Google Latitude
Seems that Google is throwing its hat into the ring with its own location aware social networking app and mobile friend finder called Latitude. The news is being well covered today including a great summary on O’Reilly Radar as well as one right there on the front page of AllthingsD.com today, Silicon Alley Insider and some particularly intersesting insidery point of view from the ex Googler and Dodgeball founder. All of those give some nice details about how it works, so I won’t bother going into much detail here, except to say that Latitude seems to work like other similar services including Loopt, Buddy Beacon, Brightkite, Limbo, etc. Where the application determines your location through one of a variety of ways and then lets you share it with friends, with a number of different controls to monitor with whom and to what detail (if at all) you share your location data.
One reason that it is noteworthy is of course because it’s Google doing it… and while literally dozens of small start ups have tried to build something similar and attract users from scratch with location awarness as a core benefit, Google seems to view location sharing/friend finder as another added feature to go along with Google Maps as sort of an extension to finding things on a map (hey why not find people too?) and GMail/GTalk, as an extended way to communicate with someone you know (hey, why not see them in person as well as emailing them?). I am still trying to wrap my head around that one a bit… should current location be as universally available and shared as ones phone number or street address (ie integration into an Outlook contact field) or is it better suited at this point as another facet of your life to be shared only with a more tight and existing social network?
It does seem odd that there wasn’t a specific tie into the social networking side of Google in Orkut, where Latitude would presumably be most right at home, although news on that may still be around the corner. I am sure we’ll see something before too long from folks like Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace as well.
I’ve see a couple of articles that seem to think that this announcement will mean the death of folks like Loopt and Limbo. I think this may be premature, heck in the short term they may even see a nice boost as overall consumer awareness is lifted and potentially attitudes are changed… hey Google’s mantra is ‘do no evil’, so if they’re letting people track each other, maybe that’s not so bad afterall?
Once LinkedIn or Facebook comes out with something similar, then, I think we’re getting closer to that come to Jesus moment for folks like Loopt, Limbo and Buddy Beacon, who may then be relegated to being a white label solution to power the location element of other existing communities/networks.
If Google is doing it in a big and mass way, and Mossberg’s squad over at the Wall Street Journal are reviewing it and putting it on the front page of allthingsD then I think it must be pretty close to going mainstream. I for one can’t wait to see a higher level of consumer consciousness and adoption, so we can begin to move along with all the other cool stuff that first requires getting this basic concept acceptance under our belts.
City Sense: If U Like Wall Street, U May Also Like Rikers
I came across Sense Networks last summer when they arrived out of stealth mode and think they’re potentially doing some of the most interesting and exciting stuff in LBS… out of the 212 nonetheless (+40.7-74 didn’t seem as catchy)! take that left coasters!
What the heck do they do you may ask? Well rather than just pasting the long description from their about us page, here is the twitter inspired version: they collect, process and analyze (in real time) anonymous data on the whereabouts of a ton of location aware devices (phones, navigation devices and sensors) in order to uncover useful information related to patterns of historical location data.
Sounds cool huh?!
So, you know how when you go to Amazon to buy a book, and you get the’people who bought that book, also bought this book’? Well on one level Sense Networks is trying to do that for everyone as they traverse the streets that is their city or town… folks that go to the Statue of Liberty, might also like the Empire state Building (aka tourists), folks that go to the meat packing district on Friday nights, might also like Alor Cafe in Staten Island for brunch on Sunday (aka the bridge and tunnel crowd)… you get the idea.
Since I don’t live in SF and don’t know the area very well it’s hard to really tell exactly what the iPhone application can and can’t do at this point, it’s being positioned as a nightlife finder… so presumably if you’re looking to head out to a bar and want a better idea of where and when to go, a quick consulation of CitySense can let you know that Cantina on Sutter is hopping right now, but Lion Pub on Divisadero, well not so much… by the way Sense Networks folks, those Google and Yelp points of interest really need to be layered directly over the map, it would make a huge difference in helping users get their bearings!
But more than anything the CitySense nightlife finder application seems to be more about creating a tangible and visible showcase for the Sense Networks business and technology…but thinking about what’s happening behind the scenes and how it could be used in a variety of applications is where it indeed gets quite interesting.
Location Based Social Networking Sites
Claudio Schapsis put together a nice list of all the Location Based Social Networking sites he could find and posted them to his site… its a handy resources to have… there sure are a lot of them these days.
