Monday, March 03, 2008
Are Plain Vanilla Location-Based Services Passé?
Regular readers will notice that this blog is sharply focused on the convergence of services as varied as messaging, location-based services, social networking, mobile search, mobile advertising and so-called collaborative web 3.0 technologies, as well as the systems and service providers that will ultimately need to come together to make it happen.
Consumers and prosumers alike must be empowered to experience communications on their own terms. That means having a say in how they communicate, with whom, and under what circumstances. Location is a part of this, but so is presence (the availability of the individual at the place and time to take part in an exchange in the first place).
The pivotal role of presence was explored in this post and podcast from MSearchGroove. The audio interview with Simon Wood, Artilium VP of Program Management, discusses presence and the systems that will manage it.
As Simon pointed out: the current crop of location-based services makes a huge and incorrect assumption. From mobile advertising to find-the-nearest-buddy services, they are built from the ground up to deliver services related to a user’s location, when in fact they should be architected to deliver services in an intelligent manner that matches the user’s status, mode and personal requirements.
Put simply, services could be delivered differently depending on context and the company a user keeps. As Simon summed it up: “At certain times of the day, I might want certain calls from certain groups of people to be handled in one way, and another time of day in a different way.” The same goes for content, apps and advertising. The user’s availability and receptability, if you will, must be considered as factors in service delivery.
To automate this, Artilium is exploring ways to rate and rank and effectively “decide” which expressions of presence are more relevant than others, and what actions this knowledge about the user and their circumstances/communications/preferences should trigger. Imagine a scenario in which a user is officially “offline” on Skype but in reality very much present and eager to engage in conversation with certain business colleagues via mobile.
Moving forward, providers will not only need to have the capabilities mix to deliver on the promise of Unified Communications (UC); they will need the intelligent systems that “know” which expression of presence is a mere statement of fact and which one really determines the rules for handling incoming messages, calls, content, and so on.