Continuing the Irregular Interviews series, our second interview is with a freelance software engineer working in the geo space, Christopher Osborne, who is the founder, organizer and Master of Ceremonies of the London Geo/Mobile Developers group, better known as #geomob.
Chris, thanks for taking the time to talk to us.
1. The concept of the meetup originated in the US and there’s a flourishing Web 2.0 Mapping and Social Networks group based in Silicon Valley. What inspired you to bring this concept to the UK and to London in particular?
I knew there was lots of interesting people working on impressive geo related projects in London, and I was looking for a forum where I could meet and bounce ideas off other like minded location gurus. This being London there was no shortage of rather stuffy official events, VC/startup fests and the occasional Barcamp but nothing that really got my interest. While searching for a suitable meetup I stumbled across the WebMapSocial in the Valley and after a call to organiser, the lovely Catherine Burton, decided that I should simply create the event that I wanted to go to, here in London. And that’s what #geomob is; an informal meetup where I can have a few beers, listen to some great speakers and chat about location with some super smart people working on interesting projects. It’s not an event for academics or suits to sit and stroke their chins, it’s a meetup for people who are actually creating the next big thing, in their minds anyway.
Why London? I’m not sure if it’s our colonial or maritime history but there is a real wealth of geo experts in the UK and especially in London; I also believe we’ve reached the tipping point in the Web 2.0 ecosystem here. Everywhere I look there’s new startups, many of them with a location element; we need to foster that developer community to ensure London becomes the digital hub of Europe. As if to illustrate my point, Rummble, one of our recent #geomob speakers have just scooped the Tele Atlas Innovators award at Mobile World Congress 2009. Proof that the next big thing may very well come from a member of #geomob, well done to Andrew Scott and and the rest of the Rummble team.
2. Speaking of #geomob, when is the next meetup?
The next #geomob will be held in London on March 27th 2009; the time, place and speaker list are yet to be confirmed but you can keep up to date by signing up at the official #geomob site at http://gmdlondon.ning.com.
3. What do you see as the challenges that the location space will face in the coming year?
With the release of Google Latitude we’re starting to see a few issues bubble to the surface that have been brewing for a while now. It’s something we’ve covered at #geomob and it simply won’t go away; if you have the location data of an individual you are dealing with extremely sensitive personal information. What you do with that data and how you handle it are of the upmost importance, I’m already imagining the press hysteria if Bebo introduces location – headlines screaming “They’re Tracking YOUR KIDS Live Online!” from the usual tabloid suspects. If sharing personal location information is going to be commonplace then it must be secure. I contend that the three principles for secure location are: permission, resolution and trust.
Permission – An application must ask for explicit permission to access a user’s location. It must be made clear in what situation the data is to be used and whether it will be shared with third parties. Some companies in this space have murky T&Cs which makes me very wary, they’re setting a very bad example of “we can do anything we want with your data” and the data privacy implications are huge.
Resolution – I need to be able to set the resolution at which I share my location with others. Exact for close friends and family, neighbourhood for friends, city for acquaintances, etc. This is something Fire Eagle does very well and Latitude does OK, I was quite surprised that I can could only set resolution on a per-person basis.
Trust – Right now it’s too early to tell who people will trust with this. Lots of bad press coverage is not a good start, and Google’s over-secretive approach also alienates the developer community. They should improve the way they communicate with developers, and I would suggest #geomob style events as the perfect place to make small scale announcements to the community.
Your own product Fire Eagle deals with all these very well, although no-one has the full trust of the general public and rightly so. The release of Latitude has also put the fear of God into every location based social network out there, the aforementioned Andrew Scott wrote an excellent article about it for Agit8 and I agree with this; for the most part, “who’s nearby?” is not a business. The economic downturn is already refocusing attention on business models and location enabled mobile social networks are not worth the millions of pounds lavished on them.
Our other biggest problem is the mobile Major Network Operators and handset manufacturers, right now they are all building walled gardens. They control the device you use, the network and they are also trying to control the content. I don’t believe in a mobile internet, I believe in one single internet that can be accessed anywhere from any device. The MNOs are busy writing themselves out of the picture, look at how it took Apple and Google to revolutionise the platform, but for the next few years they are going to throw everything they have at one last attempt to create and control a “mobile internet”.
