Friday, December 10, 2010

Location Trends 2011 & Why Contextual Search is one step closer




I was due to present at Mobile Monday Oslo last week, when a Spanish air traffic controllers strike prevented me from catching my flight. I was going to present ideas from my book on Location Aware Apps (with co-author Murat Aktihanoglu, published by Manning-USA) as well as take a look at the current and future trends for location on mobile.

While my talk may have been postponed, I've decided to share the presentation deck I prepared here so that those who were looking forward to hearing it can at least get a flavour for it (see below).

My key conclusion: location today is everwhere. We can now archive the term Location Based Services (LBS) and think more of location-aware apps. I was listening to Marissa Mayer speak at the LeWeb conference in Paris a couple of days ago (via Ustream) and she made a point of stating that Google is working hard to make contextual awareness (or contextual search in Google-speak) a reality. 

This is great news, as I have been stating for the last couple of years that contextual awareness is the holy grail for mobile apps. I also mention this at the start of my book and explain why this is so. We are now a (big) step closer to achieving it...