Karen Jenkin’s Blog

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that more often I’ve had to go to Advanced Search and set date filters to weed out all the search results that are out-of-date, old and irrelevant.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?