BrandAwhere Business Concept
Ok so I went ahead and threw together some powerpoint slides just to put pen to paper to try to describe the business idea alluded to here a few times before… mobile location aware advertising… business listings as the jumping off point… modeled after Web 0.5 “search” circa 1995, becuase frankly I think we’re not even to mobile ad version 0.5 yet. I have a long winded post to accompany it, look for it shortly. But thoughts, questions, suggestions all encouraged… leave em in comments or email.
NuviFone: NuviNirvana Or NuviNightmare for Garmin?
Garmin had their 3Q quarterly earnings announcement yesterday, and amid all the revenue, earning and profit hullabaloo, they also announced “Game On” for the launch of the Nuvifone in the first half of 2009.
With GPS introduced as a standard feature in the new 3G iPhone in June and the more recent announcement of the availability of the Android G1 phone from T Mobile, there was the feeling among some that maybe Garmin would have a change of heart and take the opportunity to holler “Car!”, grab their ball and make a run for the house and never come back out. But no, the game is still on.
While I was, and still am, quite excited about the prospects of Garmin bringing their NuviFone to market, six months ago I would have been one of the first in line, but now I have since become a happy iPhone owner and now I am not so sure I’ll be making a change anytime soon. And when the subject comes up about Garmin entering into the super competitive smartphone market, what I mostly hear from industry type folks is “what the hell are they thinking?”
So what does Garmin have going for it to think that it can make a good business out of developing and launching a location centric smartphone? Some thoughts:
Destination: NuviNirvana
My guess is that Dr. Min Kao’s thinking went something like this:
-Despite what some people think, creating a great turn by turn navigation experience is as close as it gets to rocket science in the consumer electronics space, and we think we do a pretty good job at manipulating complex technologically to create awesome consumer experiences, so how hard can it be to go do a phone?
- Mobile location awareness is really the next big thing that will change everything about the mobile phone experience, people just haven’t been able to truly experience it yet because those other losers bury GPS functions deep in the deck next to the calculator and the latest release of Bejeweled. Make it front and center and people will eat this stuff up!
-The market was headed toward connected PNDs anyway, and there is no way in hell that we we’re going the MVNO route… no one will pay a monthly fee on their PND and I just don’t want to deal with that mess. Wait, I know, let’s just add in the original killer app of voice calls to our PND and call it a phone instead, people have no problem paying monthly fees for phones.
-We’ve already invested so much in developing manufacturing and distribution capabilities and those guys are going to get bored soon if all we’re selling is a few million navigation devices, these guys need more stuff to manufacture and distribute and world wide demand for phones is something like 2.3 bazillion…. If we can just get 1% of that market we will all be rich! 
Destination: NuviNightmare
Meanwhile in the other corner, the “have you heard of a little company called Motorola” crowd, where the argument goes something like this:
-Are you insane! Even the people who have been in the phone hardware business for years and years, no longer want to be in the hardware business anymore. It’s turning into a low margin, commodity business. Customers are fickle, and want to pay all of $20 for a phone that does everything but wash the car for you.
-Android and the iPhone are rapidly changing the game. Customers no longer expect to be able to do 4-5 things on their phone like make a phone call, check email, send a text, etc. They now expect to be able to do 500 things including… check in on Facebook, watch the latest YouTube video, browse their web photo collection, read the newspaper, trade stocks, listen to music, all while playing real-time head to head mobile AirHockey against their roommate.
-Yeah, you may know navigation, but this ain’t navigation and you’re a couple of decades behind in learning what folks want from their phones.
-Want to do business in the U.S? Well, remember those millions of little guys who you once considered your customers, well no more, now you have one big customer, meet Mr. Carrier.
Well so far, NuviNirvana seems to be winning the battle at least among the folks that matter, Min and crew. But I am frankly not sure what I think about the whole thing. But I do know that there are some things that could really make this interesting:
-An Android Nuvifone. This would solve the problem of not being able to have those 500 different apps that could put the NuviFone at a disadvantage. Not sure how feasible this would be with the way that Garmin (not unlike Apple) really likes to keep a stranglehold grip on the user experience. But undoubtedly an interesting partnership.
