The thing about useful stuff is

Google Latitude - the what, why and where next? Thursday, February 05, 2009

Image by thms.nl via Flickr

Many of you will have read elsewhere, including via mainstream media about the launch of Google's Latitude offering, which introduces location based information that can be shared with nominated friends at your discretion.

It means that if you choose to expose your location, a decision over which you have constant control, then you can choose who you share that info with.

Your location can be set manually via your browser, which involves typing your location or moving a "pin" around over a google map. However, if you have Google maps on your phone then you can choose to automatically update your location using either the phone GPS or base station information, which is far easier, albeit it will continually consume data on your phone plan, not to mention gobble up your phone battery [I’d like the ability to configure how often phone updates occur for that latter reason].

You can also define how much detail those chosen contacts get since Latitude settings mean you can publish at city-level, general area or actual location.

So, using this service now means you and your chosen friends can share locations updates with each other most of the time [exceptions being when you/they turn off details].

This is not a new concept. Latitude is similar to services such as Loopt, Brightkite, Whrrl, Buddyping [now defunct it seems], RadiusIM and Buddy Beacon, most of which focus upon the intersection of "social mapping" and communication. However, all of those services don't could close to touching the might of the Google Brand and its reach.

So now comes the "why" anyone would choose to opt into this, given that it immediately throws up privacy concerns/fear in a "big brother is watching you" sense to many people.

Why?

Well, most obviously this increases the likelihood of chance meetups because you can now see which of your friends happens to be in the neighbourhood. Hence, seeing I am nearby you may choose to avoid the area or call me if you are nearby to arrange to meet, which is actually something likely to be of interest to a wide range of people for business and social reasons alike. To that point, I'd actually like to be able to group Latitude contacts into categories which would give me the option to tailor the information I share with others e.g. friends, business, which isn't possible in this first incarnation.

Of course, some parents may hope to use the service to keep track on their kids as the newspapers suggested, but given that kids can turn-off location sharing, it may prove ineffective unless they are so desperate for their friends to also see the information that their parents see it by default. Sadly I was immediately entrapped yesterday when my wife was immediately able to spot on Day One of this service that I was near a shop she wanted me to call into!

Where Next?

This being Google one can easily speculate on how this service could evolve i.e. where next. It's not a unique insight but there is a clear route to the three way intersection of mobile, social, and local. The last of these quite simply refer to location aware or based services. Hence, similar to the famous scene from the Tom Cruise movie, Minority Report, you could begin receive news, travel, announcements and adverts all related to your present location.

On its own, "local" probably isn't inspiring enough for large numbers of people to sign up to service which discloses one's location, since the benefits are less obvious. Hence, offering the social element first is a better "bait". Having attracted a large user base, it then becomes attractive for firms/services to participate in "local offerings" e.g. offering targeted ads and coupons to people in the vicinity of a store.

Here's a scenario that I put together with a business a couple of years ago, but have substituted Latitude's name

A national coffee chain head office create a series of offers that are hosted by Latitude that may be used by their local shops when those stores are quiet to try to drum up business e.g. coffee half price for the next hour or "buy one and get one free". Local managers may activate these at their discretion perhaps via a text, phone, or web activation with Head Office able to possiblly control the times that offers may be used e.g. only offpeak. Head Office also agree the price that is paid to Google for distributing these "coupons" in a similar manner to Google Ad-words.
Latitude's [future] ad service offers to either broadcast offers/coupons or be paid a higher price for redeemed coupons [assuming a mechanism to identify redemptions can be implemented easily].
Latitude users would have the option to pre-set their profiles to indicate whether they are willing to receive offers and the types they will countenance. Likewise they may search for local offers on an ad-hoc basis e.g. bars offering deals now.
Google Latitude broadcast the offers either as adverts or coupons to Latitude users who are in the local area, which drives custom to the stores. Google could choose to broadcast all ads or similar to Ad-words running a bidding process in given time slots which would allow them to extract the best price and ration/manage the number of offers issued so as to minimise the perception of spam.

In this scenario, all parts of the market are satisfied, namely

consumers get alerted to cheap deals for relevant goods/services
retailers increase traffic and revenue at slack times, whilst only incurring ad spend when relevant/appropriate, in a setting in whichcompanies can delegate authority within parameters for local stores to tune their offering based on conditions
Google increases its' revenues by connecting the market paticipants, as a consequence of providing a social service

Obviously, in my example, the service being marketed has a time-expiry element - an empty coffee shop can't recoup that revenue opportunity. Hence this scenario equally applies to empty cinemas, theatres, pubs and restaurants, or any leisure facility. Yet it could have much wider application including competitive advertising - based on being near Starbucks, I receive an advert from a nearby competitor attempting to lure me away. There are many other applications one could list.

