Are Location Based Services the Way of the Future?
There has been so much coverage in the Media regarding Location Based Services (LBS) and how they are the way of the future. While I tend to agree with the vast majority of what’s being said out there at the moment – I thought I would do a bit of exploration around how location based services are NOT going to be the way of the future. Or more so, how they are not going to be as big as what we all think they are going to be and perhaps why we shouldn’t rely on them in their entirety.
The main negative arguments that have been presented in all my readings about location based services is predominately focused around some research which was conducted in the UK by Dr William Webb from telecoms regulator OfCom. He discovered that of the 100,000 people tracked in his research – almost all of them had similar, if not identical, movement patterns day in, day out. This basically means that people don’t really change all that much – we move to work, using the same route that we use every day. We stay at work the majority of the day and then we go home. We don’t really explore other avenues of getting to and from work because it nonsensical to assume that we haven’t already mapped out the best way to get there already – so any sort of mobile location based service is not going to change our already proven best method. Additionally, lets say that it did find out a better route, we would then use that route everyday and not change from this newly discovered one again for some time. What’s interesting is that the research found that children and teenagers are much the same – they go to school using the same route every day and they spend the vast majority of their day at school. They then go home using the same route they took to school, and while they might deviate a little here and there to pick up food or go to a friend’s house – the overwhelming majority of their movement is within a 5KM to 10KM radius of their home and school.
So what does all this mean? Well, what seems to be the biggest trend in all this research is human consistency. People realistically don’t deviate from their typical everyday lives all that much. If you wrote down where you travelled day in and day out – you would discover that realistically you don’t really move more than a 10KM radius from your work or your home. When you are at work you might travel around a little or you remain stationary in the one place all day – when you are at home you go to the shops around your house, and commute to restaurants and use services within this limited area. Sure there will always be exceptions to this rule – so it’s not a blanket generalization, but what it is - is what the vast majority of people do. This also rings true for any interactions you have with your friends and colleagues. Most of the friends that you have, you have grown up with or you work with – and really you already know where they are located. Sure thing, you don’t know where they are located all the time but this then begs the question – do you really want to know? I have read arguments for and against this point and obviously the biggest factor in all of this has to do with privacy – perhaps something that deserves an entirely separate post in itself later.
So lets dig a little deeper - with the birth of ‘super’ smart phones (aka iPhone 3G) where you can be “always on” and your friends can interact with your every second of the day – how much will people really rely on location based services. I think it’s a moot point – I for one go to work each day and discover that only during the limited 1 hour I have for lunch would I look to see where my friends are located around my work. If they were within a close area of me, I would definitively give them a call or a message to hook up for lunch (of note is that I may already know they work close to me and so I don’t need to know this). Sure thing on a Friday night or around the weekend I would definitively use location based services more to find out what my friends are doing – but only if I could be bothered hooking up with them. If I didn’t want to go out – it’s pretty obvious that I should be able to “turn myself off” – which I think most location developers are on top of (or should be otherwise their service is going to have real privacy issues).
So where does that leave us? Well realistically the point that comes out in all these articles and all of research around location based services is that people don’t really change all that much. They go to the same places day in and day out, and the intrinsic similarity in their movement patterns suggests that they don’t like change. Most people develop an affinity for the same coffee shop, super market, clothes stores and so on. If you find something that you like at one location, you won’t often change to another location but rather revisit that same location over and over again. So realistically, location based services are pretty useless when it comes to trying to get you to change – because the vast majority of research has found that people resent change. Have a think about this – if you love your local coffee shop just around the corner and within walking distance of your home, and then someone came and told you “No, no you have to try this cafe, it’s the best coffee in the world but it’s not a walk down the street, you have to drive” – what would you do? 95% of people couldn’t be bothered to try the new coffee shop until they were in that area and it was convenient to them. I love the coffee down at my local cafe, and there is no way I would drive to another cafe just to get coffee which is better but requires me to get in my car, dodge traffic, park, get out of the car, wait for the coffee, get back in my car, dodge traffic and return home. The stress alone of that exercise is enough to make it not worthwhile. It has to be truly value adding for you to want to go through this, and like most things in life - if it’s not going to be an ‘amazing experience’, rather just a ‘good one’ - then you will not find yourself doing it. I can see some of you at the moment going “if the coffee was really unbelievable I would do it” - and maybe your thoughts really do have some merit to them, but I think in the vast majority of cases people rely on the age old adage “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it”.
