Latitude

Contributing editor: Ian Schulte

Latitude pooled its collective intelligence to identify what we think are five emerging areas of opportunity for smartphones in the context-aware realm (taking into account factors that influence the interactor personally and situationally, including location, time-of-day, personal habits, etc.), which dovetails with last week’s “Opportunity Space” on augmented reality:

The “subsystems” of the emerging internet operating system are increasingly data subsystems: location, identity (of people, products, and places), and the skeins of meaning that tie them together. This leads to new levers of competitive advantage.

No app is an island

Smartphones do what they do well, but they don’t tend to get any smarter in the process; for all its virtues, my iPhone is often just a black box.

“Is the Web getting smarter as it grows up?”

With the exception of some eccentric spellings (autocorrect) and a few sophisticated recommendation apps (Pandora), it doesn’t typically self-refine based upon the ways that I interact with it.

We’d like a little more intelligent discovery built into our smartphones.

My iPhone also doesn’t synthesize in any meaningful way the hordes of personal data that I pour into a variety of different applications daily, nor does it recombine in any innovative way the intelligences of these applications that handle the delineated streams of my mobile life.

5 “Future Requests”

1. Music recommendation apps like Pandora do learn from a interactor’s personal listening history, and recommend novel content based on a song or artist “seed,” refined in real-time by simple “yea!” or “nay!” reactions to each song.

   But, focusing so entirely on the media at hand, they don’t also carry a consciousness of situational factors that are likely to influence musical preference–like location, time of day, and weather.

   (I may prefer my angry-chicks-who-wore-birkenstocks-in-the-90’s redux when at the gym, some smooth jazz when it’s raining, and new music discovery only while walking home from work.)

   Wouldn’t it be nice if they did?

Whatever the algorithmic equation, of course, there’s a listener on the other end who is much harder to decode.

What you want to hear can depend on your mood, or whether you’re listening at work or in a nightclub. Context affects any cultural product.

“The Song Decoders at Pandora,” New York Times Magazine

2. We like the idea of a personal city guide–a Yelp / Brightkite mash-up, with a little of the embedded world thrown in. How about checking into a restaurant (or other business establishment), and assigning it a simple rating (maybe 1-5 stars) based on your experience there.

   “’The network as platform’ means building applications that literally get better the more people use them.”

   Then you could receive other recommendations–even in advance–relevant to both your preferences and the areas you frequent as determined by patterns in your past check-ins. When traveling in a foreign country, you could receive recommendations for this novel environment based upon your personal history.

   We also like the idea of placing QR codes, readable by mobile devices, on the doors of business establishments to make the upload of information easier.

   A bottle of wine on your supermarket shelf (or any other object) needn’t have an RFID tag to join the Internet of Things; it simply needs you to take a picture of its label. Your mobile phone, image recognition, search, and the sentient web will do the rest.

   We can make do with bar codes, tags on photos, and other “hacks” that are simply ways of brute-forcing identity out of reality.

   Tim O’Reilly & John Battelle, “Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On“

3. Many people keep information to track their health–logs for diabetes management, diet and exercise, etc.–on their smartphones.

   If you superimposed this wealth of personal health data on the physical world, your phone might point out a walkable scenic route to your destination that would help you fulfill your “calories burned” quota for the day or inform you which nearby restaurants, given the meal-time, mesh well with your particular nutrition preferences (and your budget).

   Being able to intelligently manage and adapt to the gamut of your health needs, your phone might also remind you to schedule a visit with your doctor based upon your visit history and personal health profile.

4. Importing preferences around our behaviors into applications feels redundant and often takes a lot of time. What if you could streamline the input process by scanning a QR code from your receipts with your mobile device–so purchases of your choice could be remembered and applied to future scenarios?

   Think: an automated shopping list based on your actual food purchases–information which you could then apply fluidly to ordering from online grocers if desired, or to alerts of sales and to find new, relevant items of interest.

   We also think it’d be nice to scan a store’s sale offers on the way in (mobile device to QR code), and see how our lists relate to theirs–digitally and intelligently.

   The beauty in the beast

5. Finally… a personal concierge system–fundamentally, a web of the Web with the smartphone as the personal input center–essentially, mapping structured data sets that are currently holed up in individual applications to produce progressively more accurate and texturized interactions between virtual and physical realities.

“We see the era of Web 2.0, therefore, as a race to acquire and control data assets. Some of these assets—the critical mass of seller listings on eBay, or the critical mass of classified advertising on craigslist—are application-specific.

But others have already taken on the characteristic of fundamental system services.”

Tim O’Reilly & John Battelle, “Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On“

Header image courtesy of moriza’s flickr, (cc) some rights reserved.