-Garmin isn’t thinking Navigation, but instead a portfolio of services built on top of location awareness. In other words, they have downloaded, played with and called the developer of every application in the iTunes App store that makes use of location data. Google search is certainly a start, but hopefully is just one of dozens of similar partnerships.
-Garmin moves away from its roots and has some sort of back up positioning besides GPS for indoor and other GPS compromised environments.
-Garmin is aggressive in implementing features that not only allow the owner of the phone to know their own whereabouts and what is around them but to broadcast out their whereabouts to others with a robust set of security controls of course.
-Some technological innovation that can allow the GPS or other location identifying technology to remain always on in the background without killing the battery. There is a big difference between this passive vs active location awareness and the types of services that can be offered.
Stay tuned… maybe Garmin can pick and up run with what Apple started.
Search is 90% solved! Woo hoo, now we can go out and play!
I am sure it was just one of those goofy comments that she made, that she now wishes she hadn’t made that she is now trying to clarify, which she does a respectable job of via the Official Google Blog. I am equally as sure that back in the 1876 Melvil Dewey said something equally as silly when he came up with the Dewey Decimal System… I am sure it went something like this: “ all knowledge can be categorized into ten core classes and I have devised a perfect hierarchical classification system that can handle an infinite number of new elements. The problem of searching for and finding information is practically solved.” Followed by the off the record comment “woo hoo yeah baby! Now we can go paaaaart-ay!
What Melvil didn’t acknowledge is that not all the worlds’ information would be written into books and stored in large libraries.
What Google is not acknowledging is that not all the worlds’ information is written out and coded and available to be stored in large server farms.
The Google clarification goes on to recognize some key gaps including cross language information sharing, modes of search (like by voice) and personalization… all things that focus on the different methods of getting at and sorting through stuff currently available on web servers. The clarification does not address the problem that the worlds’ information is no more confined to the world of indexable web servers than it was confined to books back in 1876.
Ok getting back to location stuff as an example, a couple of simple things I might like to know in the next few hours are: Where is my bus? Or where is my friend? Or where can I find a great Cuban sandwich within a five minute walk for under $8. Or are there any guys playing basketball at the gym right now? Google search can’t answer any of these questions. Sure, it may be able to get me to a bus schedule of where a bus SHOULD be, or that a Cuban restaurant or a gym exists nearby. But that is quite different than information on the actual location of the bus, or that a deli nearby does great Cuban sandwich, or that the gym even has a basketball court, let alone whether there are people there playing at that moment.
The Google’s of the world still have a lot of work to do to first figure out how to handle all the knowable yet transient (there one moment, but then gone the next) information that exists out there already… and then they can move on to the bigger problem of helping to get information materialized in a way to make it more accessible… scanning books was a start, but I certainly hope it wasn’t then end.
Limbo iPhone App, Activity: Feeling>Frustrated>Confused in NYC From 3 to 4p today, DND
It also seems to be a product that may really only work for the MAYBE U crowd (MAny, Yet Bored Enthusiastic Updaters), so if you’ve already updated what you’re doing right now on Facebook more than three times today, please read on, this product may be for you.
I first learned about Limbo while waiting in line with a friend at the NYC Apple Store. Guys and girls, who well looked like they belonged in an apple store, were handing out cards promoting the application. So being the good consumer I am, I loaded it up as I was told and tried to get to work. Loading it up and setting up an account, worked like a charm, no problems. Once I got in, that’s when the confusion began.
Problem #1 Complexity. There are probably ten times as many option in this application as there needs to be, and it’s not readily clear what they all do at first pass or why they’re all there. There are four categories across the top, Faves, Friends, Contacts and Members… this could very easily be two: people I know and people I don’t know.
Then there is the Who, What, Where, Shout and Profile. “Who” shows who is nearby and “What” shows what the people nearby are doing categorized in one of seven categories: socializing, eating, playing, me time, chilling, working and feeling, all of which can be described in great pre selected detail. For example a mere ten taps later I can tell the world that I am Socializing>Dancing>Salsa Dancing in Chinatown and plan to be participating in that activity Today from 6 to 6:05 PM. I can also shout at people, or in other words send them a text message… presumably to let them know that I plan to commence swing dancing next, just in case they’re not around to see the update on my activity profile.
