Karen Jenkin’s Blog

There was a great article on ConsumerReports.org regarding a house in Georgia USA being demolished in error: GPS blamed for home demolition. The gist of the story is that a demolition crew razed the wrong house in error and later “indicated that the GPS coordinates led them to that address and the house matched the description they had”.

This is a classic case of relying too much on technology and not enough on common sense. As others have commented, GPS does have some margin for error (depending on whether they were using differential GPS or not) so you’d think they would have triple-checked before destroying a house.

The main lesson from this sad situation is not having a complete reliance on one source of information (and an arguably inaccurate technology) in cases where there are serious consequences for mistakes. Surely something as simple as a house number or some kind of land plot map would have provided an additional and more accurate checkpoint to help the crew verify their location and - better yet - stop a really bad mistake!

Although this is an extreme case of mistaken location-identity, it is worthwhile considering these possible consequences when using technology in both business and personal situations. The mind boggles how many embarrassing (let alone serious) situations could ensue! Something to watch out for with the proliferation of location-based mobile services …

It has been a while since I have been actively involved in mobile services since I started Six Figures - the online job and career site for Executive and Senior Professionals a couple of years ago. However, since mobile applications (in particular location-based services) have been the dominant theme of my career to date, I do keep an active interest in what’s happening; and wow there sure is a lot happening!

General awareness has never been higher about what you can both consume and generate whilst “on-the-go”. As a consequence of improved positioning technology and user interface choices, plus readily available maps, search and mashup techniques, location-based services (LBS) are really taking off.

But something has been niggling away at me recently. I have noticed that with plain web Google Search that more often I’ve had to go to Advanced Search and set date filters to weed out all the search results that are out-of-date, old and irrelevant. In certain circumstances, information is very timely and I would say this is even moreso for LBS; the when is just as important as the where.

As many mobile apps are built with some form of search, clever ways must be introduced to present “now” or recent content vs. historical or dated content, and include the ability to easily flip between these contexts. When you’re mobile, the last thing you want to be doing is scrolling through irrelevant results or setting filters etc to manage the data - the circumstances of what you’re doing or interested in should dictate the content presented. For example, I’m wandering about a city and want to know the history of a restaurant; the information shown to me about that place should be very different to what I would want to see if I was just looking for somewhere to eat. And there’s no reason why these two contexts cannot be delivered through the same mobile application. It also helps with reducing the bandwidth used for information that is of no interest to me right now.

So I am in search of examples that do this kind of context-switching well. Has any come across a location-based, mobile application that handles this management of information? Or promises to deliver on not just personalised applications, but situation-aware computing?

If you’re immersed in Web 2.0 applications and terminology, then take a look at this light-hearted view of how the phenomenon could affect your local supermarket.

Widgets – little self-contained applications that can be placed on a web page – are proliferating with the rise in online blogging, portals and social networking sites that have opened up their platforms (e.g. Facebook). Widgets effectively operate in a symbiotic relationship with the site or platform they sit on, each helping the other drive up interest and user traffic (and thus advertising potential).

Social networking sites like LinkedIn and MySpace are licking their lips in anticipation of what can be achieved by effectively throwing open web application platforms to external developers. The same goes for venture capitalists and others who want to get in on the action: Google has a program called Gadget Ventures that provides grants or seed money to widget developers, whilst venture capital firm Bay Partners (US) has setup a multi-million dollar program called AppFactory to invest in startups purely targeting Facebook. Those social networking sites yet to open their platform will be feeling the pressure to follow suit.

Beyond the open-source community, this is part of the first major wave of businesses allowing external, adhoc development contributions to their products. The widgets trend will let businesses work out how they will manage and take advantage of outside development, as well as the concept of virtual “resources”, and to prepare for more collaboration in the future; all with a relatively low level of risk. Only time will tell how these collaborative relationships will morph and mature in the coming years. However, businesses cannot afford to ignore this trend.

There is a groundswell of concern in the business world towards addressing the environmental and sustainability concerns of staff, customers and the world at large. The rise in carbon offsetting and tree planting initiatives (which deserve a separate discussion as to their long-term sustainability outcomes!) shows that business leaders are trying to grapple with how to make a difference.

However, as with all trends, there are some businesses that are simply riding the back of this green wave for their own self-interest. There are also businesses that think they’re doing the right thing, but just don’t seem to get it when it comes to making fundamental changes to how they or their industry operate. This is where government guidance, assistance and legislation can help. But not like this:

At the recent National Small Business Summit in Sydney, one of the Australian government departments had a booth with the following ‘Plant the seed for a green business’ promotional pack:

Extract from marketing blurb:

“By planting this seed, your business can make a green start, help the environment and gain customers searching for enviro-friendly businesses.”

What on earth were they thinking?! Whilst planting a tree has some merit, what was the environmental cost of all that packaging?

Whoever was in charge of this part of the ‘Greening your business’ campaign has completely missed the point and undermined any credibility the Department might have had in setting a good example for greening business. Alternatively, they’ve just jumped on the shameless self-promotion bandwagon for this hot topic. Regardless, it’s enough to put me off looking at their website to “discover more about how to green your business”.