Sunday, 23 November 2008

Future of Mobile 08: Signposting on the New Paths of Discovery

Andrew Scott — Rummble

  • Only 4.5% of your time is spent in a good GPS signal…
  • CellID in city centres is good enough to allow you to track your movement along Oxford St
  • 25% of flickr photos are now geotagged
  • Under the Radar last week — a good proportion of companies had something to do with location, but they were spread throughout categories
  • What went wrong with playtxt (Europe’s first location-based social network)?
    • Cost (on mobile)
    • Mobile usability
    • Location set was manual
    • Lack of public understanding
  • What did Andrew learn from playtxt?
    • Privacy was not a barrier — less than 5% used privacy settings
    • No boundaries — went worldwide
    • 15x messages via SMS than by web
  • “Who’s nearby?” is not a business — see loopt
    • US only launch
    • Restricted networks
    • Not useful enough — just text your friends!
    • Lots of competitors Rummble competitors in 2006
  • What is the business model?
    • Need to know not just who’s nearby, but what they’re doing — context of presence
  • Current services
    • brightkite — iPhone app, location focus
    • limbo — focussed more around what you’re doing
    • whrrl — recommendations like Amazon
    • zkout — profile matching
  • Differentiators for Rummmble
    • Instant; Personalised
    • Existing sites not enough: Other recommendation sources
    • Use trust networks rather than friend networks
    • Use similar ratings to expand relationships
    • Computationally expensive
    • Add in who you trust for what — using semantics & language taxonomies
    • Also computationally expensive
    • See linkeddata.org for sources of semantically linked data
    • Can use twine
      • though twine doesn’t look like it’s quite there yet, as with most semantic web tools…
    • Can import social graph rather than spamming all your friends
    • Has to be quick — within 45s
  • Location detection is a commodity
    • Operators could scramble Cell IDs to make cell ID databases useless, but they would risk all their customers getting upset
    • An individual’s current location is also becoming a commodity

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