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.

Visitor Map

Really like this technology as it shows where are audience coming from. This is one of applications for “location powered services’ (LPS). This is not a LBS.

3D Web: Two kinds of Virtual Worlds

I was invited to give a talk at the Second International Workshop on “Virtual Geographic Environments (VGE)’ hosted by Hong Kong Chinese University, January, 2008. The workshop was chaired by my friend, Prof Hui Lin. Joined by several leading researchers in this field, Mike Goodchild,  Mike Batty, Liqiu Meng etc, I presented my thoughts “Empowering the 3D Web – extension of your lives”. I discussed two kinds of Virtual Worlds:

• Mirrored Worlds: replicas of the physical world
  • Microsoft Virtual Earth, Google Earth etc
• Imaginative Worlds: computer-simulated imaginative space
  • SecondLife, There etc.

Regardless which “worlds’ you are developing, the key success is about how you can master these three pieces in the world, that is, places, users (you) and things to do by you in the world (places) and apply the fundamental but complex rules of social, economical, political, ethnical and environmental to the World. I presented some fascinating progress in the developments of these worlds, a comparative analysis of these worlds, business models and use cases, as well as challenges ahead. My full presentation can be accessed from “Empowering the 3D Web: extension of your lives“.