Timeframe for this to become reality? Well, there are no technical limitations to what I've described, albeit Google need to build the "ad-words like" infrastructure and tie this into the Latitude user data. So I think its' about Google choosing its' optimum moment to launch the "local" element once enough consumers are on-board or trend evidence of wide-spread adoption exists.

Labels: Google, Google Latitude, googlemaps, GPS, LBS, location based services, mobile

posted by John Wilson @ 11:09 AM Permanent Link ,

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London tube unearthed Friday, January 09, 2009

A London Underground 1995 Stock train pulls in...

Image via WikipediaDescribing itself as the tube travellers bible, I stumbled across Metazone's London tube site last night by accident whilst looking to find the nearest tube to a meeting venue.

In one part of the site, they've overlaid the tube lines on a google map which highlights the astonishing meandering routes some of these lines follow, but more practically as you mouse over the map useful tube information is revealed.

You can check it out here.

Labels: Google, Google Map, Google Maps, mashup

posted by John Wilson @ 8:40 AM Permanent Link ,

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Byebye Hello Friday, May 09, 2008

There may be many alternate ways to achieve the same thing, but I liked the photo-messaging service from Google called Hello, which formed part of the Picasa suite. Why? Because it was the easiest way for me to send photos to my parents and reliably ensure that

they saved to their hard drive without them having to do anything
I could offer a commentary as she went through them because the application allowed you to see which photos the other person was viewing

Now Google have apparently announced they are to close the service on May 15th. It's a great shame they don't simply allow the service to continue to operate, even if it was on an unsupported basis with no further development, especially since it operated on a peer-to-peer basis as far as I understood it, albeit with centralised log-on.

Labels: Google, photos, Picasa

posted by John Wilson @ 4:20 PM Permanent Link ,

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Gtalk gets meebo like chat widget Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Google have released a Gtalk chat widget that you can post onto any web page, which allows visitors to chat with you whenever you are logged into your gmail account. I've embedded it onto this blog on the left above the meebo widget.

Whilst it's not as slick as Meebo's widget [little customisation available and the visitor chats in a pop-up window, assuming they allow pop-ups in their browser], it works fine. Perhaps this is the start of Google edging into Meebo's space.

AFTERTHOUGHT
I also realised that the Gtalk widget doesn't provide a presence indicator unlike Meebome ie. meebome tells me if there are visitors on the page in real-time and provides me with the chance to initiate a chat, whereas the Gtalk widget only lets me respond to visitors if they start the chat.

Labels: Google, gtalk, Meebo, meebome

posted by John Wilson @ 4:45 PM Permanent Link ,

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Google search fails to find profits in social networks Friday, February 01, 2008

Yesterday Google reported an unexpectedly sharp slowdown in the number of “clicks” people make on its online adverts on social networks, leaving Google out of pocket thanks to the guaranteed minimum payments it makes to a number of social networks that carry its advertising, principally MySpace.

This was despite a number of initiative pursued by Google to reverse the decline, all of which had failed according to Sergey Brin, but they remained hopeful they could turn things around.

This pushed shares down by 9%, which have fallen by 25% since January 1, contributing to the nervousness on the markets about its core revenue engine - advertising services.

To date the only people making money from social networking are the owners of the platform - not quite the commercial eco-system hoped for by many. Seems that people just use them for socialising.

Labels: Google, social networks

posted by John Wilson @ 8:06 AM Permanent Link ,

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A free checkout worth checking out Wednesday, December 12, 2007

I continue to be astonished how few people seem aware that Google have been running a promotion in the UK which provides online credit/debit card merchant services for free. Google Checkout was running this free promotion until the end of the year but announced today that they are extending the free period until end of Feb 08.

Compare FREE with typical online merchant charges of 4.25%. Moreover, when the service does begin charging it intends to only levy charges at 1.5% AND these charges may also be offset against Google AdWord spending ie if you sell £100 of goods/services via Google Checkout which would attract charges of £1.50, they will give you free AdWord spending equivalent to this.

I mentioned this to a number of established online businesses who were completely unaware of it and the savings they could make. Several were dissuaded by the fact that a customer paying via the service had to open a Google Account if they didn't already have one, unlike the PayPal equivalent service. However, I rather think that a) there are a huge number of folks with Google accounts already b) the Google brand is virtually perceived by the non-tech community as being the internet. The number of times when speaking to non-tech friends they explain how they use the google web search box to type in web addresses, having never understood that you can use the address bar to enter the address!

Adding between 3-5% to your bottom line is a notable improvement and whilst it may be another example of a land grab by Google, in this case to dominate the online payment space, its' not a bad trade in my opinion. Thanks Google.

