The Power of Proximity – location technologies for disruptive business applications PART I

Most recently a new breed of social services have caught our imagination. They go by the name of location-aware social utilities (LASU) or location based social networks.
Location is a critical asset, a fundamental dimension any marketer should think about when addressing its core audiences.
The reason it matters for any company/brand trying to get their messages to their core audience is simple: location starts with the consumer. I’ll refer to it as ‘proximity’ and goes beyond the most puristic definition of ‘being close in space’.

The reason I want to talk about it is that we have evidence of approaching  the tipping point of the innovation curve – in this field.

We all live in a flux of social interactions, communication streams have multipied with the advent of multi-media and doubled down in scope with the internet and the web.

The array of digital devices available to us has made it incredibly easy to access information, consume & create media, produce knowledge and (perhaps most notably) helped us share. ‘Social networks’ have only ‘recently’ hit main stream but really they have been around from the pre-history of the Internet.
What social networks (or social utilities) have done is to augment the ability of each one of us to communicate – in a synchronous and asynchronous way – to one or many of our families/ friends/ co-workers and business partners.

We all have multiple accounts to linkedin, facebook, myspace, yahoo groups, friendster, bebo (depending on latitude and demo) because we all find them helpful tools (utilities) to connect with our tribes.

Many of them – our tribes – are dispersed throughout the globe, many of them are just across the street or in the same office as us. In one powerful & elegant way web enabled social utilities have given us the gift of portability of our tribes. Wherever we are, however we feel, we can check in our facebook or flickr account and feel more connected to our community/ies.

Posting photos of the grand canyon or the big wall of china on flickr whilst traveling and getting almost-simultaneous responses from people that are sitting 2,000 miles away from you isn’t bad. It can’t be bad. It’s like sending a real-time postcard and get immediate feedback from the people you care. That’s what I call the Power of Proximity.

If this argument doesn’t convince you, look no further than a seminal example of what proximity means. Twitter is a relatively young, early stage social utility. Throughout 2008 it has showed some pearls of its – yet unrealized – potential. Only popular amongst the digerati at first, it moved quickly to the world of celebrities – the latter probably signing the shift, the tipping point from utility of an elite to a mass utility.
Twitter creates Proximity by means of regular/short updates about what you are doing now. Social Proximity is real because it’s about sharing and connectedness.

Twitter was used as the first means of social news dissemination of the Hurricane Katrina aftermath, witnessing Obama’s run for president and reporting the almost real-time landing of a plane in the Hudson river in NY – bringing people together, making them feel nearer to where events were unfolding.
Although lacking spatial attributes (vicinity), this type of proximity is very powerful. It’s the glue to communities and social interactions on the web. And it isn’t surprising that to-date – some 20 some years after the inception of the commercial web – nobody has really done anything to add the dimension of ‘vicinity’ until very recently (Yelp, Qype, LocalGroups for example started walking in the right direction).

The web has broken down the spatial boundaries of commerce, communication and interaction by providing an effective and efficient platform for carrying out those activities regardless of your geographies.
The first law of geography (by Waldo Tobler) goes : “Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.”. Apart from its interconnection with the law of demand (in that interactions between places are inversely proportional to the cost of travel between them, which is much like the probability of purchasing a good is inversely proportional to the cost), the first law of geography is relevant on the web because in many ways it serves as an amplifier to social proximity.
What if we start adding vicinity to social proximity – what if you could know that on your way to the local veg market in an urban area (like London) you could look no further than your pocket to find that your good friend David is also shopping nearby and you could invite him for a quick bite? What if as you walk across the city a stream of events, news, stories would appear on your mobile device telling you what’s relevant that has happened nearby, right there where you walk.
Sure this risks to resonate like 1984  and probably will start ringing some bells and privacy concerns but provided that you – the consumer – decide at any time how and when to make your geo-location  available to your friends & communities this should help replace  “fear” with “empowerment”.

You line up vicinity + social proximity + immediacy into an elegant blend – you produce something that is both extremely powerful and terribly exciting.
When I started researching in this area I was firstly amazed at the fact that neither google nor yahoo or most notably facebook & twitter had not added a feature that would expose spatial proximity (vicinity).
And until recently, technological barriers (i.e. low penetration of GPS enabled phone + high cost of internet data packages) had made it difficult to justify any heavy investment in this area.

