Location Based Services in 2014 - Part 2

This is part 2 (of 2) of a paper I wrote for the AGI in the UK on the future of location based services, which I have been meaning to publish for a while! This was for their "Foresight Study" to look at where the geospatial industry will be in five years' time. Please read part 1 first!

Impact of changes upon the geospatial industry and upon customers
Based on all these assumptions, we will have the ability to know where more or less everyone is, all the time – but with individuals having control over which people and applications can know their location, at what time.

As with managing social network connections, users will be able to manage a common set of location sharing rules that are used by all applications. For example, work related applications may only be able to access a person’s location during working hours, certain applications or people may only be able to access an approximate location rather than a precise one, and so on. This will be integrated with the more general methods for managing sharing of information with groups of friends / business contacts (so for example you can set a location sharing policy with groups of people defined in other systems like Facebook or LinkedIn).

There will also be widespread mechanisms for determining where you are more precisely than can be done with a GPS (or in situations where GPS does not work well, for example indoors). As mentioned previously, a common one will be using one or more kinds of proximity sensor.

Image processing will be significant also – for example it will be commonplace to point a phone’s camera at a building, identify the building in question and give the user relevant information about that building, such as businesses within it, etc. This is a fairly straightforward combination of current technology categories. The first category is “simple” augmented reality systems like Layar, which are based on knowing the location and orientation of a phone (and overlaying data on a video image produced by the phone). The second category is technologies like PhotoSynth and Google Streetview’s new user photo capabilities, which match items such as buildings from different images (as well as having a geo-referenced set of base images). Combining these two areas will result in much more accurate augmented reality capabilities.

In general with most location services there is a requirement to provide them based on where you are now, but also in many cases based on where you will be in the future. I may want to find a restaurant to eat at right now, or I may want to find somewhere to make a reservation for dinner in the city I will be in tomorrow night. This can be done manually of course, but we will also see increasing integration with calendars, travel reservation systems, etc, to build a model of a user’s future location and enable applications around that.

Location aware phones will be a massive source of crowdsourced data, using both passive and active approaches. Passive approaches – automatic uploading of location data periodically – can be used for things like determining real time speed on roads (and footpaths, cycle paths, etc). Passively captured data can also be used to identify likely changes to road networks or other geospatial data – for example if lots of people are travelling at 30+ mph along a path where there is no recorded road in the database, that is probably a sign that there is a new road there. And conversely if a normally busy road suddenly has no traffic then it is probably closed. Active approaches to crowdsourced data will be discussed in the scenario section.

Scenario(s)
This section includes a few examples of potential usage of the technologies discussed previously.

Highly personalized “what to do” services
There will be widely available services to make suggestions to people on what to do in a given location – combining highly detailed location data with huge amounts of user created data on restaurants, bars, music venues, bands, and so on. Technologies like Amazon’s recommendation engine very much apply here, to look at what other “people like you” like in this area (based on explicit information you provide – “I like sushi” – or implicit information derived from other places you have been, or restaurants you have rated highly, etc).

As mentioned previously, there is a requirement to provide this type of service not just based on where you are now, but where you will be in the future. This will also be a commonplace capability in 5 years – there will be many systems to help with planning trips in a very personalized and detailed fashion.

Sophisticated social planning tools
Location based social planning tools will grow enormously in usage as smart phones and social network usage become pervasive. Currently there are a number of applications that show where your friends are now but they have relatively low adoption, which means that they are still more at the novelty stage rather than being genuinely useful for most people. This will change dramatically over the next 5 years.

Active crowdsourcing for data creation
Crowdsourced geodata creation has huge momentum at the moment, with OpenStreetMap being the most notable example. Easy to use tools on smartphones will make this even more prevalent, especially for simple items like points of interest. More active mappers will use tools that make requests proactively – for example they might get an alert that OpenStreetMap is not sure whether the street they are currently on (or are close to) is correctly named, so please could they validate it.

We will also see significant growth in real time crowdsourced data – for example current gas / petrol prices, how long is the wait for a table at a given restaurant, etc.

