NewsNews2011-05-02 09:May:nd2011-05-02 09:May:ndhttp://www.ivt.com.auinfo@ivt.com.auCopyright 2011 IVT - Internet Vision TechnologiesThu, 15 Jul 2010 09:51:57 +1000Thu, 15 Jul 2010 09:51:57 +1000http://www.ivt.com.au/news/id/134The greatest social-media marketing campaign of all time
<p><em>By Jonathan Oxer, IVT Technical Director</em></p>
<p>If you're even slightly interested in online marketing (and if you're in business, you should be!) then it's worth paying close attention to a little bit of drama unfolding online right at this moment. Old Spice is currently conducting what will undoubtedly go down in the annals of marketing folklore as one of the best social media campaigns of all time.</p>
<p>The story begins much as you expect: an established brand has a fading image associated with an older generation, and wants to revitalise themselves for a younger market. So they hire a marketing agency to create a brilliant TV ad, which they also put on YouTube. The ad itself is very cleverly done and attracts a lot of attention when people email their friends about it.</p>
<p>Ho hum. Sounds familiar. It's a course that many companies have taken over the last couple of years, and there have been some great examples: the "evil Ka" ads, the "Extreme Sheep Herding" video, and many others. Those ads were obviously designed to go viral and they did, to great effect.</p>
<p>And that's where Old Spice started their campaign, but the brilliance is that they didn't end it there. First they created the now-famous "I'm on a horse" TV ad starring ex NFL player Isaiah Mustafa, and if you haven't seen it yet you should go and watch it right now before reading on.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owGykVbfgUE">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owGykVbfgUE</a></p>
<p>You have to watch that ad a few times to follow everything that's going on, and part of the brilliance of it is that it's *not* done with computer graphics. The only effects added in post-production were the diamonds spilling from his hand and the Old Spice bottle rising out of it. Everything else was done with cranes and pulleys and clever sets that morph while out of camera shot. The whole ad is one continuous take, and it took them 3 days of trying over and over again until they got it right.</p>
<p>The combination of the clever scripting, surprising visuals, great casting, and the "I'm on a horse" punchline are enough to make it a brilliant ad. They could have left it there, cracked open a few bottles of champagne, and patted themselves on the back for a job well done. With that effort they would have created as successful an online media campaign as anyone before them.</p>
<p>But this is where the genius kicks in.</p>
<p>What they did next is monitor social media for mentions of the ad and begin to participate directly in the online conversion *as* the Old Spice Guy, maintaining the persona defined in the ad. They created profiles on Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, and other social media platforms, then started responding to tweets and YouTube comments with short videos specifically directed at the commenter!</p>
<p>To maintain continuity with the TV ad they set up the bathroom portion of the set that was the backdrop for the opening sequence of the ad, and filmed Isaiah responding in-character with a series of 20 to 40 second segments that are pushed up to YouTube right after they are recorded. In the first 12 hours of this phase of the campaign (which here in Australia was from late Tuesday night through to Wednesday morning) they filmed over 120 short video clips in direct response to online comments, with each video going up on YouTube within minutes of being filmed.</p>
<p>There was a break during the day yesterday (hey, even Isaiah has to sleep sometime) and then it resumed overnight, and over the last few hours they've been maintaining a rate of producing one new video about every 6 minutes on average.</p>
<p>This is astounding stuff, but it gets even better.</p>
<p>What they have cleverly done is respond to a mixture of comments from both random Internet users and to high-profile individuals and media outlets such as Ellen Degeneris, Alyssa Milano, Demi Moore, GQ magazine, and Gizmodo.</p>
<p>This has two effects. Firstly the responses to random Internet users gives the feeling that Old Spice Guy is accessible - he's not being snobby and only responding to celebrities, there's a feeling that if *you* tweet him a question there's a good chance you'll get a response. So there's emotional buy-in from the mass market, viewers feel like he's just one of them. Some of the videos have been quite off-the-wall: one viewer even sent Old Spice Guy a message asking him to perform a marriage proposal on his behalf, which Old Spice Guy duly did - and it was confirmed a couple of hours later that the response was "yes".</p>
<p>Secondly the responses to high-profile individuals provides those individuals with personalised content that they in turn promote to their networks: the "I got a response from Old Spice Guy!" effect. This greatly broadens the reach of the campaign to quickly encompass not just the immediate audience but also everyone who any of those celebrities can influence.</p>
<p>The overall result has been something like the perfect storm. A combination of factors and influences all worked together to amplify each other and produce an impact that I'm sure is worlds beyond anything that the marketing agency could have hoped for in their wildest dreams.</p>
<p>In the first 12 hours of the social media response element of the campaign the Old Spice channel on YouTube hit 55 million viewers, making it the most viewed corporate YouTube channel of all time. And that number just keeps on climbing.</p>
<p>Want to see more? Check out the Old Spice channel on YouTube and see some of the responses he's posted.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/oldspice">http://www.youtube.com/user/oldspice</a></p> Fri, 27 Nov 2009 15:00:18 +1000Fri, 27 Nov 2009 15:00:18 +1000http://www.ivt.com.au/news/id/130Google's Chrome OS: trendsetting or just wishful thinking?
