Piotr Woloszyn

Industry has been trying to tackle problem of location based services (LBS) for years. There was always something stopping wider adoption: mobile providers having brain of the size of a peanut finding always a reason to reject the request for the location data (famous code of conduct), clunky mobile handsets with no capabilities what so ever to accept in convenient way user’s input or to display in an acceptable way results, expensive mobile data pushing most of the possible users of the LBS systems off. I could go on and on about the reasons. Let’s just add one more: content. The ideas for location based services exist for years and I believe are very good. There are endless ideas which could improve our way of interacting with context sensitive data, ideas which could be possibly monetized.

Which year is now? It has been at least 7-8 years since I started to put interest in that. But what has changed, what has improved, what hasn’t? Certainly the capabilities of mobile handsets has improved with the new era of the “touchy” handsets changing completely the user experience. Let say it loudly: it becomes acceptable experience now. The problem of the cost of data becomes valid but more and more operators offer (unlimited) data packages for reasonable price. The wide adoption of Wi-Fi and wireless internet capabilities of modern handsets play important role here as well. Nothing really changed in the Telco Towers in term of availability of the location data. Ok, maybe you can get your location but forget about any ideas based on sharing your location with other people. Ain’t gonna happen. Luckily there are services like Yahoo Fire Eagle which tries to fill the gap, services which facilitate users sharing own location with push model and serving that location to interested parties (other applications), doing this in a secure way where the user can control who can see what and when by delegating authorization to own data. There is as well wider presence of mobiles with a GPS module built-in or connected via bluetooth.

We can see improvement and work done in all areas. So, what’s the reason for this rant? The reason is that the experience of using LBS services is still horrible! Let’s take the simplest possible service: “what’s nearby” search. I can get my location as accurate as it can be via GPS but I still can’t really find what I am looking for. Real life situation: I am near Blackfriars station in London, I know that that there is a branch of the Halifax bank nearby, possibly on Fleet Street. Can the new technology help me? The answer is NO. The Google Maps found couple of banks near Fleet Street, but not what I was looking for. The same Yahoo! GO service. Nokia Maps: no love neither. So, let’s face it: mobile location based services suck due to still poor content.

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I was looking for a way of synchronizing my private Google calendar events and my professional Outlook calendar with Nokia N95 8GB. As it turned out it is possible to have quite neat configuration with 2-way syncing to and from your mobile. What is interesting it can be used with other phones as well, not just Nokia, not just Symbian 60 3rd.

The solution has two distinctive parts:

• 2 way synchronization of Google Calendar with the phone
• 1 way synchronization of the Outlook Calendar with the Google Calendar

There is a free service GooSync which helps with first problem. It works with many, many different phones and as basic version is free. The biggest limitations of the free version is that we can synchronize just main calendar, so people using multiple calendars might have to consider using Premium version of service. As a result of registration and installation the goosync software you will have a new synchronizer added to the standard Nokia Sync application.

Next… To pump out events from Outlook to Google Calendar you can use Google synchonizer. Install it on a computer where you have Outlook (note: the supported Outlook versions are 2003 and 2007) and setup 1-way synchronization Outlook -> GCalendar. The application working as a deamon will push events every X minutes to your Google Calendar.

To synchronize your phone with your calendars go to the Sync application on your phone and choose the goosync.com http syncing. You can use WiFi or GPRS to connect to the syncing service. Unfortunately you cannot schedule the synchronization, you will have to do it manually.

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I want to talk today about new ways of expressing opinions and reaching to people using example of a tragic accident which happened last year in Canada.

On October 14, 2007, Robert Dziekanski, 40 years old Polish immigrant who arrived at the Vancouver International Airport has died shortly after being tesered and subdued by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) after waiting 10 hours at the airport and becaming visibly agitated. According to police Dziekanski “continued to throw things around and yell and scream”, after the arrival of the police officers, which was later revealed to be false in the video. RCMP was heavily criticized for providing a false version of events prior to the public release of the video. It was very unfamous incident which triggered big debate concerning police use of tasers and about the way how RCMP handled the situation. Just to mention that Dziekanski has been teasered second time after failling to the ground which completely doesn’t make any sence to me. Some eyewitnesses claim that he has been tesered as many as four times.

Couple of days ago this case came back to the headlines again. This time because of a video which appeared on YouTube that “parodies” the incident. The video, created by Vancouver resident Mike Greenway, titled Megaman vs. Polish Immigrant shows the 1980s video game character Megaman tasering an opponent (Mr. Dziekanski) after choosing option “Taser Mercilessly”.

As we could expect the reaction to the video was mixed. Media in Canada and Poland has been indignant at the video calling it more than offensive. Similarly a spokesman for the RCMP said he found the video offensive blaming the online culture for emerging such thing on the Internet: “Any right-thinking person who would look at the video would be offended by that. A gentlemen lost his life and it is in extremely poor taste” said sgt. John Ward. Lost his life? Hmmm… Rather you took it. On the other hand there are opinions that the video in the form of parody is really a statement on police taser use, not a cheap entertainment for crowds. The author Mike Greenway said that “The video that I made is a tongue-in-cheek parody about the incompetence of everyone involved, not police brutality.”

Why then that video has been so controversial? Because it’s been intended to be. Someone could say that Greenway crossed a border of a good taste when he has chosen the infantile form of an old game to make a comment on that event. But to make a point we have to reach sometimes for such tools to trigger discussion, to be controversial in sake of reaching bigger audience. I am really happy to live in current times when everyone via forums, blogs, videos, twitts etc. has a chance of forming independent thoughts and independent conversations. A spokeswoman for the Polish Embassy in Canada, Marta Grywalska said: “The public was disturbed by the event. This is how the subculture reacted to it”. Well said. But it is not a subculture anymore. We have own voice. We are the mainstream now.

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If you google yourself often then don’t be ashamed. It is not a sign of your vanity or being an egocentric. If you do it regularly it means that you are in the top 3% of internet users. Users who care what The Web knows about them. Conscious, sane and sensible users.

As Pew Internet and American Life Project says in their report about the online identity management and search in the age of transparency more and more people are aware of their publicly available digital footprint. 47% have searched for information about themselves online, up from just 22% five years ago. There are as well interesting finding about our opinion about the amount of information about us available online, need for self-promoting online, transparency in the social networks and how many of us used search engines to follow others’ digital footprints.

So, if you can find time have a look at full report (PDF), it is really interesting.

Ok, enough for now. It is almost Christmas, isn’t it? I would like to take this opportunity and wish all of you Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

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