“Safe driver” insurance
Car insurance companies will offer discounts for users who participate in “safe driver” programs, where the driver agrees that if her car exceeds the speed limit, this information will be passed back to the insurance company, with penalties resulting when certain thresholds are exceeded (in terms of amount by which the speed limit is exceeded, number of incidents, etc).

This also raises interesting questions in terms of privacy policy and legal issues. Whether or not drivers have signed up for such a scheme, in the event of a multi-car accident it is quite likely that data will exist showing the speed and route of all vehicles prior to the accident. Should the police and insurance companies be allowed to have access to this data? There are valid arguments both ways, but this is an area where technology is possibly developing faster than policy, and this would be a good thing for the AGI to get some focus on. This question and other similar ones will come up with increasing frequency. Under what circumstances (if any) can law enforcement authorities issue a “search warrant” to look at a person’s location information that may be stored with a telecom company or IT service provider?

Enterprise location-based services
In the enterprise, we will see a huge growth in the use of location-based services, driven by their widespread adoption in the mainstream consumer world. Currently most enterprise applications involving location tracking tend to be specialised niche applications, often on specialised hardware like rugged tablet PCs. This is likely to change to make much greater use of mainstream devices like the iPhone, and using commercial services to store and display location information.

This is likely to impact the enterprise in two broad areas: one is that mobile / field based workers will have much better and simpler access to information, using the type of location-based services already mentioned. And the enterprise will have a real time picture of where all its employees are (as well as other resources and assets). Traditionally geospatial applications have been more about documenting and analysing the past, and planning for the future, but there will be significant growth in applications focused on real time information. This will also be driven by other sensor-based information. For example, utilities are seeing significant growth in intelligent sensors on their networks, especially in the electric industry where there is a strong focus on building the “smart grid”. A combination of sensors on the network and location tracking of employees, vehicles and assets will give electric utilities much greater visibility of their operations than they have today.

Summary of 5 key points

1. Location tracking will be pervasive in 2014 – all mobile phones will have location tracking, and current limitations like inability to run applications in the background will have been addressed. Compasses and cameras will be fused with GPS to provide much greater context around the user’s location (and orientation). We will have the ability to know where everyone is all the time (with appropriate ways for people to limit access to their location in various ways).
2. Location aware smartphones will create an enormous amount of free and accurate crowdsourced data, both relatively static (road networks, points of interest) and very dynamic (traffic speeds, gas prices, restaurant waiting times).
3. Mainstream consumer-focused location aware smartphones and related location based services will make significant inroads into the enterprise, significantly reducing the cost and effort required for many mobile applications. This will provide better tools for mobile / field workers, and an increased emphasis on real time geospatial applications for many enterprises.
4. While current location is extremely useful for many applications, future location is also very useful, and there will be an infrastructure in place for applications based on future location in addition to current location .
5. An important area of focus should be developing appropriate policies and laws around sharing of an individual’s location information. We cannot just stop the advance of technology, and there is a danger that the technology is advancing much faster than policy in this area. This would be a good area for the AGI to add value, by initiating / encouraging work on policy and legal issues.

OpenStreetMap in Haiti - video

I am sure most readers of this blog have heard about how there has been a huge effort to map Haiti using OpenStreetMap - Harry Wood gave a good summary of efforts a few weeks ago. Currently Schuyler Erle and Tom Buckley are down in Haiti helping out with mapping for the relief efforts on ground - Schuyler's blog has really interesting accounts of what they've been doing. Schuyler tweeted today that he and Tom were "starting to post raw, iffy quality, unedited audio and video - please feel free to edit/remix/repost". So here's my quick edit of what they've posted so far - I'll try to do something similar if they post more in the coming days. The video features people from UNOSAT and UN OCHA explaining how useful OpenStreetMap data was to them - and also some clips from a prayer march. Click through on the video to see a larger version (and choose 480p).

Update: some quotes from the video ...

Catherine from OCHA (the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs): "Basically it's the best source of transportation information that we have for Haiti ... it's the most comprehensive one, and the most up to date, of course. This is information that everyone is using here. There is a big GIS group here for this humanitarian response, and everybody is using OpenStreetMap."

Schuyler: "OpenstreetMap was used for the UNOSAT building damage assessment ..."