<i>By Jonathan Oxer, IVT Technical Director</i>
<p>Well, I'm back! Of course I never really went away, but eBusiness News has been on hiatus since May and people keep telling me they miss it. In the meantime I've written another book (more info at <a href="http://www.practicalarduino.com/">www.practicalarduino.com</a> in case you're interested) and IVT has completed dozens of projects and hired more staff. We've even had to do office renovations to fit in more desks so it's all action around here!
<p>One of the more intriguing developments I've seen since the last eBusiness News is Google's new operating system, Chrome OS.
<p>Google are a bit like Apple in that they tend to take things to an extreme. Rather than accept compromise and create something that is a balance of attributes, they take a particular idea and see just how far they can push it. Chrome OS is a perfect example of that mindset.
<p>The thinking behind it is that for many people, everything they do on a computer is done (or could be done) within a web browser. Apart from the obvious thing you do with a web browser (look at websites!) it can also let you:
<ul><li> Read / write email (Gmail)
<li> Chat online (Google Chat)
<li> Manage contacts (Salesforce)
<li> Create text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations (Google Docs)
<li> Manage your photo collection (Picassa)
<li> Watch videos (YouTube)
<li> Do your accounting (Xero)
<li> Manage your tasks (Remember The Milk)
<li> Manage projects (Basecamp)
<li> Create flowcharts and diagrams (Gliffy)
</ul>
<p>and hundreds of other tasks. And of course each of those tasks I've listed is not limited to just one supplier, but has many competing services. There are thousands of webmail providers, hundreds of video sharing sites, and so on.
<p>"Well," the smarty-pants developers at Google thought, "why have a big complicated operating system like Windows or MacOS or Linux installed on your computer, when all you really need is a web browser? What's all that other stuff doing on your computer anyway?"
<p>And when you think about it that way, you realise that for many people the only thing their operating system does is act as a way to load up a browser. Gigabytes of code and complexity, all to run one program. When you look at the overall architecture of a typical computer it's very complex, with multiple layers stacked on top of each other starting with the bare electronics at the bottom and running up to the application (a browser in this case) sitting right at the top. The layers in the middle are the traditional operating system doing its thing to manage files, and drivers, and whatever other things operating systems do.
<p>Chrome OS, then, is literally just the Google Chrome web browser running on an absolutely minimal system that does nothing but load the browser as soon as it boots up. There's no desktop, no file manager, no control panel. When you boot it up (which takes something in the order of 3 seconds!) you're presented with a browser window taking up the whole screen, and that's it. Attempt to close it and it just comes straight back again. The *only* thing you can do is use the browser.
<p>See what I mean about taking an idea to the extreme just to see what happens?
<p>It sounds incredibly limited, and it is. But that limitation is entirely intentional. The result is to turn your computer into a simple window onto the Internet rather than a complex device designed for maximum flexibility. It's almost a return to the '70s popularity of "dumb terminals" connected to a central mainframe computer.
<p>Having played around with a beta of Chrome OS my first impression is that it is jaw-droppingly fast. Google Chrome is already a very fast browser, but when it's running on a stripped-down platform dedicated to doing nothing else it's simply stunning. Web pages appear in the blink of an eye, and complex web applications run as if they're local programs. I've never seen Google Docs respond the way it does under Chrome OS. For example, clicking the "Documents" link inside Chrome OS to open the Google Docs file manager (loading the document list off a Google server via the Internet) is actually faster than opening a file manager window on my local computer to see a list of files on my hard drive.
<p>Or as another example, think about how long it takes you to start a new word-processor document on your local computer: just launching the office suite takes several seconds. On Chrome OS starting a new document using Google Docs takes less than half a second.
<p>That sounds cool, but is an "Internet operating system" for everyone? Definitely not. IVT's Development Projects Manager, Luke Sparke, is a cynic who likes to cut down bold predictions about changes in the industry. Any time someone says "all applications will be online within X years" he starts laughing and asks how well that will work out for people who do video editing or graphic design. As Luke points out, the reality is that right now the bandwidth required to do things like deal with high-def video streams running at more than a gigabyte / minute just isn't practical.
<p>Bandwidth limitations apply more to some people than others, of course. My father lives in a rural area outside Bairnesdale in eastern Victoria, and he can't get hard-wired Internet connectivity at all. His only access to the Internet is via a wireless broadband connection to a provider's base station some kilometers away, with the result that his connection is very slow and has a minuscule monthly quota. When he wants to install a software update for his Mac it's not practical to pull it down using his Internet connection. I can download a 500MB update in a couple of minutes, burn it on a CD, put it in a padded envelope, mail it to him, and it's delivered to his door by Australia Post before the download would even be complete if he tried to fetch it himself. Obviously an Internet-based operating system would be a disaster for him!
