The Location-based revolution is coming according to GigaOm

Om Malik, founder and senior writer of GigaOm, has a nice perspective on why the commoditization of GPS and the associated emergence of Location-Based services is poised to change the market. Here's the interesting excerpt:

But lately I’ve been feeling like I may have been too conservative with my outlook for the location-based services revolution.
The main reason is the ubiquitousness of mobile phones; the sheer number of them that get shipped each year guarantees LBS a huge audience. Of course, in order for LBS to be on mobile phones, we need applications, which is where I believe the iPhone plays a vital role. Its large screen and built-in GPS (and now its 3G speeds) enable and encourage truly interesting LBS applications.

I think the introduction of an embedded GPS chip within the iPhone is what the LBS industry needs to move itself forward. Sure, we had a number of different cell phones in the past with embedded GPS chips. And this is the core of the problem: they were different cell phones with very different characteristics. So why is the iPhone different? It relies mostly with developers and their ability to create truly rich mobile applications. No more of those crappy Java-based apps. With that richness, comes very immersive applications.

If you add into the mix location-based services, then you got the perfect recipe for the best location-based device. And this was echoed by the Loopt CEO at the WWDC keynote: "This is the best version of Loopt we've ever made, and by far the best device we've had the opportunity to work with. We've developed for every mobile platform out there, this one is the best and the most powerful" [WWDC Keynote @ 0:28:32]

Although this comment was made in the context of the WWDC, so you should remove some adjectives, I'm convinced that this platform will push forward LBS services further than anything that has been attempted so far.

Happy location reporting - Martin

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The 3G iPhone - My predictions for the WWDC keynote

The Apple World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) will be held next week starting with the keynote address by Steve Jobs on Monday June 9th @ 10:00 am PDT.

It is widely expected that Steve will announce a new 3G iPhone that will support the HSDPA standard for higher data exchange throughput.

There has been a huge number of predictions within the industry about what this phone will do and not do. So I decided to jump in the game and provide a list of my own :

Form Factor

The iPhone form factor will be reduced, current rumors is that it will be 22% thinner. Apple always strive for minimizing the form factor of new devices (new MacBook Pro, MacBook Air). I'm not sure if it will be 22% thinner but it will be thinner for sure. So this one is strong on the list.

Probability: 9/10

GPS

With recent updates to the Google Maps application and the strong push by Apple for location-based services, it is almost certain this new iPhone will have an embedded GPS chip. This will further acknowledge the recent market push for Location-based services (Loopt, BrightKite, FireEagle) and will help propagate them to higher levels of acceptance.

This one is really a no-brainer. If it is not included, the market will not be happy.

Probability: 10/10

On a side note: Expect a huge announcement storm of iPhone-specific LBS at the WWDC conference.

Camera

The current iPhone camera is good. According to sources, the new phone will be powered by the Broadcom chip which can easily handle a 5 Megapixel camera. I expect Apple will go all out on this and provide a 5Mpx camera to be on par with the Nokia N95.

Probability: 7/10

Since the 3G iPhone can handle higher data throughputs, video conference calls are now possible. To properly support this, a front side camera is needed (like in the Nokia N95). Will Apple follow this trend, I'm really not sure here because it really changes the design of the phone.

Probability: 4/10

Memory Size

We have seen the introduction of the 32Gb iPod Touch recently. So I expect Apple to announce the availability of a 32Gb 3G iPhone along with the current 16Gb version we also have today.

Probability: 8/10

Versions

From my understanding, and the reading I've been doing, it looks like Apple will be providing a white colored iPhone. However I still think the more upscale Black version will still be provided. In the same line as the MacBook line (where black is the upscale line), the white version will be used in subsidized markets and will basically be a 3G iPhone but with less memory and not front-side camera.

The Black version will be a fully featured 3G version with the front side camera.
Apple really needs to offer more than one version to reduce supply chain issues it has been experimenting over the past few months.

Probability: 6/10

In the end

Consumers are again going to rush to get this new device. I will, for sure, update mine as well. With the iPhone officially coming to Canada, thanks to the Rogers partnership, and other new countries, Apple is really disrupting the mobile market.

