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Smells like collective intelligence
Posted on April 20th, 2007 by Brian.
Categories: mobile, spatial annnotation.
At Mobile Monday earlier this week, Ajit Jaokar focused on UGC (user generated content), what he calls the “holy grail” of mobile web 2.0.
Instead of waiting for carriers to uniformly open up GPS triangulation to consumers through their APIs, he encouraged developers to take advantage of the falling prices of GPS components. They should consider using a pocket bluetooth GPS to interact effectively with their cell-phone hosted location-aware UGC application.
What kind of applications?
- Identify unknown images in a photograph using historic tagged metadata. Ajit describes a related thought experiment on his blog, but the gist of it is that you can search a photo website for previous photo tags at the same location to determine blurry features in your own picture.
- Infer memorable events by looking for data thresholds. This is a bit of a thought experiment as well and certainly unnecessary given the invention of AM radio, but hear me out. I’m not intimately familiar with Flickr’s API, but imagine the following:
- Let’s assume we live in a world where photos are instantaneously uploaded to a photo website from a wireless capable camera.
- You setup a location-sensitive “trigger” to send you an SMS to your cell phone Twitter-style.
- You setup a Flickr “rule” like “Send me a text message when Flickr receives 500 photos in a 10 second interval from AT&T Park (where the San Francisco Giants play baseball) over the next 10 days”
You’ve just subscribed to be the first one to know when Barry Bonds beats Hank Aaron’s home run record! Furthermore, you could subscribe to the feed associated with those pictures.
I believe that this concept is powerful and can be more generalized. I could subscribe to any Flickr photo feed when a certain threshold of pictures taken has been exceeded in a short time interval. Even if we remove that futuristic assumption that photos are immediately beamed to Flickr, the rule is still useful as long as the GPS coordinate and timestamp are preserved upon upload.
- Integrate olfactory devices and GPS (I am half joking here). By mashing up smells and locations, one can broadcast the existence of restaurants, gas leaks, fires, etc. It sure smells like UGC
To summarize, by capturing aggregated user generated content in the form of tags, time, subject context and smell (!), we can infer potentially useful information.
Geohana - location based web services
Posted on April 4th, 2007 by Brian.
Categories: geography, mashups.
At BigTribe, we’ve developed a compelling web service that allows any publisher (bloggers or website owners) to instantly become a destination for services like:
- booking restaurant reservations
- golf tee-times
- hotel rooms
- inviting friends to events
- checking weather conditions
- finding interesting places nearby
Our product is called Geohana, its name inspired by taking Hana, which means “family” in Hawaiian, for a geographic spin. A central vision for Geohana is to give people tools to communicate more effectively and act socially based on their location.
You can play with Geohana right here on this blog! Check out the Geohana widget with the map on the right side of this page.
In addition to adding relevant geographic content on your website, you can also earn revenue with Geohana. By embedding Geohana on your site (with minimal javascript!), BigTribe shares commissions with you whenever a user on your site makes a restaurant reservation or a golf tee-time. We call this Geographic affiliate marketing and you can read about it at the BigTribe website.
It is easy to add a Geohana widget to your blog or website. Follow this link to customize its functionality and the way it looks. You can personalize your widget to:
- Ask the user to enter an address
- Start off with a specific address
- Display a list of your favorite locations
- Choose the location based services made available to your readers (restaurant reservations, golf tee-times, hotel rooms, weather)
If you are technically inclined, Geohana comes with a full API with which you can closely integrate Geohana web services into your page. You can build store locators and display your own location based content (reviews, ads, etc) by catching Geohana Javascript events. Check out some examples in our demo section.