So that brings me to issue #2… I am not in the MAYBE U crowd (Many Yet Bored Enthusiastic Updaters). The product assumes that you have 50 friends all with iPhones and all the time in the world, who are all bored and willing to update their status information constantly. Anything less, and I am not sure this product really works.
Loopt and other Location Aware iPhone Apps
After having read quite a bit about Loopt over the past year or so, I must say that I was pretty excited to see them offer a free iPhone application of their product. Free and iPhone being the critical components here… the hell if I was going to switch over to Boost mobile, and I am not so sure that I’d be willing to pay for Loopt, at least not yet.
As soon as Apple opened their app store I loaded every application I could find that looked like it might make cool use of location awareness, and I must say that after playing around with quite a few, Loopt certainly seems like the best so far… not including the Google powered maps application that comes standard.
But before I get too far along in my experiences with the various applications, I think that everyone that is currently making a living or hoping to make a living in the world of LBS, needs to drop whatever they’re doing and personally write a hundred thank you notes to Steve Jobs and all the staffers over at Apple that made location awareness such an important part of the iPhone (for the computer geeks among us, the thank you notes are that stack of little square pieces of paper that your grandmother gave you that you stuck in the bottom drawer of your dresser).
Ok so with that out of the way, there are a number of finder applications available for the iPhone and they’re all trying to do something slightly different: find friends, find places, find events, etc. From the initial batch that became available with the launch of the app store I tried Loopt, Yelp, Eventful, Whrrl, Where, EarthComber, Limbo and Nearby.
The only ones that I still use today are Loopt and Yelp.
You can tell from using the application that Loopt has been doing this for a while, and has learned the pain points for consumers and has done a great job of streamlining and simplifying the interface… there is a difference between complexity and power that I think Loopt gets… Loopt is not complex, but that doesn’t mean it’s not powerful.
First of all, getting a new Loopt account up and rolling was super easy, in fact it was so quick and painless that I’ve long since forgotten exactly what I had to do, I think it was just supplying my phone number and maybe a password… but I remember going from tapping on the icon to having a new account in well under a minute, and that’s all that matters.
Next it allows me to add friends either by typing in their phone number or going through and selecting friends from my iPhone contacts… again a very easy process.
The maps are provided by Microsoft Virtual Earth and are great quality and easy to navigate around through one finger panning and zooming, and they’ve partnered with Yelp to help beef up the POI listings and reviews.
Updating your friends on “What’s Up” is another simple 2 step process, just click on “What’s Up” and “Update” or feel free to add a blurb or photo (either from the camera or from your saved pictures) about what you’re up to.
But the coup de gras, is the link you can create with a Loopt Facebook widget. Once you’ve added the application to your Facebook account and linked it with your mobile application, all of your updates feed into your Facebook account and show up on your wall. This is important for me because at this stage in the game finding friends that can or want to get Loopt is not easy, so being confined just to Loopt with just my tech savvy friends would be a pretty lonely experience, but the Facebook updating utility allows me to connect with my larger group of Facebook friends, even if it is just for me to post “What’s Up”… in fact I now find myself providing updates through Loopt instead of directly via Facebook.
Now I am hoping that they come out with an embeddable widget where I can add my location and ‘What’s Up’ in places besides Facebook, like the Skyhook/Loki widget.
The Others
Ok so here is a quick rundown of my experiences with Yelp, Eventful, Whrrl and Where. I’ll save the others for another post, another day:
Yelp, is also another well done and slick application, although I think they still have some work to do in organizing the information. The default categories include categories that seem random to me… are that many people really looking for coffee & tea? Maybe so but not me. And when I search for restaurants around me, there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason behind the results provided, which I find frustrating… the top 10 results can be up to 20 blocks away, even when there are obviously ten restaurants closer… it seems to be taking into account quality/popularity in addition to proximity but the heck if I can figure out how to change the default setting. In reality I don’t typically get the results I want from proximity searches, although when I already know the name of the restaurant I do use the Yelp search function to get a better idea about the restaurant before committing to going.
I loaded up Eventful hoping to be able to quickly find nearby and last minute activities around the city to do with my kids, ala GoCityKids. In reality Eventful on the iPhone seems to really focus on the young hipster crowd looking for a band or show. I tried playing around with it anyway to see if I could find a upcoming and nearby college football game to go watch in the New York City area… a search for “college football’ returned some comedian’s routine under “Events” and a midtown bar that evidently was showing the BCS championship game back in January under “Venues”. I know NYC is a bad town for college football, but c’mon it can’t be THAT bad!