This has started to change. Jumpstarting its ‘open strategy’ for mobile devices Yahoo has launched a number of initiatives aimed at leveraging the opportunity of proximity.  Engineers behind Fire Eagle realized that by creating a standard for localization services not only Yahoo can layer in its  applications across its roster of content and communication properties but also ignite  innovation allowing a multitude of outside developers to build apps onto the platform that would leverage location-based services.

Within a year Silicon Valley, NYC and Europe prime innovation scenes have given birth to Brightkyte, Loopt, Aka-Aki, Mobnotes, Rummble, Geo-Twitter, Firefone etc…and google launched ‘latitude’.

I will cover some of these services in my next post.

to be continued…

New Information Revolution: Microsoft’s Vision

Below is Ballmer’s note to Microsoft’s customers highlighting Microsoft’s “Software Services Plus” new paradigm in the era of the Cloud.

From: Steve Ballmer
Sent: Tuesday, October 28, 2008 2:37 PM
To:
Subject: A Platform for the Next Technology Revolution

During the past decade, a dramatic transformation in the world of information technology has been taking shape. It’s a transformation that will change the way we experience the world and share our experiences with others. It’s a transformation in which the barriers between technologies will fall away so we can connect to people and information no matter where we are. It’s a transformation where new innovations will shorten the path from inspiration to accomplishment.

Many of the components of this transformation are already in place. Some have received a great deal of attention. “Cloud computing” that connects people to vast amounts of storage and computing power in massive datacenters is one example. Social networking sites that have changed the way people connect with family and friends is another.

Other components are so much a part of the inevitable march of progress that we take them for granted as soon as we start to use them: cell phones that double as digital cameras, large flat-screen PC monitors and HD TV screens, and hands-free digital car entertainment and navigation systems, to name just a few.

What’s missing is the ability to connect these components in a seamless continuum of information, communication, and computing that isn’t bounded by device or location. Today, some things that our intuition says should be simple still remain difficult, if not impossible. Why can’t we easily access the documents we create at work on our home PCs? Why isn’t all of the information that customers share with us available instantly in a single application? Why can’t we create calendars that automatically merge our schedules at work and home?

This week at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles, we shared news with software developers about a new set of platform technologies that will help transcend these limits. Because you are a subscriber to Executive Emails from Microsoft, I wanted to share my thoughts about the impact that these technologies will have as developers begin to use them to create a new generation of experiences that extend uninterrupted from the desktop to the mobile phone, media player, car, and beyond-to places where we never thought information and communications would be available to us.

A NEW PLATFORM FOR CLOUD COMPUTING

At PDC, we announced the availability of an early preview release of a new technology called Windows Azure. Windows Azure will enable developers to build applications that extend from the cloud to the enterprise datacenter and span the PC, the Web, and the mobile phone. For the first time, we shared pre-beta code for Windows 7 and for Windows Server 2008 R2. Windows 7, which is the next version of the Windows desktop operating system, will take advantage of software and hardware advances to help eliminate the boundaries between information, people, and devices.

We also previewed Office Web applications, which are light-weight versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote that are designed to be accessed through a browser. Office Web applications will be part of the next version of Office and will enable people to view, edit, and share information and collaborate on documents on the desktop, the phone, and in a Web browser in a way that is consistent and familiar.

Windows Azure is part of the Azure Services Platform, a comprehensive set of storage, computing, and networking infrastructure services that reside in Microsoft’s network of datacenters. Using the Azure Services Platform, developers will be able to build applications that run in the cloud and extend existing applications to take advantage of cloud-based capabilities. The Azure Services Platform provides the foundation for business and consumer applications that deliver a consistent way for people to store and share information easily and securely in the cloud, and access it on any device from any location.

Windows Azure is not software that companies will run on their own servers. It’s something new: a service that runs in Microsoft’s growing network of datacenters and provides the platform that helps companies respond to the realities of today’s business environment, and tomorrow’s. Windows Azure technologies are already finding their way into products such as Windows Server 2008 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager, enabling organizations and Microsoft partners to create their own cloud infrastructure.

