multi-player shootem-up games. Look at the Utube then let your imagination take over! These guys know they are onto something big – they disappeared almost immediately they walked off stage, no chance to examine the device or ask them about whether they’ve sold out yet to Sony. One to watch. Monetisation There were several sessions on how to make money from the geoweb but few new ideas. The “freemium” model, by which users access basic facilities for free and then pay to upgrade to premium services, still seems a popular business model although there were few examples of serious money being made in this way. There was talk of buy outs at levels that would allow the twentysomething founders to retire to the Bahamas. Selling services to customise these applications seems the obvious step. Perhaps as one CEO confidentially put it – ‘the greybeards were actually the ones making money out of this stuff by plagiarising the best ideas and integrate them into their own enterprise solutions’.
Disaster support Several presentations addressed the
Summing it up There were fewer completely
successful use of geoweb technology to help the Haitian earthquake response. The deployment and enhancement of the Ushahidi open source software product (see http://haiti.ushahidi.com/ for more details), created originally in Kenya to track the troubles around the time of the disputed election, was impressive. As was the coordination of 1000 volunteers enhancing
stunning new ideas than in previous years but still plenty to think about. Also, there were some signs that perhaps the geoweb is maturing – the “separateness” of this community from the rest of the geospatial world seemed less pronounced. Making a profit in geoweb world still seems elusive except for the market leaders, Google and Apple.
joining the geography jigsaw
Above: AR Drone – the latest in autonomous airborne vehicles. Photo courtesy of James Duncan Davidson and O'Reilly Media.
About the author Andy Coote writes for GiSPro and is chief executive of ConsultingWhere Ltd, an independent IT consultancy specialising in research, strategic and technical consultancy to the geospatial industry. You can contact him at www.consultingwhere. com or on twitter@acoote.
www.gisprofessional.co.uk
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their work combining street level capture of urban areas with oblique and vertical areal imagery to provide large scale photo-realistic 3D “platform” technology. Microsoft prefers to use the term platform rather than application to describe Bing maps, seeing it as a way to “bind services together”. They also say “mash-in” to distinguish what can be done by adding content and applications to their platform, from having to integrate data in mash-ups using the developer’s own infrastructure. Blaise demonstrated some truly impressive visualisations and spoke about how they are expanding their capture programme using not only camera equipped cars but also “human-mountable rigs” to enable coverage to be extended inside buildings. The video of his talk is well worth watching on UTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= giOa6i9cXFI& feature=related
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