Smartspace - Smartspace

noticed for the first time a few weeks ago a new way of blending advertising and mapping together when I stumbled on a new game by Adidas that uses Google Earth as the platform for a quiz about famous soccer players. At the time I found it to be an interesting new way to tie geographic data and marketing together.

Dubbed "mapvertising" by trend site CScout, the technique is now being used by FIAT, Jeep and HBO, the latter of which has now launched a similar "mapvertising" feature to promote the new season of the Sopranos. The game takes you on a tour of northern New Jersey using Google Maps (possibly the safest way to tour northern New Jersey) stopping off at hotspots featured in the hit TV series.

With Google Maps now available on mobile devices, the availability of open APIs that enable mashups like these above make it likely we will see even greater levels of tie-ins between marketing content, location and context.


Posted on March 7, 2006 by Scott Smith in Mashups, Mapping | Post a Comment
Upcoming Events
Mark Vanderbeeken has flagged these two upcoming events in our area of interest:

International Symposium on Intelligent Environments: Improving the quality of life in a changing world
Cambridge, UK, 5-7 April 2006
Second International Conference on Intelligent Environments
Athens, Greece, 5-6 July 2006

While I won't make it to the first one, I can see possibly making it to the second. I'd be happy to have anyone who is going to these or other events or activities relevant to the topics covered on Smartspace provide some reportage from the scene. Any volunteers, mail me here.

Mark keeps an events calendar on Putting People First, his experience design blog. Check it out. If anyone is going to SxSW Interactive, drop me a line.


Posted on March 5, 2006 by Scott Smith in Events | Post a Comment
Reporting Your Location On a Call
I just stumbled across an entry from last week on Mobhappy by Russell Buckley where he discusses a study cited by Nicolas Nova on Pasta & Vinegar regarding the behavior of calling home from the train to let a spouse or partner or friend know when you are arriving. Russell points out that we perform this (often extremely annoying) behavior to provide context to the caller about our location-- particularly in an era when devices don't disclose this information themselves.

Nicolas extracts the following -- five reasons the academics running the study identify for why we disclose location:

To signal interactional availability
To make practical arrangements
As part of an activity itself

To coordinate real-time planning
To share "virtual" or "information" location, such as where a caller is on a Web page he is jointly viewing with the other person on the call.
These are interesting points, and ones that Nicolas somewhat doubts hold true. Nonetheless they open an interesting discussion about how the use of location information will change the way we interact while engaged in mobile communication. We are just starting to see the potential uses for location data as part of the overall context to remote social interaction, and I am among many who is intrigued by how this will play out.

Meanwhile, I find it interesting that, while we are waiting for applications that alert the person on the other end of a mobile discussion automatically as to our location as the call comes in, it would be easier at the moment to take a picture of myself on the train and MMS it to my wife using something like ZoneTag, allowing her to see where I am before I call. Talk about a workaround.


Posted on March 4, 2006 by Scott Smith in User Behavior | 3 Comments
Third Spaces Prime for Physical/Digital Touchpoints
I wouldn't normally give airtime to Trendwatching (all buzzwords and little substance), but their most recent briefing spurred an observation in relation to "smart space". TW talks about Being Spaces and Brand Spaces, places where consumers spend quality time and enjoy experiences together. It just struck me that these are prime (static) locations for touchpoints or nodes where digital environments and physical environments come together - in entertainment/play, social interaction and communication.

In these third spaces, people are often looking for a combination of these activities. Increasingly, due to the digital expansion of our social networks, they will be points where we use the digital plane to connect and interact meaninfully with our social contacts at a distance.


Posted on March 1, 2006 by Scott Smith in Third Spaces | Post a Comment
Windows Live Local...Live and Local!
By way of Waxy and Lifehacker we get news of Windows Live Local going live beta (or is it alpha?). WLL, as we will call it here, takes the aerial photography angle of mapping services one step further with street-level views (as in, from your car or a really low-flying predator drone) of locations, allowing the user to "drive through" the map. MS competitors such as Google, Yahoo! and Amazon (?) have also been sending out vanloads of people with cameras and GPS to take photos and video of real locations.

The nerds can follow the progress of the WLL team here.

Posted on March 1, 2006 by Scott Smith in Mapping | Post a Comment
Where Are You Now?
I was just in Japan and found the market for children's mobile phone services to be well advanced of the US and Europe. Better handsets, more evolved operator services, and location-based services were all in evidence. The ITU Web site, by way of Smart Mobs, tells us of one such service, Ima Doko (Where Are You Now?).

