On Tuesday I moderated a panel on location at Being Digital. It's a slightly different event as there were only 10 minutes of powerpoint in the whole day! So there was a lot of discussion between panelists and delegates.
My panelists were a seasoned bunch of location gurus - Ed Parsons, Gary Gale of Yahoo, Jeff Kelisky of Microsoft, Andrew Scott from Rummble and James Parton of O2.
I did get a feeling of déjà vu talking about value and location. The consensus seemed to be that location would be an enabler rather than a solution or application.
The only disagreement amongst the panel was when one said that the iPhone was not mainstream. You can imagine the response from our iPhoned panel let alone the 150 or so in the audience.
The interesting question that we left too late was "what would happen if GYM pulled out of offering free mapping API's?" Is that a possibility, would anyone else step in, would digital business pay for an API? Maybe this is a topic for another day.
I don't think location is getting boring but I do think we need to move on from the novelty, ubiquity and privacy stuff and start talking about what is being done (not what could be)
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1 comments:
Steven
Sorry I missed the BDE - same faces and topics at other upcoming events likely though.
Rumours have been around for a while regarding the great advertising engine's trojan horse mapping API and how long they will persevere with it; view at Bing Maps for Enterprise one imagines rather different.
Paid for looks like being the new "free" in some online areas (USA Today joined in now) and, let's face it, as an enabler location more often that not generates real net profit (as opposed to social value/capital or or even ad income) when accuracy, currency and other quality factors are at a granularity that users are willing to pay for owing to the net benefit to them and their organisation, programme or activity. And in our experience digital business already pays for an API on these terms!
So, no I don't think location is getting boring and I do agree with you regarding the nature of the conversation - real practitioners need to be heard!
James
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