It is going to fail but they are certainly making it difficult for developers, witness how many are suddenly pushing their own widget platforms and application stores at this year’s Mobile World Congress. Nokia are the smartest of the bunch and have already started a push towards the mobile as a service – they purchased Navteq to provide their own location based services and now we have Nokia Comes With Music. Positioning themselves as a service provider via the mobile, rather than just handset manufacturer, is a very clever move. It doesn’t change the fact that the MNOs (with the exception of Three) are in complete denial about becoming mobile ISPs, anyone remember AOL? How this plays out over the next few years is going to be very messy indeed, the current level of mobile OS fragmentation is already unsupportable.
4. There are currently a large number of players in this space from the “big three” of Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google, through to extant and new startups. Do you see the market for location consolidating or continuing to be varied and heterogeneous?
As I mentioned above I can see some of the mobile/location social networks disappearing, Facebook have been ominously quiet about all of this. Apart from that I see a bright future for a diverse geo ecosystem, after all we’re really just getting started. The crowd #geomob attracts is varied and is doubling in size each time and that is a good sign.
The tools available to geo developers are becoming simpler to use and more powerful all the time, enabling the bedroom coder to be just as innovative as any big player. Track My Journey is a great example, I met Stephen, the creator, at an OpenStreetMap meetup in Decemeber, I was simply speechless when he showed me live vector rendering of OSM data on a mobile phone. Just a few months later it has turn by turn directions and is featured at the CloudMade Developer Zone launch. If you’ve got a good idea and the will to pull it off, there is no better time than now to get started.
5. The news in the geo data field has recently been dominated by the acquisitions of Navteq and TeleAtlas while crowd sourced data sets such as OpenStreetMap and Geonames continue to grow and attract members and activity. How do you see the face of geo data developing and changing during the year?
Geodata is a cruel mistress, you need her so much and yet she treats you so bad. For a long time we were starved of her loving embrace, the slippy map changed all that (thanks Mistress!) and we saw a massive growth in the geoweb. I wrote an article for Agit8 on the Future of Cartography where I argued that the slippy map had taken us about as far as we can go and that developers need access to the underlying vector data. Why is this important? Look at a regular search engine, it understands text but it can’t read text written in an image. The text is locked in the image and no amount of searching is going to find it, take that text out of the image and record it as HTML and suddenly you have a very searchable site. Exactly the same principle applies to mapping applications – expose the underlying vector data and it becomes searchable, queryable and customisable.
Until recently OpenStreetMap was the only way to get hold of vector data, unless you have huge piles of cash. I love the OSM movement and encourage anybody interested to come along to The State of the Map (http://www.stateofthemap.org) conference this summer in Amsterdam. The rate of growth is incredible, according to Steve Coast the UK will be complete by the end of 2009, and they really are producing something world changing. As the datasets get richer it will unlock hitherto impossible geo applications, although it does involve heavy geohacking skills.
The emergence of CloudMade, creating commercial mapping APIs from OSM data, has been really interesting to watch over the last year. Their set of APIs gives developers a new set of powerful tools to flex their development muscles without all the heavy lifting involved in processing raw OSM data. It was a real pleasure to take part in the CloudMade Developer Zone launch last week and present Where Can I Live? to an enthusiastic crowd of developers. I wish the CloudMade team all the best, they’re working on a great project and are *the* space to watch this year. I am particularly interested to see how their Vector Map API is used.
6.What are your favourite geo apps or mashups and what would you like to see appearing in the next year?
Well of course my favourite has to be Where Can I Live? as a new concept to search for a new place to live. The cynic in you might suggest that’s because I developed the concept with the Nestoria team, but it’s a really useful idea. Mashing travel time between stations (London only) and historical property price data, it shows you where you can afford to live within a set commute time of your workplace. I would love to see more mashups like this that give the user contextually relevant information to help them make better decisions.
I am massive fan of the GeoCommons project that enables anyone to share geodata and publish it with some easy mapping tools. We often forget that not everyone is a geohacker and GeoCommons makes it really simple to get data and mashups out there. In the next year I’d like to see Public Sector Bodies taking the lead and following up on the Power of Information Taskforce Report, by using tools like GeoCommons to make public datasets readily accessible.
Thanks Chris. There’s some deep insights in these answers and they go to show the passion and drive that has made #geomob a much welcomed addition to the London engineering and geo scene and we look forward to news of the lineup for March’s meetup.
Gary Gale, Head of UK Engineering, Yahoo! Geo Technologies
Photo credit: Roman Kirillov on Flickr.
