World Wide Web Creator Tim Berners-Lee On The Future Of Location Services
I was lucky enough to watch a talk this morning, by the inventor of the Web – Sir Tim Berners-Lee. The keynote was delivered at the annual Nokia World conference in London (Nokia Ireland are a client of ours at Simply Zesty). The level of speakers at the conference was absolutely superb and for me seeing Berners-Lee speak was the cherry on top. The word ‘location’ was heavily thrown about over both days of the conference and I was pleased that this took up a significant part of the final keynote. It tied in well with the overall theme of the speech, which covered the web of data, and perhaps more closely, concerns over the future of Location.
What was of clear concern to Berners-Lee, was that location services ultimately respect their users. How many hoops are you making the user jump through, and importantly what’s the embarassment factor in what you’re offering? The issue of respect mentioned again and again and I don’t think it can be said enough. When it comes to location, privacy and consideration of your users is not something you can choose to ignore. The sensitivity and shear wealth of information that you’re handing over is testament to this. At the end of the day you have to get the balance right between what people are comfortable with right now, and what you can try and introduce to them. Forcing them to give up information they don’t want to won’t result in a successful business.
But as much as respect of the user, it comes down to education. We’ve seen enough blunders being made by individuals through social networks- telling your prospective employer exactly what you think of their pay-cheque etc.. Now that location services are hitting the mainstream, it’s something that has to considered and tackled head on. Far too often there is a disconnect between what the true tecchies understand and your average Facebook user. Being caught out by your boss is one thing, but being actually found by someone you don’t want to be is something else altogether. Facebook Places have already got this massively wrong in my opinion and can’t afford to leave this unaddressed.
Mine of data
The overall theme and clear passion for Berners-Lee himself, was the web of data and the need for companies and government organisations to supply and share data. If everything that we want to happen is possible – holding your phone up and finding out everything about the local area, then there is an even bigger onus on organisations to supply the data and be a part of the game. As much as we need to consider who is providing the data, making sure that their right people find it is a significant challenge : providing everyone with access to the information that they have a right to. In the most inspiring moment of the speech Berners-Lee compared a need for the internet with a need for water. It may seem crazy to some, but if the internet is to be as democratic as we want it to be, it’s something to be addressed and importantly, invested in.
Where it gets really exciting is when you think about what happens when location meets data. If you weren’t on board with the idea of the internet being almost as important as water, think about if you’re living in a remote village, and you can access a map that shares information on the local health services near you, and who can help you with what. Or even accessing live chat with a medical professional to assist when there’s no care for miles around. Then it becomes about enabling basic human survival and this is pretty powerful. As much as we love to focus on the whizzkids of the location world and the mayors and badges, the other side of it isn’t discussed as much. Tim Berners-Lee advocated the need to continually combine data with location and called on organisations to be accountable to provide the information to make this work. It may not seem as sexy as Foursquare, but it’s what will take location services from cool, to a fundamental part of any society. We saw early hints of this with the Google Flu project, but this was just the tip of a very big iceberg.
The impact on business
This was touched on in the speech, with the idea that busineses are increasingly accountable for the data they provide. But the impact of mobile location services to the advantage of businesses is huge. We’ve now reached a stage where companies are more transparent than ever before and this isn’t always by choice. Organisations were forced to accept the first stage of being transparent – the advent of social media itself. But location has come along and seriously upped the game. Take a typical review site for example – a user could upset a company’s reputation maybe by the end of the evening, when they returned home from a rotten meal and logged on to complain. But add a mobile and a location service into the equation and you get something different. Now every single person has the power to control the front door of a restaurant. You can share your bad experience right from the dirty cutlery when you first sit down at the table. And if location reaches mass take-up like it could well do, you could be putting people off in the local area who might otherwise have gone there. This could hugely upset businesses and I don’t think we’ve started to see the real impact of this yet.
The other implication of location for businesses, is that as much as users might be able to access data about them, it gives you a huge wealth of untapped information about your customers. This is already available to a certain extent through Foursquare, who introduced their business analytics tool earlier in the year. This is invaluable for businesses and a whole new way of doing things. You could have the power to think of endless variables – the weather, seasonality, what special was written on the board that day and track your checkin trends against this over the past 12 months. Combine this with the ability to access demographic data and you have something incredibly powerful. Imagine being able to optimise a business based on location information. The impact of mobile on business was also touched on by Mary McDowell, Exec Vice-president of mobile phones at Nokia, when she announced a new venture with Intuit that aims to address the needs of SMEs around the world, with the impact of mobile.
While location wasn’t the sole focus of the keynote speech, it certainly made up a large part and what was interesting was how it tied into pretty much every subject covered, particularly data. For me I think location may go the way of mobile internet. We’re seeing the first real wave of it, but we’re not quite there yet. I wouldn’t be surprised if it goes away for a while, just like mobile internet access and then comes back bigger and better. Whatever your views on location, you can’t argue on the huge potential of it and I can’t wait to see what part it will play in our lives in 10 years time.