So in conclusion however, and I say this as a big however – I think where location based services will come out on top is by letting you know what you friends and colleagues are doing at any given time. Sure thing, the argument that people don’t move far from their location is a valid one (and clearly proven) – but this doesn’t mean to say that location based services are entirely useless. A 10KM radius is still a huge area, and many people will want to know what their family, friends and colleagues are doing. Being able to have the choice of discovering new places and new friends with location based services is an offering that has previously never been accessible to the masses before – so perhaps people’s movements and consistency patterns may change. While it’s undoubtedly true that the majority of people are resistant to change – location based services will assist in allowing people to communicate with the people they want too, and ignore the ones they don’t want to deal with. It’s all about choice – if location based services can provide people with more choice than they already have in their lives – then it opens up a whole range of avenues that have never previously existed. Something I think, which is ultimately very very exciting.
Thoughts? Drop a comment below.
2 commentsTry not to do too many things at once
I modified this famous George Allen quote:
“Try not to do too many things at once. Know what you want, the number one thing today and tomorrow. Persevere and get it done.”
to my own version:
“Try not to do too many things at once. Know what you want, the number one thing today and tomorrow. Persevere and get it done above all else. Otherwise, who knows, if you wait - you may never know what could have been.”
Cool huh?
No commentsCreating a Product
A concept in the software industry which is often heavily debated is that there are, in fact, no new ideas - rather just products created off existing ideas, which are done - to put it simply - much better. A perfect example would be the social networking phenomenon. There are now so many different social networking sites that they are almost impossible to track. Thus, it begs a very valid question - what is truly different about each of these sites ? The obvious truth is - there isn’t really anything different. Most of these sites are ultimately exactly the same - they are just presented in a different format and appeal to different niche audiences. For example, Myspace is still extremely well known for its Music and Bands - an area Facebook is trying to get into - but just can’t crack. Conversely, Facebook is getting huge adoption rates simply because it has marketed itself as a “safer” site than Myspace, and tends to be predominately used by late teenagers through to late twenty-somethings.
So then you may be asking - why bother creating any new products at all if they are all just going to repeat themselves ? Well, the reasoning behind that is clear - the innovative process always comes from building a product and then changing, altering or narrowing your focus on that product to area’s which appear to be working. Thus, in my opinion, the best way to create a product is to look at what an existing product has - and what it doesn’t have. For example, there are hundreds of companies now producing many very successful applications off social networking sites because they are trying to fill the voids that the site itself has - a very clever strategy. The key is to get a core idea, and build on this idea with a bunch of features that a user will want to use - as opposed to being forced into using. Forcing a user into a product isn’t going to get you anywhere - additionally - attempting to force a user to change from one product to another by producing a bunch of similar features isn’t going to help either. If you were going to do that - just build a clone of Facebook and you should be worth a few billion in a couple of years ? Unlikely.
The key to any application is to centralize your idea around a core concept - then flesh out features from this core concept. You can’t do everything - so focus instead, on things that work and that you truly believe are going to be value adding to your core idea and to your users. Therefore, the most important aspect in any new product chain, in my opinion, is to focus on the core idea - but also accept that you may need to change it in response to what your market - and more importantly - what your users are demanding. It’s important to recognize that if things aren’t working out the way you originally intended them to work, then you need to change your strategy to maximize the value of your brand as well as change what your doing in response to market demands, user requests and what people expect to see from what you are doing.
