I recently had the opportunity to speak at a local social media meetup in Victoria BC, Social Media Meetup Victoria (@smcvictoria), a monthly gathering of business folks interested in social media and opportunities to extend their usage of social tools and services.
I was tasked with offering up some insight on social location technologies in a presentation titled "The latest on social location technology and apps"
Given that this was my first time at the monthly meets (recent travel has prevented me from making it to the last 2 events) so now knowing the crowd made things a little challenging from my perspective – deciding to use a "101" style presentation and electing to speak about consumer vs enterprise uses was a tough decision. My solution was to offer up a little bit of history and discuss GIS and traditional geospatial technology and the players that have laid the foundationo. I followed that up by sharing some actual demos of mobile location-aware technologies that I use regularly on iPhone. I recorded a series of 1 minute quick demos of a number of apps, mostly social check-in apps and services, then followed that up with examples of more traditional and "useful" location aware apps mainly to convey that location services is not merely about fun and games and checking in.
The room of about 40+ locals was engaged for most of the time I think, although I may have "blown some minds" with a little bit of excessive geo-geek talk on a couple of occasions – old habit! I think the fact that I received a ton of questions from the crowd reinforced to me that people are indeed interested in location technology and people are craving more. As is the case in many presentations on LBS and location sharing, I made a effort to raise the topic of security and privacy as I believe firmly that this is an important matter and something everyone needs to be aware of prior to jumping in and checking in. I mentioned facebook as a concern, particularly with their recent addition of "Places" and location sharing. I made a point of acknowledging key industry players like Esri, Google, Nokia and others who have an amazing job at pushing location technology into the mainstream and brought awareness to the masses.
Some of the topics that I made sure to emphasize:
– be aware of your privacy settings in apps and services
– Open government is driving development and an important topic
– Android is coming on strong and is important for developers to consider
– checking in is getting boring and the rewards have been lacking, many long time social checkin users are checking out
– the open source movement is a key driver and OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a game changer
– look for official apps and be leary of some of the 3rd party apps that fail to deliver
– enterprise apps and services are turning to social media to extend their reach
– crowd sourcing is huge and an important driver
– location technology and technology like Augmented Reality and WiFi are crucial moving ahead
A few items I never managed to get to:
– businesses need to take ownership of their online business listings, particularly those shared via social checkin services
– businesses should monitor their checkins for loyalty and be more aware of offering useful rewards in exchange for loyalty
Below is the slideshare presentation of slides used in the session introduction
Video – Location Technology and Mobile Apps
Video – Location Technology – More than just social check in on Twitter
Video:For fun I was planning on highlighting the issue of privacy with the help of a video from an Ignite Spatial presentation by Nick Armstrong. Time did not permit showing the vid but you’ll find it below – thanks Nick!
For more from the event, browse the event twitter hashtag #smcvictoria