Posted on June 28th, 2007 by Brian.
Categories: mobile, hyperlocal.
Be sure to read Harvey Feldspar’s recent geoblog about the impact of location-awareness:
“Hyperlocality is transforming our lives at every scale: bodyware, roomware, streetware, cityware, nationware, and global ware. From nano to astro!”
Posted on May 19th, 2007 by Brian.
Categories: mashups, mobile, social networks.
A mobile social network can recommend events of interest by analyzing information from users with similar profiles. For example:
Miguel, a gay 30 year old New Yorker vacationing in San Francisco, wakes up on Sunday morning wondering what to do. His cell phone beeps with a text message suggesting that he visits Dolores Park later that afternoon.
This suggestion was made because his social network has data that on hot and sunny Sunday afternoons in San Francisco, hundreds of gay men in a social network spend time in Dolores Park.
Let’s deconstruct how the social network arrived at this conclusion:
By collecting data about how and when members use a service, social networks can creatively analyze and find patterns useful to the community. Furthermore, when Miguel arrives at Dolores Park, I would expect the network to facilitate a meeting with other like-minded members nearby.
Update: Related to this, check out this posting describing GyPSii, a social network that tracks users’ GPS location
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?
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.
To summarize, by capturing aggregated user generated content in the form of tags, time, subject context and smell (!), we can infer potentially useful information.