location based information kit
2008.04.08 - 02:04upon entering a park in shanghai, there was a signboard with a compact set of information for park visitors. on the top, there’s a picture and a phone number of the person to contact should anything happen in the park. below, highest/lowest temperature of the day & other relevant phone numbers are listed. its a nice gesture but at the same time it is difficult to imagine how this set of information can be useful for park visitors in practice. it would take a lot of forward-thinking for anyone to predict the usefulness of these numbers & save them for future use upon seeing this information.
many location-based mobile services are subjected to play around the similar threshold of adoption, from service discovery to engagement to actual usage. often it is also about how to transform the linearity to an encompassing, opportunistic space: the physical sign board which broadcasts information at a set node vs. an information broadcast available in a larger area such as a park.
chinese public parks are very vibrant, always full of engaging & engaged activities - encompassing all age groups, be it tai-chi practice, playing chinese chess, singing practice, kite flying, dance performance, or caligraphy with water.
on a sunday afternoon in shanghai in march 2008.
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I am reminded about something I read from Jeremy Wagstaff(loosewire blog)about software on mobile/cell phones to use the camera to read bar codes, which are mostly constructed to a set of internationally agreed standards. Perhaps there is scope for an influential company like Nokia to develop a standard format for displaying names and phone numbers on signs or in print media so that on-phone software can convert a camera picture of the numbers into phone/address book entries. It would take a while to adopt but my guess is that in counties like china where new ideas in technology are being very rapidly embraced this would be readily accepted.
Perhaps it would need something similar to the face recognition feature used on recent digital cameras to recognise the name/number field in a camera view.
BTW, welcome to London, Younghee.
The million dollar (pound/quid?) question for me is, how can we pinpoint someone’s general location for web personalizations based on geo-location which has been previously done off of the user’s IP address? It seems like, at least here in the USA, most phones use care-of-addresses and are situated behind an actual IP address many miles away. For Sprint, my Treo’s IP address is one in Massachusetts… But, on the flip side, if we were able to locate someone based on care-of-address (location of nearest cell tower), we’d be invading their privacy…
So what what do you actually do? I think I read an article recently about a guy working for Nokia traveling the world taking pictures of people using technology (mainly mobile phones) in their own environment and your blog seems somewhat similar. Very interesting as I majored in Anthropology.