Olivier from UNOSAT (UN Operational Satellite Applications Programme): "Of course we used OpenStreetMap on a daily basis ... every day it was possible to improve our maps ... with new information. Usually it is impossible to get this information ... so thanks to this volunteer platform, it has been fantastic for us, that's for sure."

OpenStreetMap meetup in Denver next Wednesday

On Wednesday next week, there will be an informal meetup at the Wynkoop Brewing Company in downtown Denver, to drink beer and discuss OpenStreetMap. Steve Coast, the founder of OpenStreetMap, will be there, and it should be an interesting group of local geo folks. We'll be there from 5:30pm until 9ish or later!

If you’re already involved with OpenStreetMap, this is a chance to get together with other contributors and discuss ideas – I would love to see us having more coordinated initiatives in the Denver area than we’ve had so far. And if you haven’t been involved but are curious about OpenStreetMap, this is a great opportunity to learn more. Hope to see a good turnout – please sign up here! That's Steve and me in the photo above by the way, to help you track us down if you don't know us!

Exciting job news: I am rejoining Ubisense

I am excited to announce that I have decided to rejoin my friends at Ubisense, where I worked from 2002 until I went to be CTO at Intergraph in 2005. I was a co-founder of Ten Sails, the company that provided early stage funding to and later merged with Ubisense.

There are two main parts to the business: Precise Real Time Location Systems (RTLS), and geospatial consulting. I’ll be involved with both sides of the business.

The RTLS technology tracks objects to an accuracy of a foot or so, using local sensors. Many, but not all, the applications are indoors, where it is especially hard to track location accurately. The difficulty is that whatever type of sensing technology you use, signals tend to reflect off walls, floors and ceilings, and direct signals are frequently blocked by furniture, people or other obstacles. This means it is very easy to get false readings that can result in serious errors in location calculation. Ubisense uses a technology called ultrawideband (UWB), enabling many interesting applications that can’t be implemented with less accurate sensing technologies.

There are potential applications in many different industries: right now we have good traction in several, including manufacturing, transit, military training, plant safety, and logistics. And many people’s favorite “unexpected” application seems to be cow tracking! The technology has really matured since I was last at Ubisense. I’ll talk in much more detail about the technology and applications in future posts.

On the geospatial consulting side of the business, Ubisense is primarily focused on implementation services to GE Smallworld customers (Smallworld continues to be the leading geospatial software platform in utilities, according to Daratech). As readers of my blog know, I am enthused about the potential of applying the new generation of geospatial technologies to more traditional GIS application areas. So I’m excited about the opportunity to work with Smallworld customers on a geospatial strategy that enhances the strengths of their existing system for complex applications by adding in newer, simpler geospatial technologies to help broaden the use of their geospatial data.

Since this is a full time role, I won’t be continuing in my role as Chief Technology Advisor at Enspiria, where I was previously spending a week a month or so. I very much enjoyed my time working at Enspiria and wish them all the best. But I will continue with my two advisory board positions, at FortiusOne and PublicEarth.

The GIS Certification emperor has no clothes

Today there has been a flurry of discussion about the GISP certification on twitter. I thought I would repost an article that I originally had published in Geospatial Solutions magazine in November 2003 (!!), which I can no longer find online (except in obscure archives). I think that everything there is still relevant (the "grandfathering" provision I refer to is no longer available, but it is still relevant in that many people received their GISP this way). I know and like various people involved with the program, and believe that they have good intentions, but continue to feel that it is misguided for the reasons I outline below. I have no issue with the code of ethics part of the program. And I also have no issue with a certification program that actually attempts to measure competency or skills in some specific way (for example ESRI has announced a more specific program that will evaluate skills with their products, which makes more sense to me). But I still don't see how GISP in any way evaluates a person's competency. Anyway, here's the old article, unchanged from 2003 ... (also, the FAQs on the GISCI site that I reference haven't changed since then!)

The Certification Emperor Has No Clothes
Peter Batty, Nov 1, 2003
Geospatial Solutions Magazine

The GIS certification process recently rolled out by URISA and others aims to "recommend a formal system to evaluate the competency of professionals whose primary job responsibility involves the design and use of geographic information systems" (see www.gisci.org). But a major argument against GIS certification is stated in the frequently asked questions (FAQ) at the certification site.

