Puntofisso's Old Tech Blog

Category: geo

  • The several issues of geo development: a chronicle of October's GeoMob

    GeoMob has returned after a longer-than-usual hiatus due to other – and definitely very interesting – commitments of our previous Mr GeoMob, Christopher Osborne. It was a very interesting night with the usual format of four presentations covering aspects of research, development and business. Here’s my summary and comments.

    Max Howell, @mxcl – Tweetdeck

    I’m a bit unsure on how to comment the involvement of TweetDeck into the GeoSocial business.
    Max’s presentation has been focused on the integration of their application with FourSquare. It’s a tightly coupled integration allowing users to follow their Twitter friends using the locative power of Foursquare, i.e. putting them on a map. Max gave out some bread for our brains when commenting that “Google Latitude is not good for us because it gives out location continuously, whereas we are looking for discrete placement of users on POIs“: this is a real example of why more-is-not-necessarily-better and, in my opinion, the main reason for which, to date, Latitude has been less successful in catalysing users’ attention on locative services.

    However, I’m not totally sure why TweetDeck foresees its future into becoming a platform to integrate Twitter and FourSquare into a single framework. “Other apps put FourSquare functions in a separate window and this is distasteful“. Is it really? And how exactly will TweetDeck benefit, financially but not only, from this integration? “We spent a lot of time on FourSquare integration but unfortunately it’s not much used“. They should ask themselves why.
    Their TODO list includes Geofencing which might be interesting so let’s wait and see.

    Matthew Watkins, @mazwat – Chromaroma by Mudlark

    For those of you who don’t know it yet: Chromaroma is a locative game based on your Oyster card touch-ins and touch-outs. They’re still in closed alpha, but the (not so many?) lucky users (I’ve asked to join the alpha 3-4 times, but they never replied) can connect their Oyster account to the game and take part to some kind of Gowalla for transport, based on the number of journeys, station visited, personal and team targets.

    Two things to be considered:
    – open data and privacy: upon joining the service, the user account page is scraped for their journeys. Matthew explained they approached TfL to ask for APIs/free access to the journeys data but “due to budget cuts we’re low priority“. Apparently they’ve been allowed to keep on doing scraping. The obvious issue is a matter of trust: why should someone give their oyster account access to a company that, technically, hasn’t signed any agreement with TfL?
    This is worrying, as to get journey history data you need to activate Auto Top-up. So you’re basically allowing a third party to access an account connected to automatic payments from your payment card.
    Secondly, I can’t understand TfL’s strategy on open data here: if they are not worried about the use Mudlark is doing of such data, why not providing developers with an API to query the very same data? Users’ consent can be embedded in the API, so I’m a bit worried that Chromaroma is actually exposing the lack of strategy by TfL, rather than their availability to work together with developers. I hope I’m wrong.
    – monetising: I’m not scared of asking the very same question to any company working on this. What is Mudlark’s monetisation strategy and the business viability of such strategy? It can’t be simply “let’s build travel profiles of participating users and sell them to advertisers” as TfL would have done that already. And if TfL haven’t thought about this, or if they’re letting Mudlark collect such data without even letting them adhere to some basic T&C, we are in serious trouble. However, it’s the declared strategy by Mudlark that does not convince me. Matthew suggests it might be based on target like “get from Warren Street to Kings Cross by 10 am, show your touch-ins and get a free coffee” or on the idea of “sponsor items” you can buy. Does this strategy have a market that is big enough? And, as I’ve already asked, why should a company pay for this kind of advertisement that is potentially available for free? If the game is successful, however, it will be chaos in the Tube – and I’m really looking forward to it 🙂

    Oliver O’Brien, @oobr – UCL CASA Researcher

    Oliver has recently had his 15 minutes of glory thanks to some amazing live map visualisation of London Barclays Cycle Hire availability. He went further to develop visualisation pages for different bicycle hire schemes all around the world – before he received a Cease&Desist request by one of the companies involved. As a researcher, he provided interesting insight to the GeoMob showing some geo-demographic analysis. For example, weekdays vs weekend usage patterns are different according to the area of the world involved. London is very weekdays-centric, showing that the bicycles are mainly used by commuters. I wonder if this analysis can provide also commercial insight as much as Chromaroma’s intended use of Oyster data.