According to the ITU, the service, from the largest mobile operators DoCoMo, allows parents to track children either via a children's handset or the P-doco Mini, a simple tracking device that is attached to the child's clothes. Parents can either get an view of their kids' location on a PC, imode phone or via e-mail. The device will also switch itself on and report a location if it is switched off. I looked at several DoCoMo handsets for children first hand and found they had a lock on the back to prevent the battery from being dislodged.


With a recent spate of child killings in Japan, a country with a very low crime rate compared to the rest of the industrialized world, child tracking technologies have taken on a new popularity. Authorities in Osaka began a program in 2004 to tag schoolchildren with RFID to enable tracking in that area.


Posted on February 28, 2006 by Scott Smith in Location Services | Post a Comment
Dangerous Plazes
Oh, the perils of modern geotagging. I have been using Plazes for about the last two months since I have been on the road more. On a recent flight to Copenhagen from Washington I was hotdogging and using in-flight wireless broadband provided by Boeing Connexion on SAS international flights and found that I could establish a "plaze" on board just like you do when the network recognizes you on a fixed-line connection and resolves the IP address to a general location on dry land. And since someone had already done the same on board this flight previously, it was only down to me to add latitude and longitude info (as provided by the in-flight info system) to actually give a place to the "plaze". Well, i somehow goofed on the data entry and drop this poor SAS flight in SE Russia (see image at left) instead of the corresponding location WEST of the 00 longitude.

Doubtless some Russian airforce jets were scrambled to that location or something serious while we cruised along on the way to a landing in Denmark. But, because of the way Plazes is configured, I couldn't go back in and reset that "plaze" until I am in the same location again - which means getting back on the eastbound flight and resetting the data once connected to Plazes via in-flight broadband. So, for now I look like I have been somewhere I haven't. Is that annotated reality, or annotated unreality?


Posted on February 28, 2006 by Scott Smith in Geotagging | Post a Comment
DIY Google Map Mashup in Jotspot
Today's postings seem to have a theme - basic Web apps. I am a new user of Jotspot, the Web-based wiki platform. One of Jotspots useful apps is Tracker, an online spreadsheet application that allows multiple users to collaborate on a spreadsheet real-time. One feature of this is the ability to quickly plot addresses entered into a spreadsheet format on a Google Map.

In my case, it was simply to plot the location of my son's soccer team to better locate a central practice field. But in a couple of keystrokes it was done - I had created a custom Google Map with each player's home as a marker. Probably killing a fly with a sledgehammer, but the easy import function made it seem like a quick way to get an idea of where we all live in relation to one another.


Posted on February 28, 2006 by Scott Smith in Mashups | Post a Comment
ZoneTag: Geotagging Cameraphone Images for Flickr
Yahoo! Research has released ZoneTag, an application currently for Nokia Series 60 mobiles, which allows users with a Flickr account to easily upload images taken from a cameraphone and have those images not just tagged with Flickr tags, but also appended with geotagging data generated by the user's location when sending. ZoneTag currently works with Cingular and T-Mobile US networks and requires a data plan for either carrier.

I have used it for several days and find it a smooth way to upload images quickly, though I haven't yet found a use for the geotag data, which looks something like this:


I have found ZoneTag competing with Shozu, another Flickr upload app I have loaded on my Nokia 6682. So far Shozu uploads first, then ZoneTag does the same behind it with more data appended to the image. It looks like you can have one or the other active, but not both.







Posted on February 28, 2006 by Scott Smith in Geotagging | 4 Comments
Welcome to Smartspace
Welcome to Smartspace, a new blog about annotated environments, intelligent infrastructure and digital landscapes--the merging of technology with the environment around us, and the overlay of digital environments on the physical ones we inhabit.

This includes discussions, observations and insights on ubiquitous and embedded computing, mapping, location-based services, surveillance and tracking, geotagging, smart homes, intelligent environments, the annotated reality, and virtual worlds, where the increasingly intersect with the physical.

An increasing amount of interest, research, development, investment and regulation is being directed at the world of smart spaces. The purpose of Smartspace is to provide context and explore implications of the convergence of the above mentioned factors as they relate to these activities. Hopefully we will feature interviews, guest authors, and other interesting features and contents that make Smartspace a compelling read.


Posted on February 28, 2006 by Scott Smith in General Announcements | Post a Comment

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