In answer to the question "Why not test an individual's knowledge of GIS skills to certify competence as other professions do?" the FAQ responds: "It is felt that general agreement on the skills needed for the GIS profession has not yet been achieved, given that there are so many different professions that use GIS technology . . . it is very difficult to design a single examination that can fairly evaluate the basic skills needed". After "not yet been" I would add "and will never be". The range of spatial applications and technologies, and skills needed, continues to diversify rapidly and promises to do so well into the future.

The problem of creating an exam is swept under the carpet by requiring formal GIS education in order to be certified. The obvious issue with this is that the great majority of GIS professionals do not have any formal GIS education. To overcome this objection, there is a grandfathering provision, which allows anyone with eight years of technical experience in the industry to become certified. How this evaluates anyone's competency is a mystery.

Furthermore, a five-year recertification process requires one to do a certain amount of GIS-related education. The problem with this is that the most appropriate development path for many GIS professionals may not be to take academic GIS study. It may instead be to learn more about XML, or environmental policies, or relational database tuning, or utility network design. To insist that someone has to do education within a very narrowly defined set of GIS courses or conferences would do the industry a major disservice. This is not to say that a continuing GIS education is bad. It may be a great option for some people. But it is just one of many valid options to help people do their GIS-related jobs better.

In 2008, the grandfathering option goes away, which means that a prerequisite to being certified is to have obtained a degree in GIS. If anyone took certification seriously, this would massively reduce the talent available to the spatial industry as the 99.9 percent of people who have degrees in other subjects would be excluded. Obviously I don't think that will happen, but again it begs the question of why bother with the certification process?

Does certification pass the test?
Many of the reasons advanced for certification do not stand up to scrutiny. One is helping employers with recruitment. But a glance at someone's resume will give much greater insight into whether someone is appropriately qualified for a position than certification does. Another is that "it is felt that the nation's taxpayers deserve assurance that competent and ethical GIS professionals are being hired with their public tax dollars". I smile at the thought of millions of taxpayers lying awake at night worrying about the competence of their government's GIS professionals. Personally, I'd prefer that the GIS professionals my tax dollars are funding be doing their jobs rather than spending time applying for a certificate that bears no relation to their competence. It is even claimed that GIS certification will improve the lives of citizens, which seems like a particularly desperate attempt at justification.

As spatial technology expands into the mainstream, a hugely diverse range of skills is required to implement systems and move the industry forward. The space is so broad that it makes no sense to try to have a certification process. To implement a consistent process, the certification criteria need to be either so broad that they're meaningless (as with grandfathering) or so narrow that they apply to a tiny fraction of relevant people, and would greatly hamper the industry if anyone took certification seriously.

We should not be trying to hide spatial technology in the back room and restrict who can use it. Instead, we should be promoting usage by everyone.

Great co-founder opportunity in web geo startup

A friend of mine has put together a really interesting business plan for a web-based geo startup and he's looking for a technical co-founder. I've been seriously contemplating doing it myself but have some other plans that I think will prevent me from doing so (more on that soon!). He has excellent experience as a CEO and in business development and fund-raising in this space. And he has some great investors lined up, so will be able to pay a reasonable salary from the beginning. He's looking for someone with experience building large scalable database apps, web and geo experience highly desirable. Location would be Denver/Boulder, or possibly the bay area as a second choice. Drop me an email if you're interested in finding out more.

Thoughts on the upcoming Apple Tablet

Much of the tech world has been obsessing over the rumored upcoming Apple tablet, which is expected to be unveiled to the world on January 27. So I hesitate to add more to that, but there are so many rumors out there that it's hard to wade through them, so I thought I would throw in a high level perspective on what we are likely to see, and include links to some of the more interesting articles I've come across.

I think the announcement is particularly interesting as Steve Jobs is said to have stopped Apple tablet projects before - according to the New York Times:

Another former Apple executive who was there at the time said the tablets kept getting shelved at Apple because Mr. Jobs, whose incisive critiques are often memorable, asked, in essence, what they were good for besides surfing the Web in the bathroom.