Windows Azure will enable organizations to respond to realities such as the need to use the Web to provide customers with comprehensive information and to interact with an audience that has the potential to expand exponentially overnight; to integrate operations with partners-and sometimes even competitors-to meet customer needs; to add new capabilities quickly to respond to new opportunities; and to enable employees to work efficiently and effectively no matter where they are. These realities apply not just to businesses, but to organizations of all kinds: schools, governments, community groups, and more.

Traditional approaches to building technology infrastructure and delivering computing capabilities make it difficult and expensive to adjust to these realities. You need systems with enough capacity to meet the highest possible demand-capacity that includes servers and buildings to house them, the power to run them, and the people to manage them. You have to spread that capacity across locations so there’s a backup if one part fails. You have to solve issues like access for different types of users and compliance with tax regulations in all countries where your customers reside.

Designed specifically to meet the global scale that today’s organizations require, the Azure Services Platform will provide fundamentally new ways to deploy services and capabilities. It gives businesses the option to take advantage of the capacity available in the cloud as it is needed, reducing the need to make large upfront investments in infrastructure simply to be ready when demand spikes. It will enable developers to create applications that run in the cloud and provide the features, information, and interactivity that employees, partners, and customers expect-no matter how many of them there are, where they are in the world, or what device they have at hand.

SOFTWARE PLUS SERVICES AND THE POWER OF CHOICE

The Azure Services Platform reflects our belief that choice is critical for developers, companies, and consumers. It is also based on our belief that the key to delivering value today and in the future lies in combining the best aspects of software running on PCs, servers, and devices with the best aspects of services running on the Web-an approach we call “software plus services.”

Our software plus services approach lets people take full advantage of the incredible power of today’s devices. While there are undeniable benefits to being able to tap into the wealth of information and services that can be accessed over the Web through a browser, the interactive experiences that people expect on their PC, mobile phone, and media player depend on sophisticated software running on powerful processors.

The richness of these experiences will only increase as multicore processors expand the computing capabilities of our devices and new programming languages open the door to a new generation of applications that let us use more natural ways to interact with digital technology such as voice, touch, and gestures.

Software plus services also recognizes that for most companies, the ideal way to build IT infrastructure is to find the right balance of applications that are run and managed within the organization and applications that are run and managed in the cloud.

This balance varies by company. A financial services company may choose to maintain customer records within its own datacenter to provide the extra layers of protection that it feels are needed to safeguard the privacy of personal information. It may outsource IT systems that provide basic capabilities such as email.

This balance will change over time within an organization, as well. A company may run its own online transaction system most of the year, but outsource for added capacity to meet extra demand during the holiday season. With software plus services, an organization can move applications back and forth between its own servers and the cloud quickly and smoothly.

Today, companies around the world are implementing Microsoft technologies to take advantage of the best combination of on-premise software and cloud-based services. Using Microsoft Online Services, businesses including Coca-Cola Enterprises, Blockbuster, and Energizer access and manage Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications Server, and Live Meeting over the Web through a single, secure infrastructure. In addition, 1 million people rely on Office Live Workspace for sharing and collaborating with friends, family, and colleagues.

EXPANDING THE DEFINITION OF PERSONAL COMPUTING

Ultimately, the reason to create a cloud services platform is to continue to enhance the value that computing delivers, whether it’s by improving productivity, making it easier to communicate with colleagues, or simplifying the way we access information and respond to changing business conditions.

In the world of software plus services and cloud computing, this means extending the definition of personal computing beyond the PC to include the Web and an ever-growing array of devices. Our goal is to make the combination of PCs, mobile devices, and the Web something that is significantly than more the sum of its parts.

The starting point is to recognize the unique value of each part. The value of the PC lies in its computing power, its storage capacity, and its ability to help us be more productive and create and consume rich and complex documents and content.

For the Web, it’s the ability to bring together people, information, and services so we can connect, communicate, share, and transact with anyone, anywhere, at any time.

With the mobile phone and other devices, it’s the ability to take action spontaneously-to make a call, take a picture, or send a text message in the flow of our activities.

Through Live Mesh-a service from Microsoft that we announced earlier this year and about which we shared new information week-we’re beginning to bridge the PC, phone, and Web and create this next generation of connected experiences. Built on the Azure Services Platform, Live Mesh enables you to use programs and information stored on your work computer from your home PC, and vice versa. With Live Mesh, you can share folders and ensure that the information is automatically synchronized across your devices.