Whrrl and Where were non starters for me.
Where kept crashing for the first few weeks I gave it a try, I tried again more recently and it seems a little bit more stable now, but I still get error messages. Like Yelp the organization of Where seems to leave quite a bit to be desired… I am still not sure what to do with Quibblo Polls, SkyMap or HeyWhatsThat (no mountains in NYC, so I assume I don’t need that) and I’ve tried signing up for Buddy Beacon twice now with no luck. Zipcar and Starbucks locators are nice, but I don’t drink much Starbucks coffee or rent Zipcar vehicles, so don’t need those either. The application feels like one of those really slick $2 million dollar commercials for a financial services company that forgets to put the name of the bank in at the end… in other words it gets you all worked up and interested through the slick look and feel, but then forgets what the original purpose was in the first place…
Whrll gave me major password problems. I had a Whrrl account from online that didn’t seem to work on the iPhone application, so I couldn’t get into it for a while. When I did get in I remembered that none of my other friends use it and I didn’t really care what other top Whrrlrs thought about stuff in my neighborhood. So despite a nice slick application, I can’t figure out what to do with it and don’t want to hound and explain to my friend why they should get on it. So I am taking that one off.
Look out for another post on round two of the iPhone location aware apps coming soon.
Making Up Stuff About Yahoo Fire Eagle
So going back to Fire Eagle. By knowing people’s location information and matching that information with knowable information about the world around those people, the opportunity exists to target like never before. To date, targeting has been one dimensional from the point of view that it has been limited to indexing information from web pages and only reflects the view as seen from the time a user spends in front of a web browser.
Part 2: Maybe Soon Your TV Can Sit On It’s Butt and Watch You
After some more digging around on the web, I’ve now dug up enough new stuff to update the original post about Rosum’s new TV-GPS technology with some fresh tidbits.
So, first a quick review:
- Rosum is trying to develop a technology to supplement GPS and solve some of the major shortcomings of GPS… most notably the inability of GPS to be able to determine location indoors where it can’t see GPS satellites.
- Its solution: why not use something a little closer to home like broadcast television signals rather than those weak girly-man GPS signals from outer-space that have trouble even getting through the flimsy roof on your ’71 AMC Gremlin !
Now for the new updates. So it seems that they’ve rolled out coverage in the Northeast corridor from Washington DC to New Hampshire, well actually had it back in Fall of 2006… and given that the company has raised just $20 million to date, that must mean that the required network infrastructure build out must not be too much of a big, expensive an unwieldy process.
Rosum does talk extensively about how their solution uses existing technology on the broadcast tower. I can remember working with a company in the late 90’s called WavePhore that was trying to stuff various digital media down to web users over the unused portion of the broadcast signal called the vertical blanking interval (ie the portion reserved for the government to send emergency broadcast messages), so I just assume it works something like that.
Their solution does require regional monitoring units, but it seems that just a few, 3-4, are sufficient to cover each market, so maybe nothing like the thousands of boxes needed for alternative solutions. Overall the network deployment costs look like they may be favorable to alternatives like S5 Wireless.
It also looks like the actual location calculation is done on a server, off device. The Rosum equipped device will know only its pseudo location and need to check in with the regional monitoring unit to get a proper location fix. Which brings up the question of how does the device communicate with the location server to get a fix… well the answer right now is SMS. And it does seem that this poses an economical hurdle for use as a consumer solution… although I guess it depends on exactly how much SMS is necessary. And they’re working on a GPRS solution it seems. For folks like the military and first response teams, this SMS issue is of course a non issue.
It also looks like they’re pursuing a software only strategy that relies on mobile devices having tv tuner cards installed… but I am not sure I see that happening anytime soon despite what official research reports may say.
If you want to read more, fortunately their presentations seem to be all over the web, here are a few links:
http://www.e911institute.org/Events/2007/Rosum_CompanyOverview_WCAHomelandDefenseE9-1-1panel_18-January-2006_2.pdf
http://www.nlectc.org/training/commcorr2006/young_commcorr2006_indoor.pdf
http://www.ece.wpi.edu/Research/PPL/Workshops/2006/PDF/Rosum.pdf
Overall it looks pretty promising.
