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.

Popularity: 33% [?]

Share This

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.

Popularity: 37% [?]

Share This

After reading last entry on David’s James blog about reasons for not blogging enough I started to think about my own reasons for doing exactly the same thing.

User friendliness of the blog content management is important but I don’t think that is my excuse. What it is then?

I am not going to mention the natural human laziness (I’ve just done it). It could be this as well but in my case I can see two things on my way to have more often updated blog:

• perfectionism (sic!)
• type of the content I decided to write about

Perfectionism because it stops me from posting “quick and dirty” posts. Very often instead of writing maybe bit rough entry but actually writing it I wait for a bit of time when I can “do it properly”. And obviously it rarely happens.

Type of the content because I decided to post mainly solutions to common software development problems as a favour to other as I often find answers for my questions in other’s people blogs. But this type of content is pretty time consuming to create. I might to change it as I am not to be honest as excited about doing that.

So… That’s my list of excuses. What’s yours?

Popularity: 33% [?]

Share This