SiRF Location 2.0 Summit 2008 Keynote: Where is ‘Where’ ?

‘Connectivity is now available almost anywhere in the world, as is the ability to determine a location, and to find location information about the people and places that are important to us’ (from the conf marketing material). This simple statment shows all the power of location that are impacting to our lives.

Invited by the conference organizer, I gave a keynote about my personal views on location. The title of my talk is Where is ‘where’ . This is a revised version of the talk I gave at Where 2.0, this blog site had a good summary of my talk at Where 2.0. If you missed it, you can view the record video from http://where.blip.tv/file/968959/).  

The key points that I want to make here are

– we are moving from ‘organzing spatial information’ to ‘organzing information spatially’

– we may have overstated the ‘location based services’ (LBS). Location is powering everything and so location powered or enabled services may make more sense (LPS or LES). People come to games are NOT for location-based games but ‘location’ may offer added values to traditional games. This is also applied to social networking. There is no such thing called ‘Location based social networking’. It is social networking but with location as part of its value component.   

– Despite the wide adoption of personal navigation etc, the power of location is not yet fully utilized from an information and communication technology (ICT) viewpoint. There are enormous opportunities ahead of us in making sense of location (as an index to our data and information).

If you are interested in my talk, a copy of PowerPoint presentation can be accessed here.