So if they are announcing this (and you buy this quote, which is plausible), there has to be something substantial about the tablet beyond just being a MacBook without a keyboard or a larger iPhone.

So I think (not based on any inside info, just on filtering all the rumors and thinking about what makes sense from an Apple perspective) that there will be two big ground-breaking things about the Apple tablet.

First, it is widely predicted that the tablet will be Apple's attempt to redefine the world of printed media (like the iPod redefined the music recording industry and the iPhone redefined the mobile phone).
This certainly makes sense. The Kindle and other eReader devices have made an interesting start in that space, but as I said in my initial review of the Kindle, it is good for sequential reading of text, but not good for more random browsing, like reading newspapers and magazines. And indeed the Kindle is only good for text, not for other kinds of media. With the Apple tablet I would assume that of course you will be able to browse arbitrary web sites, but imagine that it is also highly likely that there may be a simplified full screen user interface, which would provide a great platform for magazines, newspapers, book publishers etc to create compelling multi-media content including text, photos, video, audio, etc. Available content would presumably include a mix of free and paid, like the current app store / iTunes models (and this would give the struggling traditional news media industry another potential business model for the future). One interesting potential screen technology for such a device comes from Pixel Qi, who have been linked with the Apple tablet in some posts. Obviously it would also be a good device for watching movies, TV shows, youtube and other video content.

However, I think that doing that alone is probably not enough to hit the size of market that Apple would want. The tablet clearly won't replace an iPhone, as it won't fit in your pocket. So the question would be how many people, if they already have a smart phone and a laptop, would buy another device in between those two (in size and cost), with a lot of overlap in functionality. This is partly a cost question, and partly one of convenience - would traveling techies, even devout Apple fan boys like me, want to carry three devices everywhere: iPhone, Tablet and MacBook? I think not. So I believe that the second big thing is that the device has to be a good replacement for a laptop too, and again there are plenty of rumors that support that.

For this to be the case, obviously there needs to be a mechanism for text entry that is a good alternative to typing on a physical keyboard. A simple on screen touch keyboard probably isn't going to be good enough to persuade people to give up laptops in large volumes. So I think Apple must have more up its sleeve here. One of the more intriguing rumor threads that has appeared in various places is that the new device will have a "steep learning curve", and that the way that you interact with it is "unexpected". Obviously having a steep learning curve is not something that you would expect in general from an Apple device, especially one aimed at the mass market, unless there is a compelling reason for this. So I think that this has to be around a new mechanism for text entry, and more broadly interaction with the device. Apple acquired a company called Fingerworks in 2005, which had a lot of interesting technology in the areas of multi-touch interaction, gestures, and text entry, and Apple also owns a lot of patents in this area - these are discussed in various places including AppleInsider (who also discuss a tactile touch keyboard) and gizmodo. The old Fingerworks web site was recently taken down, which has increased speculation that their technology is involved. One of the more intriguing aspects of this is the use of "chords", which means that you can trigger different actions by pressing different combinations of fingers (for example, your thumb and third finger versus your thumb and fourth finger) - this video at CrunchGear gives some examples. Another is an approach to user interaction where the keyboard and pointing device are integrated, you don't have to move your hands from one place to another as you do with a touchpad or mouse.

So in summary, the two key things that I am looking forward to seeing are a big focus on updating printed media (magazines, newspapers, books), and something intriguing and new in terms of user interaction, covering text entry and new ways of using multi-touch surfaces. The latter could make the tablet another major step forward for computing in general (as the iPhone was in many ways ... I am amazed at how much of my "computing" I do on my iPhone these days).

One final comment is that to meet its aims as a news reading device, you will need the ability to be connected to the Internet all the time, but most people will not want to pay for two separate wireless data plans for their iPhone and Tablet, so it will be interesting to see how they will address that. Obviously I would assume they would support WiFi, but I would also assume that some or all models would also have 3G wireless built in. Will there be an option for simple tethering with an iPhone I wonder (if Fake Steve Jobs' rant - bad language warning! - has been enough to make AT&T finally get their act together!)? Or will there at least be some sort of package deal on a data plan if you have both an iPhone and an Apple Tablet?

I'm looking forward to the announcement on January 27 :) !!