    Thumbs up for the itoworld-esque animation visualizing bike usage in the last 48 hours – stressing that properly done geo-infographic can be extremely useful for problem analysis. Oliver’s future work seems targeted at this, and ideally we’ll hear more about travel patterns and how they affect the usability of bicycle hire schemes. I can’t really understand why he was asked to take some of the maps down.

    Eugene Tsyrklevich, @tsyrklevich – Parkopedia

    The main lesson of this presentation: stalk your iPhone app users, find them on the web, question them and make them change the negative reviews.
    An aggressive strategy that can probably work – and I would actually describe Parkopedia’s strategy as positively aggressive. They managed to get a deal with AA about branding their parking-space-finding-app in exchange for a share of profit.
    Eugene’s presentation was more about business management than development. Nonetheless it was incredibly full of insight. Especially on how to be successful when marketing an iPhone application. “Working with known brands gives you credibility, and it opens doors“. The main door that this opened was actually Apple’s interest in featuring their app on the AppStore, leading to an almost immediate 30-fold increase in sales. This leads to further credibility and good sales: “Being featured gets you some momentum you never lose“. This is a good lesson for all our aspiring geo-developers.

  • The past (and future?) of location

    I must say – without making it too emotional – that I feel somewhat attached to geo-events at the BCS as my first contact with the London geo-crowd was there over a year ago, with a GeoMob including a talk by the same Gary Gale who gave a talk last night. That was, at least for him, one company and one whole  continent ago – for the rest of us the “agos” include new or matured geo-technologies: Foursquare, Gowalla, Latitude, Facebook and Twitter places, plus our very own London based Rummble, and minus some near-casualties (FireEagle).

    Some highlights/thoughts from his talk:

    The sad story of early and big players
    – early players are not always winners: this can happen in a spectacular way (Dodgeball) or more quietly (Orkut has not technically been a commercial success, for example) – but also
    – big players are not always winners: it’s all just a little bit of history repeating, isn’it? Remember the software revolution? The giant IBM didn’t understand it, and a small and agile company called Microsoft became the de-facto monopolist. OS/2 is still remembered as one of the epic fails in software. Remember the Internet revolution? The giant Microsoft had its very own epic fail called Microsoft Network. It took them ages to create a search engine, and in the meantime an agile and young company with a Big G became the search giant. Some years later, the aforementioned Orkut, started by Google as a side project, didn’t have the agility and the motivation to resist to Facebook. The same might happen about location services.

    Power to the people
    The problem with big players is that they take the quality of data bases for granted. Foursquare et al. found a way to motivate users to keep the POI database constantly updated by using a form of psychological reward. Something that Google hasn’t quite done.

    Now monetize, please
    Ok, we can motivate users by assigning mayorship and medals. Having a frequently refreshed database is a step ahead. But how do you make money out of it? “Let’s get in touch with the companies and ask for a share of the profit” can work for some brave early adopters. But it will not take long for companies to realize they can use the data – for free – to make business analysis without even contacting foursquare. “Become mayor and get a 10% discount”. What other data analysis should motivate them to pay for it? Knowing where a customer goes next? Where they’ve been before? Maybe to get higher profile in the searches, like in google searches? In the ocean of possibilities, the certainty is that there isn’t yet an idea that works well. “Even Facebook lacks the time to contact the big players to negotiate discounts“. And if you think about the small players it’s even more difficult (but if Monmouth offers me a free espresso I’ll work hard to become their Mayor!).
    The way many companies are trying to sell it is still pretty much old economy: sell the check-ins database to a big marketing company, blablabla. Cfr. next point.

    Dig out the meaningful data
    Ok, we have motivated the users to keep our POIs fresh. But they want to be mayor, so they exploit APIs. Their favourite bar has already a Mayor? They create another instance of the same place. They create their own home. I’ve seen a “my bed”. Is there an algorithmic way to filter out the meaningless data? Surely not in the general case. Moreover, as Gary stressed, simply “selling your database starts eroding its value“. Because the buyer needs to find a use for that mountain of data. As for now, such use is not evident, because most of the data is not meaningful at all.