Labels: Google

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Songza - music search that rocks Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Seeqpod is one of my favourite sites, providing an excellent music search service with an embedded audio and video player of tracks found. Moreover, if you are a registered user, you can create and store playlists.

Along similar lines is a site I stumbled on today called Songza, which describes itself as a music search engine and internet jukebox. The simplicity of the site is its essence, but it is both slick and stylish with a very neat user interface. The site has a built-in audio player which sits unobtrusively sits at the foot of the page.

Clicking on a search result, pops up a control allowing you to play, share, rate (quality of audio), add to playlist.

One surprise was that the link to "discography" took me into a google music search service (not a well advertised service) which brought back a raft of info on the artist. I'm surprised more people aren't using this service but perhaps I'm not alone in having been ignorant of its' existence.

Labels: Google, music, search

posted by John Wilson @ 8:52 AM Permanent Link ,

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Gmail IMAP - I mope Sunday, October 28, 2007

Gmail gets IMAP. Fantastic I thought. Given that I consolidate several accounts inside Gmail as an additional backup service and presently have to manually synch them , this would make life much easier.

And then you read the small print courtesy of Webware

it's worth noting that the IMAP support is one-way: You can use IMAP clients to read and send your Gmail. You cannot use the Gmail interface to access e-mail from non-Google IMAP servers or from Exchange. The only non-Google e-mail servers that Gmail can access are POP machines, and you don't get any mailbox synchronization with that method.

Oh well.

Labels: gmail, Google

posted by John Wilson @ 10:42 PM Permanent Link ,

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Google News get the picture Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Google have introduced a new means of delivering their news pages as illustrated here - news items are returned using photos and as you hover over the photos, so the related stories are served up in the right hand panel of the page.

Presently it only works for news from certain countries. The UK isn't included but the US is.

Labels: Google, news site

posted by John Wilson @ 11:32 PM Permanent Link ,

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Google Gears simply won't install Wednesday, June 06, 2007

It's frustrating but I just cannot get Google Gears to install. I click the link which downloads the file, accept the T&Cs, open it and everytime I get the message "Install Failed. Error code = 0x80040800" of which there is no trace anywhere in Google help to tell me where I am going wrong.

I am using Firefox 2.0.0.4

Any ideas?

Labels: Google, Google gears, offline

posted by John Wilson @ 10:04 AM Permanent Link ,

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Google mapplets open up new spaces Monday, June 04, 2007

Like many others, I've been astonished by the ingenuity of developers in thinking up ways to use Google maps. The google maps mania blog lists over 1,000 sites that have employed them to great effect.

To their credit, Google have continued to make the developer's job of using google maps increasingly easier. Their latest beta release is enables multiple data overlays to be employed on a single view, each of which can be individually toggled on/off. To help illustrate, Google have produced the introductory video below.

Labels: Google, googlemaps

posted by John Wilson @ 8:59 AM Permanent Link ,

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London Bridge is being knocked down Wednesday, May 23, 2007

It's not really, but I read about an excellent google maps mashup today which crawls over UK local authority websites for planning applications and then mashes the results up on a google map.

In beta at present, PlanningAlerts is an excellent idea that allows you to specify an area that you'd like to monitor and then notifies you by email as and when it discovers relevant planning applications in that area. 150 authorities are covered at time of writing (sadly my own isn't yet).

So you'd find out if a planning application was submitted to knock London Bridge down. As soon as I read about the site, I thought of MySociety, and sure enough they are hosting the site.

Google Maps Mania is an excellent source of news on interesting google maps mashups - it amazes me how many inventive applications people have come up with involving location based information.

Labels: Google, maps, mashup, mysociety

posted by John Wilson @ 7:00 AM Permanent Link ,

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Google helps maintain imperial measures Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Radio 4's Today programme is such an excellent start to the day, often setting the news agenda for the rest of the day across the media. Senior Politicians are a daily feature of the show, with occasional appearances by the Chancellor and the Prime Minister. Famously, Margaret Thatcher was reported to listen into the show each day to hear how her cabinet colleagues and ministers performed, and would call in to "correct" reports that she considered wrong/misleading.

The programme is always keen to report on Britishness issues. Yesterday it ran a story that was subsequently followed up by the rest of the media regarding the EU Commission extending the ability of the UK to display imperial measures alongside metric ones. The argument for phasing out imperial was that their presence may mislead people in comparing prices. As was pointed out, it is so long since imperial measurement was taught in schools, there is a generation that don't fully understand imperial measures. And I confess, I probably fall into that age bracket.

