I popped down to MoMo London (Mobile Monday London) last night, which was held at the CBI Conference Center in Centre Point Tower.
Titled “Enabling Location in Applications”, the evening was sponsored by Skyhook Wireless. Whereas the last MoMo London featured a high-level panel discussion on current mobile trends from a media and marketing perspective, this event was more of a show and tell.
The people presenting their ideas were:
- Ted Morgan – Skyhook Wireless
- Ben Ward – Yahoo! Brickhouse
- Charles Wiles - Google Gears
- Andrew Scott – Rummble
- Justin Davis - BuddyPing
- Mark White - Locatrix
Below are the notes I took from the evening:
Ted Morgan – CEO, Skyhook Wireless
Intro to Skyhook Wireless:
- Provides the Wifi for Apple iPhone - restaurant finding, social network apps, location apps, geo tagging
- What Skyhook does:
- Compresses individual wifi sources into one channel to pinpoint your location
- 16 million access points mapped in Europe
- Reaches 130 million people in Europe
- 200 full time scannersHybrid Location – XPS – combined wifi, gps, 3G
- Delivers consumer ready location:
- Better availability
- Better Speed
- Cross platform, mobile and web
- Cheaper and easier to work with
- Growing worldwide developer community
- App Partners:
- Locle
- AOL Instant Messenger
- Rummble
- Eye-Fi
- Trapster
- Location enabled browsing
- W3C working group
- Standard API for websites to request location
- Mobile and web
- Browser developers and content sites
- Loki toolbar experience
- Loki for iPhone 2.0
- Organises content sites with location info - e.g. Google Maps, Qype – and uploads your location info to those websites
- Currently, websites can't find your location
- Soon, you can update your location on various sites, e.g. Facebook
Ben Ward – Yahoo! Brickhouse Team, London Representative
Ben presented his team's work with Fire Eagle
- Most location aware apps base on a fairly simple premise where one app gets the location of the user then the same app uses that location
- Better model is where a single service gets that location but then shares it with a range of other apps to use that location
- Fire Eagle sits in the middle – anyone can let it know where they are, then Fire Eagle tells the location apps where they are
- Tom Taylor - www.iamnear.net
- Click the Fire Eagle link
- Then grant permission to Fire Eagle to use the service as much as you want, e.g. exact location or just postcode
- iamnear.net then able to use Fire Eagle to tell you where nearest services – like banks, pubs, etc – are
- User has ability to hide themselves from sites and services authorised to use Fire Eagle
- Process of developing Fire Eagle:
- Authenticate with user
- Make API calls to Fire Eagle
- 3 ways of updating:
- Lookup or update – London, UK or London, Canada?
- Within or recent – within a range or been in a range recently
- More ideas for uses of Fire Eagle:
- Ambient Orb
- PacManhattan.com
- Last.fm: Location of where a track was scrobbled, e.g. Brian Eno in London City Airport
- Fire Eagle helps you:
- Easily build location services
- Share your location online
Charles Wiles - Product Manager, Google Gears
- Writing a rich mobile app across a wide range of mobile devices is an impossibly difficult challenge today
- The web is the platform, but mobile web apps suck!
- Gears makes apps fast, fluid and location aware
- It's fast, fluid and location aware
- Gears is much more than offline
- First new api will be the Geolocation API, which gives developers easy access to user location
- The Location api provides a common interface to location
- One-Shot and Repeated Position Updates
- Ability to get last known position cheaply
Matt Womer – W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)
Matt briefly spoke about the work that W3C is doing to create a standardised geolocation API. They want an API that doesn't need a plug-in and has one way of presenting information to the browser.
Unfortunately, the last three presentations were sans text and were either clever presentations using only pictures or live demonstrations of the technology, so I didn't get a chance to write them up. But do have a look at all of their websites as they're doing some interesting stuff:
Andrew Scott – Rummble
Justin Davis - BuddyPing
Mark White - Locatrix
If Andrew, Justin, or Mark happens to come across this post, then I'd be happy to put your presentations up here.
Overall, it was another great MoMo London. Afterwards I got to meet Paul Walsh (Segalo and BIMA), Chris Kettle (my247.mobi) and James Parton (O2 Litmus).
- What did everyone who was there think was the most interesting idea presented?
- For those who want there, what do you think about the future of location-based apps based on the work that these people are doing?
- Are there potential revenue streams for these services?
- Are they even out to make money?
- What do you think is the future of location-based apps?
UPDATE:
James from mjelly has also written up his notes from the evening, which you can view here.
7 comments:
Some interesting ideas and applications! Regret missing this one now! There are some clear usage divisions:- Information, entertainment, commercial content (ie ads).
Questions arise as to:-
a) Overcomming consumer awareness barriers and cost perception?
b) Ease of search, subscribing and de-listing?
c) Ability to filter key information, given time contraints on the move compared to standalone PC. Does this mean the user downloads, ie like Apple IPhone or dongle info to from the PC before the journey? With more memory appearing on mobiles this becomes an interesting area!
Marketing research I have done with retail consumers indicates wariness with average users, but a desire to have this stuff if it available, controlable and affordable. This is where technological expectation and capability differs. Interested to know what others think of where we are, where we are heading and when. There are some exciting possibilities?
David Stone,Msc,M.CAM,FIDM.
d6.david@gmail.com
Hi David,
Cost perception - Mark White of Locatrix siad that they got a much better response from customers when they charged, say, $2 for unlimited use rather than charge 50 cents per use. Customers seem to be worried about racking up costs as they're unsure how much data costs. Unlimited use seems to be the way to go.
Fire Eagle was very hot on letting people hide themselves or delisting from the service. This may be due to Fire Eagle not looking for income and so are less worried about holding on to user's details.
As to user wariness, many were saying that the iPhone is a breakthrough - it has the technology and the mainstream appeal to make these more experimental apps more appealing to the average user.
Thanks for the comments - what does everyone else think?
Nicely done very clear. My big question is who are the users going to be initially? Is it web 2.0 geeky early adopters, youth, or people in India and South Africa? You can read my notes at http://blog.mjelly.com/2008/07/momo-london---l.html See you at the next one?
Through different marketing research I have seen that retail consumers indicates wariness with average users, but the greatest desire is to have this stuff if it available, controlable and affordable. This is where technological expectation and capability differs. Interested to know what others think of where we are, where we are heading and when. There are some exciting possibilities? Great ability to filter informtation
James - thanks for flagging your mblog post. I'll update my post to include a link to yours.
The web 2.0 geeky early adopters will be the initial users - all of this is of a personal interest, they normally have jobs and contacts in the industry anyway, they're comfortable with the technology and can afford to use the service off the bat.
Ammarah - most of the projects on show were available, Fire Eagle was particularly impressive with its ability to control how much information is given to the system, and Locatrix had come up with an affordable model. Now we just need an app that takes all of these into account!
P.S. add me on LinkedIn if you fancy meeting uo at the next MoMo London event!
Hi Charles Wiles,
Google's Gears Web Browser is not good as it assumes much place than other web browser
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