Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Context-aware technology

I just read an excellent special report on Business Week about context-aware computing. You can read most of the report here. Context-aware software tracks a person's location, interests, buying habits and other information. Smartphones are the perfect device to collect and aggregate that kind of information.
Early 2000, Location Based Services (LBS) already promised unimaginable smart services to serve coupon to shoppers walking by a store and other innovative applications. Handheld location was determined by triangulation based on signal strength from each base station. That architecture never delivered. Several reasons to this failure: hype cycle, precision was not good, wireless service providers controlled the information and wanted their own applications to use that data (not external applications). It is my opinion that the first incarnation of presence services went the same way for the exact same reasons.
Fast-forward nearly 10 years and we have a completely different environment. Apple (and its developers/partners), and Google are in total control of the user experience. Multiple applications are able to use location information to provide advanced services to the users. Yelp provides a unique example of combined use of location and camera with the Monocle feature (augmented reality).

The more source of data you can integrate (social media, CRM), the more phone features you can leverage (camera, accelerometer), the best experience you can provide and the more information about the user you get to track. Good and bad. Best way to enable this is to open up the phone platform (Android, iOS, RIM, Windows) to as many developers as possible. Java was a great example of a rapid and pervasive adoption.