Ambient Discovery: Location-Based Apps and Services

Editor's Notes

1. A couple years ago, I had this crazy idea that I wanted to track everywhere I went. I spent a year looking around for ways to do this, but there weren’t many options other than manually tracing on a map. Explain map of Portland.----- Meeting Notes (2011-05-17 11:54) -----:30
2. I tried to do this in 2007 by getting a hardware GPS logger, and only lasted a week of carrying it around since it was another device to charge, and I had to download the data every night.----- Meeting Notes (2011-05-17 11:54) -----:60
3. A couple months later, I finally got my first smart phone, and I made sure to choose one that had a GPS chip in it, and there weren’t many options at that point.----- Meeting Notes (2011-05-17 11:54) -----1:20
4. Now I have been logging GPS positions everywhere I go and have been doing it for the last 3 years.
5. We're still just at the beginning of exploring what we can do with location.
6. We see people experimenting with location and building things like Foursquare. Putting yourself on pause at a social gathering in order to check in on Foursquare is sometimes awkward. We want a more passive system, something that doesn’t require as much interaction to use.----- Meeting Notes (2011-05-17 11:54) -----2:30
7. Here is an example of something more useful. Say you schedule a meeting at 3pm. You think “great, he’ll get to my office right at 3.”
8. But of course, 15 minutes before the meeting you start wondering if I’ll get there early, or if I’ll be a few minutes late. Do you have time to go next door to get some coffee? Do you have time to finish this phone call?
9. And if I’m on my way to meet you and get stuck in traffic, I’d want to let you know that I’ll be a few minutes late and not to give up on me! But texting while driving is hard, and sometimes illegal! All these redundant messages could be eliminated if you knew where I was.
10. So now, before I leave for the meeting, I”ll send you a link to my map where you can watch my trip in real time. Now you don’t need to wonder if I’ve forgotten about the meeting or if I’m only a block away. This is one of the features of our app, Geoloqi.----- Meeting Notes (2011-05-17 11:54) -----3:30
11. And, you know, this relationship that we share is relatively temporary. I would like you to know exactly where I am right before our meeting, but after our meeting, I’d like my location to be private again. And it’s not even so much of a privacy concern, because really do you want to know where I am after our meeting? You probably just don’t care.4:00Location is particularly sensitive to types of relationships I'd like to share my location with a client if I'm meeting them somewhere, so they can know when I will arrive After our meeting, I absolutely don't want them to access my location This is often true even with friends Friends' location is not always relevant to me, only if I'm meeting up with them or possibly if they are near me
12. Even with my close friends, I don’t really want to know where everyone is all the time, there’s just too much noise in that. I only want to know about people’s location if it is actionable.
13. Frankly, I don’t care if my friend in New York is at his neighborhood coffee shop or his local gym, but if he is anywhere in San Francisco, I’d like to know so I can invite him to lunch. There’s a difference between privacy and looking for the signal in the noise.Even if he's comfortable sharing everything publicly, I just don't really need to know about it.
14. The point is information should be pushed to you instead of having to seek it out. In order to do this, we need to make our computers and systems more aware of our context so they can work for us. One component of this, and the one we’re focusing on, is location. Imagine if this app knows you haven’t eaten in a while, so it suggests some places you might like to eat that are nearby.
15. It could pre-load some restaurant recommendations for me based on what I like to eat and what’s nearby. But the important
16. What we’ve been doing in Geoloqi is building up profiles of where people spend time. This, for example, is a list of three places I often visit, and the dates and times of each of my visits. You can see I spent 8 hours at this coffee shop on April 9th, and about 3 hours there on March 27th.
17. We can use this information to build a unique footprint of the city for each person. Then we can provide recommendations and filter events based on each person’s individual pattern.----- Meeting Notes (2011-05-17 11:54) -----6:00
18. Real-time location opens up some fun uses once this robot knows where you are all the time.
19. For example, automatic checkins. Now you can notify someone if you enter a designated place, such as if you’re on a bridge.
20. Explain the concept of geonotes.----- Meeting Notes (2011-05-17 12:11) -----:30
21. Example: batteries for a remote at the store
22. Example: send detailed transit instructions so you don’t have to dig for them later.Rather than searching your email on your phone trying to find the information, you get it as an SMS when you need it.
23. Example: Notifications of nearby events from the city’s event calendar.
24. Example: take restaurant inspection scores, and send an SMS if you’re near a restaurant with a low score.
25. Explain map attack game at Stanford. While we were there, Mark from Spot Metrix quickly set up a viewer for the game board in his augmented reality view framework!