    “If Augmented Reality is Layar, I’m disappointed”
    Some time ago I noticed a strange absence of overlap among the geo-crowd and the AR-crowd. The latter presents ideas that have been discussed for years by the former as a “revolution”. One problem is that maybe we have augmented reality but not a realistic augmentation, mostly because of reduced processing power on mobile devices. Ideally you would like to walk down the broadway, see a SuperMario-like green mushroom that gives you an extra shot of espresso (to me it’s like getting an extra-life), catch it, and claim the coffee in the shop around the corner. Unfortunately, GPS is not accurate enough (Galileo might solve this problem soon) and walking down all the time pointing your phone camera to the road will only drain your battery (and probably get you killed before you manage to catch the mushroom). It’s not just an issue of processing power and battery life, though. Even with that, there’s a serious user interaction issue. AR glasses might, partially, solve that, but I can’t really believe that augmenting reality is *just* that and not something that empowers a user’s imagination. Geo-AR is on the boundary between novelty (“oh look, it correctly puts a label on St Paul’s cathedral!“) and utility. And currently on the wrong side of it.

    The director’s cut will (not) include recommendations
    “I’m sure we’ll make it to the director’s cut” – Alex Housley complained in the typical flamboyant way of the Rummble crowd about being left out of the presentation. “We believe trust networks are the future“. Yes and no. I agree with Alex in the sense that how to provide appropriate recommendations is an interesting research problem (but also here)  and the key to monetization of any service. It’s technically not the future, though: Amazon has been using recommendations for years, and I’ve done purchases myself prompted by their recommendations. Trust networks have been extensively used in services like Netflix. What Rummble is trying to do is a more direct way of exploiting trust networks to enrich recommendations, bringing them to the heart of the application. I’m sure that recommendations will play a role in monetizing the geo-thing and that even trust networks may, too. What I’m not sure about is if recommendations will be as they’re now. Without a revolution in the way users perceive local recommendation – that is, a user interaction revolution – they’re not gonna make it. Users need a seamless way of specifying the trust network, and a similarly seamless way of receiving the recommendation.

  • Free data: utility, risks, opportunities

    Some random thoughts after The possibilities of real-time data event at the City Hall.

    Free your location: you’re already being photographed
    I was not surprised to hear the typical objection (or rant, if you don’t mind) of institutions’ representative when requested to release data: “We must comply with the Data Protection Act!“. Although this is technically true, I’d like to remind these bureaucrats that in the UK being portraited by a photographer in a public place is legal. In other words, if I’m in Piccadilly Circus and someone wants to take a portrait of me, and possibly use it for profit, he is legally allowed to do so without my authorization.
    Hence, if we’re talking about releasing Oyster data, I can’t really see bigger problems than those related to photographs: where Oyster data makes it public where you are and, possibly, when, a photograph might give insight to where you are and what you are doing. I think that where+what is intrinsically more dangerous (and misleading, in most cases) than where+when, so what’s the fuss about?

    Free our data: you will benefit from it!
    Bryan Sivak, Chief Technology Officer of Washington DC (yes, they have a CTO!), has clearly shown it with an impressive talk: freeing public data improves service level and saves public money. This is a powerful concept: if an institution releases data, developers and business will start creating enterprises and applications over it. But more importantly, the institution itself will benefit from better accessibility, data standards, and fresh policies. That’s why the OCTO has released data and facilitated competition by offering money prizes to developers: the government gets expertise and new ways of looking at data in return for technological free speech. It’s something the UK (local) government should seriously consider.

    Free your comments: the case for partnerships between companies and users
    Jonathan Raper, our Twitter’s @MadProf, is sure that partnerships between companies and users will become more and more popular. Companies, in his view, will let the cloud generate and manage a flow of information about their services and possibly integrate it in their reputation management strategy.
    I wouldn’t be too optimistic, though. Albeit it’s true that many longsighted companies have started engaging with the cloud and welcome autonomous, independently run, twitter service updates, most of them will try to dismiss any reference to bad service. There are also issues with data covered by licenses (see the case of FootyTweets).
    I don’t know why I keep thinking about trains as an example, but would you really think that, say, Thameslink would welcome the cloud twitting about constant delays on their Luton services? Not to mention the fact that NationalRail forced a developer to stop offering a free iPhone application with train schedules – to start selling their own, non free (yes, charging £4.99 for data you can get from their own mobile web-site for free, with the same ease of use, is indeed a stupid commercial strategy).

