MetaPlaces 2009: Location is like Paint

September 23, 2009 · Posted in Conferences 

I am currently out at the MetaPlaces conference happening in San Jose where the focus is on how to make some money from all this cool location awareness stuff… or as they put it “how to keep the industry sustainable”.

Oddly enough, that phrase gave me a flashback to attending the first SiRF Location Ecosystem summit a few years ago where Kanwar Chadha was hoping that his would be the first and last location summit… where he was hoping that location awareness , via his GPS chips of course, would become so accepted and integrated into everything, that there would no longer be a need for a stand alone conference to talk about things specific to location awareness…

after all there is no conference for all the new and amazing thing you can do with say water or paint now is there?
Things didn’t really work out as planned there I guess.

There always seems to be a bit of an overhanging question in this area which is the age old question of ‘is location a feature of another thing, or some thing unto itself?’ , and one of yesterday’s panelist had a great answer for: it’s both. The analogy that came to mind for me was paint. Paint is great. Everyone loves it and uses it in a variety of cool and different ways… from a Picasso painting to something to reflect the sunlight off your sundeck. The world is a much more practical , interesting and colorful place because of it. And while certainly there are the folks at Sherwin Williams that are very into everything about paint, the rest of us use it when we need it and otherwise don’t give it much thought.

I am not sure how long it took to get modern paint to the state where it, but I am sure there were a few thousand years of people tinkering with it all along the way.
 
I think it’s safe to say that there are more than a few years ahead for folks to continue to ruminate on all things location. As a number of panelist mentioned today, the tipping point here may very well be ubiquitous, always on location awareness… once that milestone is achieved the experimenting and ruminations will likely turn into a frenzy. For now it seems that folks are trying to attract people to their service because location makes it unique and interesting…

What old Henry Ford’s cars only come in black? Well come on over here young lady, and I can put you in a Model P, basically the same, but PINK!

 

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