Combining location and real-time data is hot, according to Joe Stump, CTO and co-founder of SimpleGeo — so hot, in fact, that it was the topic of his talk at The Next Web ’10 this week in Amsterdam.
Intrigued by the possibilities highlighted by Stump during his speech, we grabbed the former lead architect of Digg for a more in-depth look at the future of real-time location and where the big growth areas might be.
1. Leveraging Cell Phone Sensor Data
Your cell phone is constantly sending geodata back to its carrier base, but that’s not all most handsets are capable of recording. The iPhone alone boasts not only a location sensor, but also a light sensor, proximity sensor, compass and accelerometer. Take into account there are over 50 million of these devices around the planet; the potential amount of data that could be captured with them is immense. While there’s potential in improved leveraging of real-time location data from phones now, what’s even more exciting is the increasingly sophisticated sensors coming to future phones, such as temperature meters.
2. More Location Tagging
As a memory trigger, location can be as powerful as smell, says Stump. Geo-tagging items such as e-mails or business meeting notes would be a clever way to remind users about events or conversations. For example, you may not remember meeting Bob Smith and discussing his start-up (and almost certainly did not if it happened very late at a The Next Web party after a few Dutch beers!) but if the method of communication was tagged with a visual reminder of the bar you stood in when the conversation took place, you’re going to have a better chance at recalling it.
3. Platforms Merging
Stump does not suggest that Gowalla and Foursquare are about to become FourWalla, but we may well see social gaming platforms merge with location-based services. For example, two games or a game and a service could live in the same virtual world if the team-up was mutually beneficial and added value for the user. For example, love-it-or-hate-it Facebook game Farmville could see players check in to a local farmer’s market to sell their produce. These kind of cross-platform mergers would increase a game’s long-term interest and stickiness.
4. Games Going Beyond the Checkin
So you’re mayor of Bob’s Coffee Shop, woo-hoo. Although the relative freshness of location-based social games is keeping folks interested now — and is in fact attracting new players by the droves (Stump says that Foursquare sees 100,000 new users every 10 days while MyTown sees 100,000 new users every day) — this won’t always be the case. The games are going to have to go beyond checkins to increase interest. A current example of this is stickybits’s integration with Foursquare. Stickybits lets you tag an object with a QR code and then map it with an image that goes with you around the world. Expect to see more developments like this soon.
5. Making Sense of Location Data
As it’s a new area, not all companies are being an intelligent about location data — especially real-time examples — as they could be. We will soon see more connections made from the information and more graphing done to understand it. We will begin to ask not only where people are going but also why they are going to certain places. As interest in a fellow user’s location declines the further you are from it, and interest in an event likewise declines the further in the past it was, a way of capturing and using real-time location data is needed to best leverage the potentially powerful information.
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