Live Mesh hints at how our lives will be transformed as the barriers between devices disappear and the option to connect instantly to people, devices, programs, and information becomes a reality.

We’re not quite there yet. Today, the Azure Services Platform is available only as a limited technology preview release. But as developers begin to combine the capabilities of this new platform with the amazing ongoing hardware and software innovations that we are seeing from companies across the industry, it will bring us significantly closer to the time when information, communication, and computing flows along with us seamlessly as we move through our day-to-day activities.

You can learn more about these technologies and the progress we are making by visiting the Microsoft Software + Services Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/softwareplusservices/.

I look forward to sharing more information with you about these new technologies in the near future.

Steve Ballmer

Yahoo goes Open – Y!OS

Yahoo announced yesterday that its OS (Open Strategy) is finally out in the wild – developers can tap into yahoo’s apis and hosted development environment to leverage yahoo’s platform of data and develop apps for the 500 M + consumers that are on yahoo in any given month.

Thought Leadership

When I first thought of writing this post I realized (and I was probably right) that writing about thought leadership was way out of my league.

Professors and social scientists have spent many words and written numerous papers.

here is the question – what is thought leadership everyone?

Android G phone – T Mobile unveiled

Gphone

T-Mobile and Google will hold a press release to unveil the fist Android based phone (photo capture from timo news below) in a SFO bar today. Here is the tv ad

According to Venture Beat the phone will also run an amazon app that will make possible to download music from the amazonmp3 store – an itune competitor – interesting to see what comes out of it.

Y! OS

The Y Team launched the Y! OS at the Open Hack 2008 event last week – here is the link to the Yahoo Developer Network featuring Y!OS

When Ari (Balog) CTO of Yahoo, first talked about the Y!OS (short for Yahoo Open Strategy) back in Q2 there were more than a few people looking at it with deep skepticism (to say the least).

It was the days of the microsoft bid and that seemed the only ting to make the headlines.

while all of that was going on, it wasn’t easy for the the Yahoo team. It hasn’t been easy for the past 2 years.

While I write this I think there is still a great deal of skepticism out there but also a growing number of fellow developers, publishers and users that are starting to feel sympathetic to Yahoo’s cause and most importantly starting to see the dormant/hidden potential in Y’s communication and content management platforms attracting a community of 500 M consumers every month.

And let’s be clear, Yahoo is a company and as a company thrives to make profit and foster long term sustainability. However what every Yahoo could tell you is that this company (and the people that make it a living being) is trying its hardest to make an impact to consumers lives in a positive and constructive way – Yahoo means good.

times of change are often (or always) disruptive, but it’s in disruptive times that innovation pops up

Mashable covers the YOS

Disclosure – I am a Yahoo full time employee and shareholder

One more reason to Yahoo

Yahoo Front Page

Yahoo just started bucket testing the new and improved home page, great improvement!

kudos Yahoo!

a few links from the blogoshere:

reuters,   yahoo anecdotal,   allthingsD and techcrunch

Also bumped into a fun video interview of Y! execs talking about openness (at allthingD) .

Chrome

A few days ago google launched Chrome.

this very event has sparkled a ton of attention from all over the blogosphere and beyond.

As I let my genuine curiosity settle in I started pondering about the implications of this not only to Microsoft, Yahoo! and the 100s of other internet companies out there but most importantly to the web, the ecosystem and us consumers.

Google has a vested interest in moving apps, audiences and developers to leveraging open source chrome.

Chrome might be dubbed a defensive move but if G convince enough of their very loyal customer base to start using their browser in the next 1-2 year time frame they’ll have enough audience to convince apps providers to cater for chrome and the audience that comes with it.

