Thursday, April 19. 2007

The Blackberry Crash...And what if you were that dependent on location?

The "Blackberry Crash" today illustrated both a business and cultural dependency on telecommunications through a mobile device. In the not too distant future, we can expect a similar situation to occur with in increasing dependency on location-based information and devices. Blackberry's are not location-enabled with the exception for the Blackberry 8800. The "8800" according to Kanwar Chadha, our keynote speaker at Location Intelligence 2007, is the fastest selling Blackberry ever. Chadha is the founder of SiRF Technology, the largest manufacturer of GPS chips. His observation is that one of the reasons that the "8800" is such a hot seller is because it is location-enabled with a SiRFstar III-LT chipset. What if we assume that location-based information is a more widely available than it is today and that more some of the more important things in our life are dependent on knowing its location? Think about the possible implications of this kind of dependency.

1. You want your daily dose of traffic...you won't leave the office without the knowledge that your daily routine will not be interrupted by some traffic fiasco. That may be even true now in some metro areas.

2. The link to your child's location device goes "dead" and you panic because you don't know the exact location of your 10 year-old.

3. You missplace your purse, you need to "ping" it's location, and the network goes down. You frantically start to "manually" ripping apart your home looking for the lost purse so you don't have to start calling credit card companies to cancel them.

Chadha said that "location is the killer app." He called the competition for location-enabled devices "location itself" meaning that if you know your location, why would you buy a mobile device with a GPS chip.

Consider for a moment that everything in the future is "location aware"...your watch, your wallet, your car, your grandmother, your shoes (you think I'm kidding, right?), regardless of the location-determination device that could be used like GPS, Wi-Fi, or RFID. Consider how many times each day your check the Weather Channel or Weather.com to see the location of a passing weather front, especially if you live in a location that is frequented by "dynamic" weather like tornado alley or the Gulf Coast. We are very much dependent now on location and the more that certain devices, household goods, and people we care about broadcast their location, the more dependent we become on that knowledge...and if a satellite network that enables this dependency becomes disabled, it will make the Blackberry debacle today seem like a "drizzle" compared to the maelstrom that will develop should our dependency on location-based services become the norm.

Posted by Joe Francica in Location Intelligence 2007 at 00:35 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0) |

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On a personal level, I really would not consider any of the examples you provide as being the least bit critical - for the average citizen life goes on just fine without 'instant' access to the internet, phone, video, etc. Anyone who has developed such a dependence on these devices and services (e.g. the 'crackberries') so as to regard them as "life critical" needs to seek immediate counselling. Nobody needs to be checking the weather on the Internet 4-5 times/day. Nobody should be monitoring the location of their children via the Internet. Nobody should panic if they can't 'ping' their purse.

Businesses relying upon such services need to understand that critical outages are simply going to happen and to have a contigency plan in place. This might as basic as a local power outage or as severe as a hurricane. Organizations that don't do this are simply being irresponsible.

In the case of Blackberry it appears that they didn't have sufficient redundancy. They apparently had made a decision to have a single control center for routing messages (according to the Wall Street Journal), which is a way to provide faster service, but has ended up being a weak point in their distribution system.


There has been a lot of hype for many years now about how 'location-based information' is going to be the killer app. This simply isn't going to happen as long as the phone companies keep GPS on their wireless services proprietary and refuse to open up and standardize their APIs.

#1 Marc on 2007-04-19 19:03 (Reply)

Marc:
I disagree with your initial assessment. Because those dependencies have yet to be built into our daily lives, you can not necessarily anticipate the dependencies we will have. I think it will be a huge dependency on even little things. Missing your keys...you'd like to know where you left them, especially if they are ten miles away. Can't find your teenager...beleive me you want to know at 1:00 a.m...Have an aging parent that has early stage Alzheimers? Enough said. Our culture will change...our habits will change and we will rely more and more on knowing 'where' things are.

#2 Joe Francica (Link) on 2007-04-19 19:41 (Reply)

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In reply to	[ Top level ]#1: Marc on 2007-04-19 19:03   #1.1: Joe Francica on 2007-04-19 19:41
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