    Ain’t it beautiful, that thing?
    We’ve seen many fascinating visualization of free data, both real-time and not. Some of these require a lot of work to develop. But are they useful? What I wonder is not just if they carry any commercial utility, but if they can actually be useful to people, by improving their life experience. I have no doubt, for example, that itoworld‘s visualization of transport data, and especially those about Congestion Charging, are a great tool to let people understand policies and authorities make better planning. But I’m not sure that MIT SenseLab’s graphs of phone calls during the World Cup Final, despite being beautiful to see, funny to think about, and technically accurate, may bring any improvement to user experience. (Well, this may be the general difference between commercial and academic initiative – but I believe this applies more generally, in the area of data visualization).

    Unorthodox uses of locative technologies
    MIT Senselab‘s Carlo Ratti used gsm cell association data to approximate people density in streets. This is an interesting use of technology. Nonetheless, unorthodox uses of technologies, especially locative technologies, must be taken carefully. Think about using the same technique to calculate road traffic density: you would have to consider single and multiple occupancy vehicles, where this can have different meanings on city roads and motorways. Using technology in unusual ways is fascinating and potentially useful, but the association of the appropriate technique to the right problem must be carefully gauged.

    Risks of not-so-deep research
    This is generally true in research, but I would say it’s getting more evident in location-based services research and commercial activities: targeting marginally interesting areas of knowledge and enterprise. Ratti’s words: “One PhD student is currently looking at the correlations between Britons and parties in Barcelona… no results yet“. Of course, this was told as a half-joke. But in many contexts, it’s still a half-truth.

  • Cold thoughts on WhereCampEU

    What a shame having missed last year’s WhereCamp. The first WhereCampEU, in London, was great and I really want to be part of such events more often.

    WhereCampEU is the European version of this popular unconference about all things geo. It’s a nonplace where you meet geographers, geo-developers, geo-nerds, businesses, the “evil” presence of OrdnanceSurvey (brave, brave OS guys!), geo-services, etc.

    I’d just like to write a couple of lines to thank everyone involved in the organisation of this great event: Chris Osborne, Gary Gale, John Fagan, Harry wood, Andy Allan, Tim Waters, Shaun McDonald, John Mckerrel, Chaitanya Kuber. Most of them were people I had actually been following on twitter for a while or whose blog are amongst the ones I read daily, some of them I had alread met in other meetups. However, it was nice to make eye-contact again or for the first time!

    Some thoughts about the sessions I attended:

    • Chris Osborne‘s Data.gov.uk – Maps, data and democracy. Mr Geomob gave an interesting talk on democracy and open data. His trust in democracy and transparency is probably quintessentially British, as in Italy I wouldn’t be that sure about openness and transparency as examples of democratic involvement (e.g. the typical “everyone knows things that are not changeable even when a majority don’t like them“). The talk was indeed mind boggling especially about the impact of the heavy deployment of IT systems to facilitate public service tasks: supposed to increase the level of service and transparency of such services, they had a strong negative impact on the perceived service level (cost and time).
    • Gary Gale‘s Location, LB(M)S, Hype, Stealth Data and Stuff
      and Location & Privacy; from OMG! to WTF?. Albeit including the word “engineering” in his job title, Gary is very good at giving talks that make his audience think and feel involved. Two great talks on the value of privacy wrt location. How much would you think your privacy is worth? Apparently, the average person would sell all of his or her location data for £30; Gary managed to spark controversy amidst uncontroversial claims that “£30 for all your data is actually nothing” – a very funny moment (some people should rethink their sense of value, when talking about UK, or at least postpone philosophical arguments to the pub).
    • Cyclestreet‘s Martin Lucas-Smith‘s Cyclestreets Cycle Routing: a useful service developed by two very nice and inspired guys, providing cycling route maps over OpenStreetMaps. Their strenght is that the routes are calculated using rules that mimick what cyclists do (their motto being “For cyclists, By cyclists“). Being a community service, they tried (and partially managed) to receive funding by councils. An example of an alternative – but still viable – business model.
    • Steven Feldman‘s Without a business model we are all fcuk’d. Apart from the lovely title, whoever starts a talk saying “I love the Guardian and hate Rupert Murdoch” gains my unconditional appreciation 🙂 Steven gave an interesting talk on what I might define “viable business model detection techniques“. As in a “business surgery” he let some of the people in the audience (OrdnanceSurvey, cyclestreetmaps, etc…) analyze their own business and see weaknesses and strenghts. A hands-on workshop that I hope he’s going to repeat at other meetings.
    • OpenStreetMap: a Q&A session with a talk from Simone Cortesi (that I finally managed to meet in person) showing that OSM can be a viable and profitable business model. Even stressing that they are partially funded by Google.