I really applaud them for their efforts.

We will see how I score on Monday. Feel free to provide your own predictions or comment on mine in the comments.

Happy location reporting - Martin

Are Location-based services too early ?

Today while reading blog news with Google Reader, I hit the report from TechCrunch about the shutdown of another location-based service: Meetro.



Here's the functional description of Meetro for the post in TechCrunch:

To those of you not familiar with Meetro, we were one of the first location-based social networks. We figured out where you were physically and then we would tell you else was around you in real-time. You would then be able to instant message with them, check out their profiles, and hopefully meet up. Other functionality included telling you about restaurants close by, media created nearby, and various local information that pertained to your location. We also supported all your various instant messaging protocols (AIM, MSN, Yahoo) and a slew of other social features.

And the telling quote is: "Even with a robust product we simply couldn’t capture enough market share". This echoes by own words in the interview I gave Austin Hill on his blog.

Seems the physical location problem is an interesting problem but very difficult to get right. And I think it has to do with the dilution of the network. When you launch a location-based service (LBS) on the internet, it is accessible world-wide. You have users (aka internet friends) from every part of the globe.

However a LBS real value is proximity of your network, so the service can detect and properly tell you who's nearby. When you user base is widely located, these functions, although very interesting on paper, do not work. Thus the value of your service is widely diminished and so is it's stickiness.

Dodgeball tried it and they failed, Kakiloc (us) tried it and we failed and now Meetro is joining the bench.

Brightkite is having a go a it right now. However looking at my friends statuses, only a few of them are actively using it. The others (early adopters) came, look and went away. I argue that most of the false-traction that Brightkite is having now is from those early adopters but the stickiness is not there yet. They have real nice interfaces to the service and a very cool iPhone web application as well. Still I'm not convinced on the success until they implement the key elements.

If you are building another location-based service, you should learn from these post-mortem experiences and you should really leverage other services that can help you move forward. The FireEagle service is one of them.

As for me, I'm currently parked on the Falkland Islands within BrightKite until they send me a message in a bottle that they fully support FireEagle.

Happy location reporting - Martin

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Location is everywhere

A very nice post by Chris Messina about the increase in awareness and popularity of location and location-based services applied to web and iPhone applications.

Here's an excerpt:

... I think we’re on the brink of seeing the kind of the ubiquity (in the consumer space) that we need in order to start taking the availability of location information for granted, and, that, like standards-compliant browsers, it could (or should) really inform the way that we build out the social fabric of web applications from thence forward.

I think this is a very good article but Chris forgot to mention FireEagle which is starting to provide some of the layers we need to truly built innovative location-based applications.

Happy location reporting - Martin

Reportage - Checkpoint

The development of the native iPhone application "Reportage" is progressing slowly. The transition from Ruby to Objective-C takes a little time to get used to.

But I really like the development environment provided by Apple (XCode / Interface Builder) and especially the stability of the 4th release of the SDK.

Here's a screenshot of the Reportage icon on the iPhone Home page. I'll continue posting progress on the development of "Reportage". Stay tuned.



Happy location reporting - Martin

Reportage - The Splash Screen

Here's the splash screen for Reportage.



But according to the iPhone User Interface Guidelines, application should not have a splash screen, so this is going into the credits section then.

Coming soon for your iPhone
Happy location reporting - Martin

Mobile Location-Based services: The Ins and Outs of the latest crop

I've noticed that there is a lot of activity around Mobile Location-based services lately. My Google reader starred items is showing a higher number of articles on that subject that I need to research.

Let's review some of the early announcements and provide some insights starting with the new Apple iPhone Firmware 1.1.3 announced at MacWorld in early January.

