Backblog | | Mobility

This week the leading location-based service Foursquare announced it had achieved 20 million users. Despite the milestone, critics were quick to point out that check-in services were dead. Over the past few months other major check-in based services such as Loopt, Gowalla, BrightKite, and Facebook places have shut down or been acquired and closed.

I'm in the process of preparing for my PhD comprehensive exams (or rather my faculty's equivalent). So I'm currently enmeshed in the literature related to my topic - how people use location-based services to make sense of their places.

I've been reviewing the recent literature related to location based services and locative media and came across an incredibly useful article for those building or refining such apps. The article, Criteria of geographic relevance: An experimental study, will be published soon in the International Journal of Geographical Information Science (but is freely available in a pre-print version). The authors, Stefano De Sabbata and Tumasch Reichenbacher are experts in geographic relevance, mobile information retrieval, and location based services.

I'm late in posting this, but the organization Mobile Future every year does a wrap-up of trends in mobile usage. Highly informative and entertaining.

I went away for a few weeks and my list of location-based services has changed dramatically - a major player is down and a new one emerges. In a little over a month there has been substantial changes to my ongoing list of LBSs, which highlights the tremendous changes in this area.

Location-based services (LBS) and locative media have garnered a lot of attention - not least of which will be the focus of my dissertation.  But the possible benefits beyond increased marketing opportunities has rarely been discussed or studied.  Here's what I've come up with so far:

Today [February 10] was the last day of iConference 2012. The conference, geared to topics of interest to iSchools (i.e. Information studies), was hosted by my school, University of Toronto, Faculty of Information. When I wasn't volunteering, I was able to attend several sessions. This post captures my ramblings as I make sense of my first foray into iConferences and immersion in the iSchool movement.

This week, I had the opportunity to guest lecture for a great class on social networking at the University of Toronto. I spoke about how new technologies were facilitating geosocial networking, that is people connecting and sharing place-based experiences via their mobile device. I've been studying this for over two years and I'm an avid user of the ultimate geosocial app, Foursquare. So I was excited to speak on this topic. I'll give a brief summary of the main themes I addressed in my presentation.

While preparing for my recent survey exploring sense of place and location-based services, I wanted to find out the mobile device types and usage patterns of participants.  I have previously offerred my take on the definition of mobile device and blogged on What exactly is a mobile device.

As much research continues into how we use location based services on mobile devices to access geotargetted information, I've been considering other ways we can access information about place.

Would it surprise you to learn that only 30 per cent of Canadians own a smartphone? It surprised the heck out of me.

What is geosocial and how does it provide ways for people to link products and services?

Why do people use mobile devices? Which ones do they use and is their use growing? Yes it is - tablet use, for one, is growing rapidly - and this offers opportunities explains Nick Jones.

Over the past few months, I’ve been exploring how location-based services and geotargetted information affect our relationship to the places we encounter. More people are using these mobile applications, including Foursquare, Gowalla, Google Places, SCVNGR, Layar, and a seeming endless array of apps to help us locate and learn more about everything from where we parked our car to the nearest restaurant.

In a pair of editorials recently (http://goo.gl/Tv2gE and http://goo.gl/0qSGQ) I discussed the problems at RIM and criticized the company both for its actual performance and for the way it communicated (entirely failed to communicate) with customers during the recent data outage.

I recently attended a conference on locative media and the definition of locative media offered, and one that is often assumed, is that locative media are mediums that address a physical space through digital technology.

Bill Buxton opened a half-day conference on locative media this past Friday at Toronto International Film Festival's (TIFF) new building, by noting that it is not just realtors anymore asserting the importance of location, location, location.

Place is no longer a brackdrop for our information seeking, creation, and sharing. As I have blogged about there are multiple location-based mobile apps. Such apps enable information to be customized based on a user’s geographic position. Various commercial applications and research projects have shown users value geographic relevance in their information seeking scenarios.

How's that for a big topic? I think about it a lot, but its demise looks increasingly inevitable, especially the way the FCC is talking these days. Much like the railroads, when the system becomes too expensive to operate, the operators start making noise and giving reasons why it needs to be scaled back or done away with altogether.

For the past few months, I have wanted to purchase a portable computing device but have been paralyzed by an inability to determine what best to buy. I don't have the budget to buy everything, so I've been trying to decide whether to buy a tablet, e-reader, or netbook. Recently our laptop computer has been gravely ill and so this adds to my purchase dilemma.

By now, you’ve heard about Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility. As the largest deal in Google’s history (a whopping $12.5 billion!), there has been, unsurprisingly, a flurry of debate and discussion. There may be some significant change on the horizon, but what does it mean for the industry?

London, UK-based app developers Blippar will soon be launching a brilliant platform for garnering pull-based mobile response to ads by with some ultra-cool augmented reality tools.

Yesterday, Google announced the launch of Google Wallet, a system that uses near-field communication devices inside of mobile phones to send payments.

Silicon Valley like its metallic namesake is shiny and alluring to those in the tech and digital media sector. In comparisson, Ontario often seems dull and staid. Although Canada has had its share of tech and Net success stories over the years, the news and blogs are saturated with coverage of the happenings in the Valley. Often Canadian tech companies are only covered in mainstream media when they sell out or move down south.