    Overall level of presentations: very very good, much better organised than I was expecting. Unfortunately I missed the second day, due to an untimely booked trip 🙂

    Maybe some more involvement from big players would be interesting. Debating face to face about their strategy, especially when the geo-community is (constructively) critical on them, would benefit everyone.

    I mean, something slightly more exciting than a bunch of Google folks using a session to say “we are not that bad” 🙂

  • A bunch of nerds with maps

    …I think I can define GeoMob this way and I fit this definition perfectly 🙂

    Nice London Geo/Mobile Developers Meetup Group meeting yesterday at City University. High level of the talks, providing vision, reporting experiences, and showing technologies and nice uses of them. Here’s a short summary.

    Andrew Eland – Mobile Team Lead for Google UK
    A very Google-like talk, showing up tech pieces with their vision. Of course, disappointing if you were expecting more in-depth analysis of market, novel ideas, or anything more than current publicly known work. But we’re used to that, and it was not a bad talk at all 🙂
    Best quote: “Tokyo is a vertical city“. That’s absolutely true, and this fact has a direct impact on geo-apps: being shops, clubs, bars, developed vertically at different levels of the buildings (this is a pic I took of the Keio Sky Garden, for example, and there are hundreds of beer gardens up on the roofs of several skyscrapers!) there’s a real need for accurate altitude information and 3d-mapping, or at least altitude-enabled maps. The interesting question for me here is how we can show multi-floor information on the 2d-maps currently in use.

    Julianne Pearce, Blast Theory
    An artists’ collective perspective on geo-development. Absolutely intriguing, as not the average techietalk you would expect from a GeoMob. I found this personally interesting, as I played with the Can you see me know? game and even created a modified version of it at the UbiComp Spring School at Mixed Reality Lab, University of Nottingham in April 2009, during a workshop dealing with Locative Game Authoring.

    PublicEarth
    They introduced their concept of a web 2.0 site for creating a personal atlas. Basically it’s about putting photographs and commercial activities of interest on a personal map. They seem to be developing APIs and the possibility of creating widgets, and directly deal with small companies (hotels, b&b, restaurants, bars) to put them in their database. The idea here is that users will be allowed to tell the (possibly intelligent) system what categories of data they’re mostly interested in, leading to some kind of customised Michelin guide.
    On monetization, they have a three-fold strategy:
    – contextual advertisement, empowered by the fact that users are genuinely interested in what they put in their atlas
    – share of profit on direct bookings
    – [long-term] user base providing more content, improving quantity and quality of contextual data in a positive feedback loop, possibly making it interesting to other companies

    Laurence Penney, SnapMap
    My favourite talk of the night. Laurence has been longing for a way of placing precisely photographs on a map for more than 10 years.
    I was astonished of seeing him doing many of the things I would have liked to see in web sites like Flickr and that I’ve been discussing for ages with my friends and colleagues! Using gps data, a compass, waypoints, directions, focal length, and all the other data associated with a photograph, Laurence is developing a web site to allow users navigate those pictures, even creating 3d views of them like the guys at University of Washington with Rome wasn’t built in a day. Funnily, he started all of these before gps/compass-enabled devices were available, writing down all of his data on a notebook, and he even had problems with the police inquiring why he was taking picture at the Parliament (unfortunately, I have to say he’s not alone -_-).

    Mikel Maron – Haiti Earthquake OpenStreetMap Response
    Mikel explained what OpenStreetMap did to help in Haiti. Disaster response relies heavily on updated maps of building, streets, and resources, and OSM quickly managed to get that done. A great thanks to him and to all of OSM guys to show the world that mapping can be helpful to people even leaving out profit considerations.