Nonetheless it doesn't mean that I don't use imperial in every day life eg my weight is considered in stone and pounds; I get excited when West Brom get into the 6 yard box (yes, it does happen); I drive in miles per hour and in distances of miles. Moreover, I have little understanding of the metric version of those things.

But, as ever, Google comes to the rescue to allow my laziness to persist - Google has an embedded calculator in their search box.

In the search box, try "X pounds to kilograms" where X is a number

The in and to operator is used to specify what units you want used to express the answer. Put the word in followed by the name of a unit at the end of your expression. This works well for unit conversions such as: 5 kilometers in miles. Or 100 miles in kilometers

You can get information on the calculator function here.

Labels: Google

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Gapminder World joins the Google stable Saturday, March 17, 2007

It appears that Google has acquired Gapminder according to some reports. It provides an excellent rendering/charting tool to display a pre-canned set of data combinations.

Each of the dimension may be changed and hence many relationships examined. In the picture I am displaying population size via the blob size, and charting internet adoption v income per capita. What isn't displayed is that you can play this chart through a timeline of years to see how the situation has changed.

I'm guessing that at some point Google will make it possible to load one's own data sets up to the tool, in similar fashion to google spreadsheets etc. That will be awesome.

Labels: chart, gapminder, Google

posted by John Wilson @ 4:30 PM Permanent Link ,

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My Google reader is broken

No idea what's causing this but Google Reader is broken on my PC and has been since Monday. More specifically
- it's only broken on my laptop (Desktop is fine); AND
- when using Firefox (IE7 is fine); AND
- when using my main google account (still operates on a secondary account)

ie it still works on my laptop for my secondary account in Firefox but not for my main account; yet my main account still works on my laptop under IE7

Quite simply, I log in and the header appears, after which it gets stuck on the "Loading" image.

After checking Google Reader forums it appears I'm not alone, but it's evidently not the account or the browser or the laptop individually but only in combination. It's irritating because I've stopped using IE7, having converted to Firefox initially for it's recovery feature. So now I'm having to use two browsers.

Any ideas how to fix it?

Labels: Google, google reader

posted by John Wilson @ 4:15 PM Permanent Link ,

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Wow - free real-time NYSE share prices Friday, January 12, 2007

This set of announcements here and here from Reuters and Google could really shake up the market data industry in capital markets.

Right now, firms typically devote sizeable chunks of their budgets to buying market data including real-time price feeds. In most cases such feeds are mandatory spending because professional traders need to see what's happening in the market to both take advantage of opportunities and avoid howlers. These real-time feeds are sold by Stock Exchange for whom they represent considerable income streams.

Large brokers and banks alike have always hated these fees primarily because the stock market is the original "user supplied content" concept and hence they are providing data to the Exchanges only to repurchase an aggregated set back from them.

Unsurprisingly, the Stock Exchanges, up until now at least, have always carefully controlled what users have been able to do with those feeds, particularly around re-distribution attaching very high charges to such practices or forbidding it. This has successfully deterred most firms from making the data widely available and avoided Exchange revenues from being undermined.

It therefore takes a firm of the financial muscle and standing like Google step in and pay punitive monthly charges to the NYSE to make it universally available on the web, assuming this deal goes through. Whilst that is not a large sum for Google to absorb, I reckon they may well recoup (much of) that $100k per month simply from rendering adwords etc on the relevant pages.

From the SEC's standpoint this is a win-win. After all, it's hard for a regulator to support a scenario under which access to market data should be restricted and shouldn't instead be a free public good. Yet its another thing to actively intercede and change such a practice - far better than Google have resolved it!

This will undoubtedly hit a number of Data Vendors that redistribute NYSE real-time prices, as well as putting pressure on other exchanges to follow suit.

The google blog suggests that:

The NYSE proposal would allow you to see real-time, last-sale prices across all Google properties including Google Finance, Personalized Google, Mobile, and of course, Google.com. It won't matter if you're on Wall Street or Main Street -- you'll have free, easy and fast access to real-time prices from NYSE on Google.

Depending on how such data is made available e.g. only viewable on a page or capable of being consumed as a structured feed that can be used by other applications, this could be of use to some professional investors as well as retail investors. If the former, this is likely to be of little interest since most current feeds are plumbed into trading and portfolio applications.

Another key consideration will be what important data, if any, is missing from the feed and how real "real-time" is it. I've written before about how firms will spends considerable sums to receive their data milliseconds/seconds faster since it can give them a trading edge over others - i.e. if I see a good price before you, I can grab it and make money.

Nonetheless this could be the start of an avalanche with market data vendors in its path.

Labels: Google, market data, NYSE, SEC

posted by John Wilson @ 11:13 AM Permanent Link ,

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