So if you are going into the start-up world - start with a pen and a piece of paper and write down a whole bunch of features that existing sites/products have, and then correlate these features to a whole bunch of features which are missing. Somewhere during this process - you will hit on a core idea and you may even be ultimately successful with this idea without having to change. However, before you jump out of your chair and start writing - the best piece of advice I can give is that you must recognize and be willing to completely change where you have started, or where you thought you were going if an opportunity presents itself. It’s important to be flexible and dynamic with your code to ensure you can make these changes, otherwise you may trap yourself into one direction and then you may not be able to get out of it. Keep the cash burn rate low, so you have the single most important factor on your side - time.
Love to hear your thoughts ? Drop a comment below.
1 commentMy Problem with the Google Algorithm
I generally love Google and I think they have created some of the best services that the web has to offer. I am an avid user of Gmail and obviously use their service engine about 100 times a day to research and expand my knowledge. However, I have a one big issue with Google and with their world-famous “PageRank” algorithm. To put it simply, it has a flaw. Before you call me an idiot or laugh at me - “How can you call the worlds largest & arguably most successful internet search engine flawed?” - well, let me explain.
The problem I have with the Google PageRank algorithm is the manner in which the content is ranked on the engine itself. Let’s say you are a massive website and have a large pagerank - predominately derived from the number of incoming and outgoing links you have on your site - and you write a story on a topic. Your post is immediately ranked at the top of search results - even if the post is inaccurate or written without full knowledge simply because of the existing pagerank your site has derived. This means that when a user is searching for content relating to a particular topic, or searching for information about a particular company - your post ranks at the top of the Google results based on your sites existing pagerank - regardless of whether it is accurate or not. Is this fair ?
Of course it’s not fair, and it provides sites that have a lot of traffic with an enormous amount of power. It means that any site with a high pagerank can effectively write an unbiased and overtly critical review of a topic, company or situation and it will receive preferential treatment within the Google search engine based solely on the bias of the existing pagerank of the site. The consequential problem then lies in the fact that Google is then not “organising the worlds information” correctly because there is no way that humans can “demote” the post in Googles search results or let them know it’s wrong, inaccurate or poorly researched. In my opinion, I believe this is a critical flaw of Google search ideology and one that needs fixing or solving. The question is - how can it be done ?
Well obviously, the most effective way is by utilizing the power of human search to some degree. Companies such as Mahalo allow users to influence the results of their search to an “n th” degree, and therefore efficiently judge the relevancy of content which is delivered within a search. Sure, there are going to be people that disagree with the contents relevancy etc - but the majority of people will always rule. (Before you start on about “automated influences” - it is becoming increasingly more difficult to register, login, vote repeatedly and then logout without being detected as a “robotic” influence on these results.) So why is this human intervention or “voting” good ? Well it would assist in solving the biggest problem (in my opinion) that Google faces in respect of content which is heavily influenced by PageRank. Just because a website has a high pagerank - its posts should not always be assigned immediately with a high page rank solely based on the overall pagerank of the site itself. The post must “earn” (to some degree) the equivalent pagerank via other websites commenting on the post, and determining whether the post is subjectively fair and/or correct.
It is clear that there is no way Google can efficiently determine the relevancy of content or whether a post is subjectively fair and/or correct - and yes, I mean the content specifically. Sure, Google can determine the relevancy of a website and the popularity of that site perfectly by looking at the number of inbound and outbound links - but it is limited in determining whether a specific article is accurately and/or fairly written. It assigns the initial pagerank of the site itself, and then effectively keeps the post at this pagerank - regardless of other websites linking and writing about the validity of the post. Put simply, Google have yet to develop a method - without human intervention - to specifically determine whether an article is “accurate or fairly written”.
The only way to interpret this is to automatically string together the words that appear on not only the initial article/topic page, but on all other websites which link and have written about the original post. If Google could dynamically determine the “mood” of a post such that they are able to identify words like “agree, good write up etc” or “disagree, got it wrong, inaccurate” on all sites linking to and from the original post, and weigh these words in assigning the overall ranking to the page - then they would be able to more effectively determine the relevancy of not only the website and the post - but also of the “content within the post”.