Apple iPhone/iPod Touch firmware 1.1.3

This announcement has been covered in numerous blogs and brings the "MyLocation" feature of Google Maps to the iPhone which I have covered earlier. However Apple has added the Wifi-sensing technology from SkyHook Wireless to the mix. This is very interesting as this technology is also available in the latest firmware upgrade for the iPod Touch as well. SkyHook Wireless is really the leading provider of Wifi-sensing positioning technology today. The inclusion of this technology within the new firmware is also a huge setback for it's competitor: Navizon. I've been following both companies for a long time now and I'm now surprised to see SkyHook being selected as the chosen winner by Apple.

SkyHook was financed early on by Intel Capital and is based on derivative work from the PlaceLab projet originated at Intel Labs. Given Apple very close relationship with Intel, it was natural fit that they would be selected. Navizon is surely not gaining any strengths with this announcement and will likely go underwater unless they can strike a deal with a competing company. Which one ? I'm still searching.

I've tried to use the Navizon software on my iPhone and the experience was really painful. The web site would not register me correctly and the software failed every time.

SkyHook: in, Navizon: out

Loopt partnership with CBS Mobile

On February 6th, GigaOM and a number of bloggers announced that Loopt has signed a partnership with CBS Mobile to help them push location-based ads to their customers. CBS will be using Loopt GPS technology to enable location-specific ads to be overlaid of top of web sites browsed by CBS mobile customers. I'm not really sure what is the added value of Loopt in this equation. Loopt, which was covered earlier as well, started out as a mobile personal-locator service and is financed by Sequoia Capital. However, there has been some shakeup within Loopt as the executive vice president of corporate development and marketing left the company to become the EIR at Charles River Ventures. Was that a sign of the new orientation for the company? Also given all the VC money going into Mobile Ads company (AdMob is a prime example), it seems that Loopt is moving sideways from it's early direction.

Also, compared to SkyHook or Navizon, Loopt does not have a lot of investments into locating technologies. It mainly relies on the embedded GPS chips within the cellphone or uses the AutoDesk positioning framework to pinpoint the location of the user. And currently, it's offering can only be used by Sprint / Boost Mobile customers. I think this is a too narrow market to actually be successful and something I still argue needs to be addressed. We will see where this is going but I doubt very much that Loopt will be successful in the Location-Based Advertisements (LBA) market.

Loopt: fading

Happy location reporting - Martin

Google Android and LBS Services

Google announced the Android Platform on November 5th and released the first public SDK for it on November 12th. After reading comments and looking at the overall architecture view of the framework, I decided to investigate the android.location API a little more closely.

The API is very similar to the JSR initiative for location-based services: JSR179
However there are a number of very interesting additions that Google decide to provide :

1:  public List android.location.LocationManager.getProviders(Criteria criteria)

Returns a list of LocationProviders that satisfy the given criteria, or null if none do When requesting the LocationProvider, the client application can define a criteria for the type of provider that should be returned. You can specify the power requirement and also the monetary cost associated to the usage of the API

2:  public void android.location.LocationManager.addProximityAlert(double latitude, double longitude, float radius, long expiration, Intent intent)

You can also register an intent (an action of a certain kind) to be executed when the devices "enter" or "leaves" a radius of a specific size from a central location.

The first item is interesting because it would allow you to conserve battery life and, I assume, toggle between (free) GPS positionning and perhaps (not so free) cell-tower triangulation.

The second item is where the interesting stuff can happen.

Imagine an application that knows the location of all your friends and the location of their favorite spots along with the permission associated to all those locations. When you are moving around the mobile application on the device could register some intents (by obtaining specific lat/long information from a dedicated server) to alert you of interesting places but also of nearby friends.

Looking at the Intent API, you could easily display the contact information of that contact in proximity and start an interaction.

This simple functionality is enabling a much higher functional value of client-side for LBS applications.

Instead of receiving basic text messages when friends are in proximity (which we were doing in Kakiloc), you can now be firing specific mobile applications based on a contextual location.

I'm sure Google is seeing this as a big enabler for location-based advertising and other potiential advertising applications. This has a lot of potential for integrating mobile applications with location-based technology.

I'll dig deeper and see what else Android is supplying. I will also look at OpenMoko because their framework also add a very interesting LBS API.

Happy location reporting - Martin

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