It’s autumn and Over The Air has come around again. A mobile hacking camp with some really decent talks, it’s a regular fixture, a place i come to and listen to stuff I only just about understand whilst pretending to build things.
This year, I made it to far more talks than usual, some not so interesting, but I managed to come away with some food for thought.
- Openplaques.org. started off a a hack, turned into more of a project. made sure that the data was open so that others can build on it, building things that the originators never thought about. End philosophy is all about giving people ways to connect the data
- Visual search. Mobile is the bridge between you and the world of things. Can be used for things like price comparison, adding data via augmented reality, marketing and ecommerce,
- Visual search – 1d bar codes were made for laser scanning, not user friendly and mobiel cameras don’t read easily. 2d designed to work with imaging. Product imaging allows it to happen when you don’t have bar code, eg with pictures of products.
- in 2008, 80% of location revenue came from navigation apps. now, that has gone, and nav apps are in the minority compared to vertical apps that just use location as part of the offering. There’s more than 6k iPhone apps available. costs are tending towards zero, so targeted ads are the preferred revenue stream, or sponsorship.
- Crowd sourced data on maps is more and more important. Realtime reporting, things that have a timebound element, eg roadworks. Users will have multiple apps using locations and maps in different ways.
- Key elements are to make highly customisable apps, making it more relevant; allow rich user-specific content to be added; navigation to be added; monetisation via ads and sponsors and let end users map their own world
- Most interesting to me, is have personal sharable maps, eg add a place to meet to your map and share it with your friends. they’ll get it on their maps, plus how to get there from where they are.