I think if Google can solve this problem mathematically (or not), then it will be a key step in ensuring they remain the dominant search engine. Of course humans can judge this quickly and easily and Google have tested incorporating human search in their Labs page - although they have since removed this experiment. Either way - I really believe it’s something that needs to be considered and resolved.
Leave a note in the comments with your thoughts. Do you agree with me or ?
2 commentsTechnology & Life
It’s really interesting being involved in a startup that hopes to change people’s lives. The most fascinating thing I find about technology is its application to human life, and whether it changes it. You know something is highly disruptive when it actually changes the way that people act, or the way they do something or even the way they will do something in the future.
If you look at the most successful technology companies on the planet - they all have changed human life in such a huge way. Take Google for example, before it was created, people would never have been able to find information as quickly as they can now. In creating any technology company, you want the technology you are producing to actually have a meaningful and positive impact on people’s lives - not simply be used as a way to generate income. Income and profit are typically by-products of a successful idea that has had real impact on human life. As much as people despise Microsoft, you could quite successfully argue that it was Microsoft which pioneered software and built huge in-roads into making programming ‘popular’. Put aside all the negative aspects of the company such as monopolistic and closed source behaviour - would Sergy Brin and Larry Page created Google or even been interested in programming if it wasn’t for companies such as Microsoft? I’m not entirely sure the outcome would have been the same.
This is really only a short post, inspired from a video I saw on YouTube. We hope that Fluc really does have a positive impact on people’s lives, and provide people with additional income and relevant information that they would have never otherwise had. The video I based this post on is embedded below, and it is perhaps somewhat negative in its interpretation of the world - I believe that there have been a huge amount of positive things done on this planet, as well as the negative ones. Either way, this video makes you take a step back and really think about yourself, your life and how sometimes things that seem really bad, aren’t really that bad at all. I believe its called - ‘perspective’.
Enjoy!
1 commentWelcome to My Blog!
It’s always difficult to write the very first post on your new blog. I haven’t been blogging for what some consider a “long time” but I have started nevertheless. As they say “The Journey of 1000 Miles begins with the First Step” and I guess I have just taken it.
I’m not entirely sure what I endeavor to achieve with this blog - I think mainly I started it so that people could get to know me better outside of Fluc and learn about all the other things I do. This blog is by no means a personal diary, and I do not intend for it to be. It’s rather just a place that I can write about some of the funny things I find on the internet, and touch on some of my experiences on the long and hard road as an entrepreneur.
While I am definitely not an ‘experienced campaigner’ in comparison to some of the seasoned veterans in the start-up industry, I am at least having a go and dabbling it in now with Fluc. I have this great book on all the speeches that changed the world, and one that Theodore Roosevelt said is probably particularly relevant now:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
I guess you could relate it to Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Poem from 1850:
“I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.”
Either way, the point is that you have to take a few risks in your life and Fluc is one of mine. I think it’s also because I am the sort of person that needs to be consistently doing something, and I find it difficult to be bored. If I’m not in the books studying, then I’m either working to get more capital for Fluc, or I am working on Fluc - so by the time you add up all these hours into one day, you really get up to the 15 hour plus mark as an average.
It’s funny (as an aside) because I really love surfing and genuine beach life in Australia, and I used to try and get down to the beach most weekends in summer. It’s around 2 hours drive from where I live in Melbourne and I haven’t had any time at all to get even near the beach since Ruslan and I started Fluc. Summer is just around the corner for us Aussies, and day-light savings starts next week (28th Oct 2007). Typically, this really doesn’t mean much for me as I tend to work from 6pm till 4am as opposed to vice-versa. I mainly do this because there are fewer distractions when you are working away at night, in comparison to the daytime - notably the phone.
Either way I am going to finish up this first post now. I honestly have no idea how many people will end up reading this blog - and to me it doesn’t really matter - as at least I’ll have something to look back on in the future and laugh.
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