I have only used chrome for a day at home and I can already see how folks would easily adjust their habits to take advantage of their omnibox and start page. 1) I have installed yahoo as my default search engine so I now can use either the chrome starting page (with most recent history, including yahoo.com) or just type what I am looking for in their Omnibox – no need to have a search box if you can just type in the main browser window 2) If my mail is there in the browser I will use it – use ymail or whatever best fits but I don’t need to open another piece of software 3) If I can store my docs on the cloud and have the browser link to that I don’t need to have them on my machine (I still do given that I don’t have a broadband connection key but if I did I wouldn’t store them on my machine) 4) If I can access my social graph from the browser (desktop or mobile) I will do just that – I don’t need to store my contact anywhere but the cloud and find them anytime, anywhere 5) Google’s Brand is at the very top of the curve, consumer will trust it and install chrome just because their “friends will tell them to”.

Bottom line: Yahoo/MSFT or Google  want to all be the *starting point* of the consumer journey because that’s how they can all add value to the consumer and to the advertising ecosystem.

All of them needs to kick ass in either/or 1) turning themselves into the OS of the web (desktop and mobile) 2) developing apps & services that are relevant to users regardless of the browser and OSs.

Even if chrome does not become the OS of the web and even if a web OS doesn’t materialize in this form there are clearly wins to the consumer from using open source code.

there are a few folks that have talked about this:

Dana Blankenhorne at ZDNet

Stephen Shankland at CNET

…to be continued

wow I love information architecture – so …

wow I love information architecture – so broad and yet so elegant. It ties to the way humans interpret information in context, engage in conversations & produce knowledge

update: this is the transcript of the i …

update: this is the transcript of the interview with Tyler Bell for the telematics detroit 2009

“There has been a lot of recent interest in Yahoo! Geo Technologies. Could you tell me more about the product your team has been working on?

The Yahoo! Geo Technologies group wants to connect our users with the world around them.  Yahoo! is an information and technology company – we collect and create content and get it into the hands of our users in the most relevant and useful way possible. Geography plays a big part in how we do that; we are always looking at how we can better join the Web world and the real world using geo technologies.

Last May, we released Yahoo! GeoPlanet, which helps bridge the gap between the real and virtual worlds by providing an open, permanent, and intelligent infrastructure for geo-referencing data on the Internet. You can learn more at http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/.

In the fall, we introduced Fire Eagle, which acts as a location broker that allows users to take their location to the Web. Users have complete control over their data with Fire Eagle: they choose which third party applications to share their location with, and at what resolution or granularity they wish to expose it – as broad as country or state, to as detailed as a long/lat co-ordinate, and everything in between. More information is at http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/.

The bottom line is that location-aware systems provide a more topical, more relevant user experience. When users interact with the Internet and, more specifically, with Yahoo!, we aim to provide them with the most geo-relevant information available.

How will the current economic climate impact the area of geo technologies?

In this economy, ad spends and budgets are decreasing, making the importance of getting the right products to the right people even more critical. Geo-relevance and geo-targeting are central to this effort, and we are looking at ways we can increase the efficacy of the geographic technologies so advertisers can be more successful, and users are not presented irrelevant offerings.

Why is it so crucial to geo-connect information on the Internet? How does this enrich the user experience?

Newspapers have been the medium of choice to convey information such as local news, and to display ads with geographic relevance – local ads for local services. The newspaper’s traditional success in this domain is based on the geography implicit in their distribution network: they know where their readers are, and they deliver local news and service local ads based on that region.  The location of the users and the content is known, and monetised.

The Internet, in contrast, is largely ageographic – it has no implicit location – so the sector has attempted to address this by superimposing a layer of geographic topologies. This started with technologies like IP-based location, but now includes GPS, cell tower, and wi-fi-based ‘beacon’ technologies, content and language detection, etc. All of these technologies are being exploited to one purpose: make the Internet more location aware.

We witnessed the launch of Yahoo! GeoPlanet last year. How has this service been received?

Yahoo! GeoPlanet is very well received. It is a foundation service: we have a lot to do in the Geo Technologies group, and GeoPlanet is required to make these happen.

The platform uses something called Where on Earth ID (WOEID), a numerical tag that is associated uniquely with a given location; it can be used to obtain geographic co-ordinates but also spatial relationships (e.g., a city is inside a country, has a postal code, is next to another city). This makes it easier for Internet applications and services to identify locales that have different vocabulary and colloquialisms associated with them – think the Big Apple, NYC, New York Cit: all of these spatial monikers relate to the same conceptual geographic entity, identified by a single WOEID.

Yahoo!’s Fire Eagle service was used by Dash navigation last year. What plans do you have in regards to the telematics space?

