About
In the real world, information about ourselves or friends is not presented to us in an easy to understand form, nor do we interact with strangers in the same way we do in online communities to acquire knowledge/information (e.g. from online forums or IRC).
It is also harder to interpret information that is not available to hand or can only be interpreted after it has been collated over a period of time (e.g. behavioural patterns). We overlook a vast amount of data, purely due to the fact it is not presented to us in an appropriate manner.
In today’s society many of us live in two worlds – the online world where by people interact within social networking sites such as Facebook, and the physical offline world where people communicate with each other in person or though mobile devices.
When viewing material on the Internet, information is presented to us in a form that is easy to digest. Web standards encourage well defined web pages that are easily searchable, data can be represented using charts and tables to help convey information in a meaningful manner, and let us not forget the ever growing use of multimedia online.
Currently, these are two distinct areas in which information does not seamlessly flow between. It is with this in mind I intend to offer a service that merges these two areas to provide information to users in situations where by previously it could not be obtained with ease or usually overlooked.
It is becoming commonplace to disclose more information about yourself online, for example where you are, where you are going to be, or your thoughts on something you have experienced. This is very apparent with “status updates” and “where am I now” style online applications.
In the real world, with the advances of technology, more sensors and gadgets are being put into our mobile phones such as GPS, cameras and Bluetooth. However, to the average everyday non technical user, these at the moment are novelties that quickly ware off as they serve no true purpose unless they really are needed for a specific task at hand.
What if we could make use of these sensors autonomously and continuously, thus abstracting the user from the technology (install and forget – easy to use), and build up a database of potentially useful information that is usually overlooked in our day to day lives?
Hence, by providing users with a simple interface to query this stored data from online sources and collated offline sources, we can provide services for many situations such as:
- Missing people can be tracked by the community if they have a Bluetooth enabled phone.
- I need to get to location x, but my GPS signal has been lost. Has anyone nearby me (say within Bluetooth range) been to this location before and thus can point me in the right direction? We could use a prevalent GSM/GPRS connection to find which of the people nearby us would be of use and thus encouraging community interaction in the real world instead of solely online.
- Where are my friends? (A common question when you are waiting to meet someone).
- Behavioural analysis – tracking people’s habits and routines via GPS to inform of shops/items that may be of interest to them in their local proximity.
Web based material is already heading towards higher amounts of interaction between users and websites, which have progressed dramatically in terms of how they are used. The transformation from static websites, to highly interactive online social networks such as Facebook, is to me an indication of the way in which users wish to take websites to the next level. Some may call this “Web 3.0”.
With the advances in wireless mobile technology and the ubiquitous presence of mobile phones, I believe the next leap is to merge both the online and offline world to give us access to meaningful data not only online but in the real world too as we go about our day to day lives.
Thus it is with this vision I aim to combine today’s current technologies available in devices such as mobile phones to extract useful information to help us in our day to day lives, by creating a transparent link between the online/offline worlds in which many people live.