Podcast: What We learned at Location Intelligence 2007

We focus in on two of the presentations at last week’s Location Intelligence Conference. One, by Yahoo’s Frazier Miller, director of product management for Yahoo Local, gave a surprising set of numbers about the potential size of teh local search marketplace. The second, from SiRF’s Kanwar Chadha, Founder and Vice President of Marketing, highlighted how we’ve barely begun to realize the scope of location in mobile devices.

The podcast is 14 minutes long (< 6 Mb) and was recorded on April 20, 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.

Placebase to Offer Per Transaction Data Use from Claritas, ESRI, NAVTEQ

Placebase jumped into the Web 2.0 mapping fray a few years back with a different model - one much more condusive to commercial mapping solutions than some of the other players with APIs. (1, 2) The platform, if you recall, is called PushPin.

Next week at our Location Intelligence Conference, the company makes another leap, this time in data licensing models. On Monday, the company will announce and release Pushpin Collections (don’t confuse it with Microsoft’s method for saving geo data of interest) which allows developers to license on a per transation basis data from Claritas, ESRI, Navteq without upfront costs or integration challenges. Among the data available to mashup that’s not normally available: real estate lot outlines (parcels), school districts, block groups. The cost, depending on the data provider, can start from just $.02/transaction with discounts for volume users.

InformationWeek on Maps & Mashups

This week’s issue of InformationWeek has an article called "Maps Meet Mashups." It’s a fantastic review of how mashups have or have not infiltrated down to business users. One statisitic quoted in the article hit home particularly: "But full-blown location mashups created by businesses aren’t that common. In a recent survey of 250 business technology professionals by InformationWeek, only 7% of respondents said their companies widely use mashup tools. ‘Businesses have bigger priorities at the moment than worrying how to mash up logistical data or workforce information into a mapping app,’ says Matt Brown, an analyst at Forrester Research." These are exactly the issues we are trying to raise at Location Intelligence 2007. Hopefully the mainstream business execs will wake up to the potential of mapping technology soon…it can be a competitive advantage that many are already using such as the companies mentioned in the article like Starbucks, UPS, Ford, GM, Target, etc.

Location Intelligence Poll: Weigh in on Key Issues

Our Location Intelligence Conference is just a few weeks away and we are asking readers and attendees to give their opinion on the topics they feel are most relevent to discuss. Please take a moment to vote on the issues you feel are most important. Here are the choices:

• Open Source Geospatial Technology
• Business Opportunities of Local Search
• How Do You Sell Web Services
• Intellectual Property Rights
• Location-enabling the Consumer
• Real-time, Dynamic Content (traffic, weather, etc.)
• Social, Location-based Networking
• Where are the VC’s putting their money.
• Will Satellite Imagery Drive Location Intelligent Solutions
• Enterprise Systems and Location Technology (CRM, ERP, etc.)

Vote at the LI website