Fire Eagle is a great example of the seriousness with which Yahoo! addresses user location, and how we view and respect the need for openness, transparency, and privacy on this subject. The whole idea behind Fire Eagle is sharing your location: getting it off an insular application, device, carrier, or network, getting it back under your control (it is, after all, your location, not theirs), and dictating how you’d like to share your location with other services.    As a platform, Fire Eagle lets developers easily create location-enhanced applications – maps, driving directions, local weather, traffic, nearby friends, exchange rates, time zones, local radio, public holidays – that consume the user’s location from a variety of sources. The benefit for users is that they can update their location just once – say, using a mobile device – and this single update perpetuates to other user-authorised applications, at user-controlled granularities – including Outside.in Radar, Skout, Brightkite, Loki and many more.

Dash itself is a two-way, Internet-connected GPS navigation system offering an innovative solution to sensor-based traffic monitoring.  Fire Eagle allowed the location detected by the Dash device to be employed by other applications.

Going forward, Fire Eagle will continue to take a prominent role in how Yahoo! engages with location-aware applications and infrastructures off the Yahoo! network. This includes any application that wants to share user location – not just telematics devices in the traditional sense.

Is it possible to geotag all the content available online? How will your group go about making geotagged information available to mobile users?

We don’t want to geotag all of it, just the significant proportion that is about a place or specific to a place, e.g. a pizza parlour in Chicago or a local news item. There are several ways to derive location information. First, a structured address – where a location, such as a store or restaurant, is. This is geocoding plain-and-simple, but doesn’t necessarily disseminate location information to the relevant audience, or accommodate content that is not address-based.

We’re also seeing a lot of explicit geo markups – mainly microformats in the body of the content, or explicit geotagging in the content header. We always like it when people geotag their data, but can’t make the Internet location-aware by relying on users to change their behaviour, so the next frontier is geoparsing and geoenrichment. These are all technologies that we are working with, and developing, in the Geo Technologies group at Yahoo!

One of the key topics at Telematics Detroit 2009 is map updates. How do Yahoo!’s methods of map updates compare to other players in the market, i.e. TomTom, Nokia etc?

Yahoo! uses traditional vendors for map data, just like the bulk of players on the market.  When we learn about a new map entity – such as a roundabout or cul-de-sac – we provide this back to the vendor so that everyone can benefit.  This is a long round-trip, however.

User contributions to maps are important, and there are many organisations, such as OpenStreetMap and CloudMade that do this very well.

We are not looking to simply duplicate a service that is already available. Yahoo! excels at geoinfomatics – how we use place to inform data and make it geographically relevant.

We want to capture the names of the world’s places as they are called by the world’s people: what are the colloquial terms in common use that aren’t in the atlas or formal gazeteer? What do the local residents call their area?

Our concern here is really named places and how they relate to each other.

Could you give our audience a brief teaser about your session at the Telematics Detroit Conference? What will the attendees learn from your session?

My session is called ‘Geographically Informing the Online Experience’. I will be talking further about what I’ve been discussing here today, highlighting new technologies that Yahoo! Geo Technologies will be releasing prior to the conference, talking about all of our offerings more holistically and how they work together to the benefit of developers and users across the Internet.

To find out more about Tyler’s session at Telematics Detroit 2009, visit http://www.telematicsupdate.com/detroit/conference_index.shtml and download the full event brochure.

Dr Tyler Bell leads the Yahoo! Geo Technologies product team that develops user location, mapping, and geo-informatic technologies at Yahoo!  He has spent fifteen years working with the geographic technologies that enrich the Internet and fuel its mobile potential.  He is currently developing technologies that geo-enrich the Internet, make the mobile experience entirely location-aware, and drive the openness and accessibility of geographic data and services.”

Finding time to listen to yourself

More and more I am finding myself twittering rather than jotting down a long blog post.

The more I think about it the more I realize why this happens. I don’t have time. I don’t have time to get all my thoughts out of my head, get them together and stick them onto a piece of html. Twitter works for a number of reasons of which I’ll indicate two:

(1) people need to visualize their thoughts

(2) they need to share them

This brings the concept of *instant web* to life – as a means of immediate (and perhaps more spontanous) communication.