  • At the #GeoMob

    Hey folks, long time I haven’t blogged – been very busy at work and home! Let me resume my techie stuff by summarising some of my thoughts after the #GeoMob night at the British Computer Society, last 30 July.
    The #GeoMob is the London Geo/Mobile Developers Meetup Group, and it organises meeting of developers interested in the geo/social/mobile field, usually with participation from industry leaders (Yahoo!/Google), businesses, startups.

    This are my thoughts about the night, grouped by talk:

    Wes Biggs, CTO Adfonic

    • AdFonic is a mobile advertisement provider that launched 1/7/09 (their home page doesn’t work, though. You need to go to http://adfonic.com/home)
    • what about user interaction and privacy? if I don’t get it completely wrong (reading here it seems I haven’t), the actual user experience is to have some kind of advertisement bar on your mobile application. If it’s just this, it’s simply the porting of an old desktop idea to the mobile environment. The problem is that it was not a hugely successful idea. Here the user is rewarded even less compared to the desktop bars (I guess by getting the app for free?). I’m not sure this can be a really successful venture unless the ads are smartly disguised as “useful information” – but, hey, I’m here to be refuted 😛
    • getting contextual information is difficult, even if you know the location of the user you don’t know what he/she’s doing. Good motto from the talk “advertisers are not interested in where you are, but in where you’re at“. But how to get and use these contextual information was not really clear from the talk. From their website’s FAQ, I read:
      • You can target by country or region.
      • You can target by mobile operator.
      • You can define the days of the week and the time of day you wish your ad to be displayed in the local market.
      • You can choose to target by demographics by selecting gender and age range profiles.
      • You can choose devices by platform, brand, features and individual models.
      • You can also choose to assign descriptive words for your campaign using tags. We compare these tags to sites and apps in the Adfonic network where your ad could be displayed, improving your ad’s probability of being shown on a contextually relevant site.

      This raises a couple of privacy concerns, as well as technical ones 😉

    • I would say this talk raised more questions than those answered – nonetheless it was, at least for me, good for brainstorming about mobile targeting
    • some of the issues with this service – which I’m really interested in watching to know where it heads to – are interestingly the same of a paper about leisure mobile recommender systems that I reviewed for MobBlog

    Henry Erskine Crum, @henryec, Co-founder of Spoonfed

    • Spoonfed is a London based web startup (Sep. 2008) that focuses on location-based event listings
    • 12 people work there – which makes it interestingly big to be a startup
    • very similar to an old idea of mine (geo-events but in a more social networking fashion) – which prompts me to realize I need to act fast, when I have such ideas 🙂
    • I would have liked the talk to dig deeper into details about user base, mobile apps and HCI issues, but it was not a bad talk and it provided a very operational and yet open minded view of how the service works and evolves
    • oh, and Henry was congratulated as the only guy in a suit (:P lolcredits to Christopher Osborne)

    Gary Gale, @vicchi, Director of Engineering at Yahoo! Geo Technologies, with a talk about Yahoo! Placemaker

    • get here the slides for this talk
    • Yahoo! Placemaker is a useful service to extract location data from virtually any document – also known as Geoparsing. As the website says: Provided with free-form text, the service identifies places mentioned in text, disambiguates those places, and returns unique identifiers for each, as well as information about how many times the place was found in the text, and where in the text it was found.
    • I see it very interesting especially as it is usable with Tweets and blog posts, and it can help creating very interesting mashups
    • only issue: its granularity is up to the neighbourhood – which is perfectly good for some applications, but I’m not sure it is also for real-time-location-intensive mobile apps

    Steve Coast, @SteveC, founder of OpenStreetMap and CloudMade, with a talk about Ubiquitous GeoContext

    • OpenStreetMap can be somewhat considered the community response to Google Maps: free maps, community-created and maintained, freely usable – CloudMade being a company focusing on using map data to let developers go geo
    • the motto from this talk is “map, please get me to the next penguin in this zoo” – that is, extreme geolocation and contextual information
    • success of a geo app – but according to me also applicable to many Internet startups – summarized in 3 points:
      • low cost to start
      • no licensing problems
      • openness / community driven effort
    • it was an absolute delight to listen to this talk, as it was fun but also rich of content – the highly visual presentation was extremely cool, I hope Steve is going to put it online!

    Oh, and many thanks to Christopher Osborne, @osbornec, for organising an amazing night!