<p>So what we see with Chrome OS isn't necessarily something that is going to be practical in the short term, and certainly not for all users. But it's still a fascinating example of an extreme thought-experiment that someone had the audacity to turn into a functioning prototype.
<p>For me personally it's something I've been expecting and hoping to see for a very long time, and given my workflow (which involves almost entirely online services) it would actually be a practical option. A computer that boots in 3 seconds, runs like Usain Bolt, and gives me access to the online services that take up 95% of my day is a very interesting proposition. I'll be running it on a spare laptop for a while as an experiment to see how much time I end up using it and how often I end up turning back to a traditional heavyweight operating system to get things done.
<p>PS: If you're interested in following the random thoughts of various IVT staff you can catch some of us on Twitter.
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/ivt_updates">twitter.com/ivt_updates</a> (IVT's official "updates" stream)
<br><a href="http://twitter.com/jonoxer">twitter.com/jonoxer</a> (That's me!)
<br><a href="http://twitter.com/neilevenden">twitter.com/neilevenden</a> (Neil Evenden, Business Development Manager)
<br><a href="http://twitter.com/lsparke">twitter.com/lsparke</a> (Luke Sparke, Development Projects Manager)
<br><a href="http://twitter.com/holmesy">twitter.com/holmesy</a> (Matt Holmes, Senior Web Developer)
<br><a href="http://twitter.com/twetwee">twitter.com/twetwee</a> (Jeffery Fernandez, Senior Application Developer)
<br><a href="http://twitter.com/jschalken">twitter.com/jschalken</a> (Jesse Schalken, Application Developer) Thu, 28 May 2009 13:20:12 +1000Thu, 28 May 2009 13:20:12 +1000http://www.ivt.com.au/news/id/128Software as a commodity / utility?
<i>By Jonathan Oxer, IVT Technical Director</i>
<p>It's pretty much an accepted trend now that the Internet has become the new delivery method for software: instead of buying it in a box with a manual, you can pay for it online and download the installer without having to make a trip to the local computer store only to find they're out of stock of the program you want. And web applications that actually run online and simply charge a monthly or yearly subscription fee have become so common it's a bit of a yawn even talking about it.</p>
<p>However, Amazon and IBM recently collaborated to demonstrate that the concept of billing for online services can be taken to even more of an extreme: instead of paying big fees for a perpetual license, or smaller fees for a monthly subscription, they're experimenting with charging tiny fees for "as you use it" charges for software.</p>
<p>In effect, they're treating software as an on-demand utility.</p>
<p>We're all accustomed to the volume-based billing applied to household utilities: turn on a switch or a tap and out flows electricity, or water, or gas. Turn it off and it stops, with usage charged on a "volume consumed" basis. With the exception of basic service levies you just pay a rate per kW/h or kiloliter consumed.</p>
<p>Amazon's latest announcement is that they are providing access to certain software packages in the same way. If you want to use one of their supported packages you just use it when you need it and they bill you by the hour for the actual time it was in use: use it a little and pay a little, use it more and pay more.</p>
<p>So far Amazon are only offering a limited range of server-oriented packages that are unlikely to interest the average consumer: things like the Informix database and the WebSphere Portal Server. There's no "pay-by-the-hour word processor", for example.</p>
<p>But what this move makes clear is the potential for developers of online applications to move towards a range of more consumer-oriented online utility services where you simply pay for the time you use the software. Instead of paying $350 for a perpetual license for a word processor, or $10/month for a subscription for an online word processor, you'd pay 10 cents / hour just for the time you're actually using it. If you use a word processor a couple of times a year you may only pay 50 cents total per year, but still have access to the exact same features as a heavy user who may spend $135 / year because they spend hours every day using it. What you pay is exactly proportional to how much you use it, just like the other utilities we're already accustomed to.</p>
<p>I'm keeping my eyes open for the first consumer-oriented Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering that provides a utility-based hourly billing model. I haven't seen one yet but I doubt it will be long coming.</p>
<p>Actually, tell you what: I will send free copies of both "<a href="http://www.stay-sane.com/">How To Build A Website And Stay Sane</a>" and "<a href="http://www.adwords-quickstart.com/">Quickstart Guide To Google AdWords</a>" to the first person who lets me know about the launch of a consumer-oriented web application that is billed on an hourly basis.</p>
<p>Good hunting!</p>
<p>PS: A friend of mine was recently diagnosed with cancer and has started chemotherapy, so I'm thinking about doing my own personal "Greatest Shave" to raise funds for cancer research and give him some moral support now that he's lost his previously very long hair. If you're willing to pledge funds (even just a few dollars) to a group such as the Australian Cancer Research Foundation or the Cancer Council Victoria in exchange for me shaving my head <a href="mailto:jon@ivt.com.au">please let me know</a>!</p> Thu, 02 Apr 2009 11:09:21 +1000Thu, 02 Apr 2009 11:09:21 +1000http://www.ivt.com.au/news/id/126Dealing with online flash crowds
<i>By Jonathan Oxer, IVT Technical Director</i>
<p>One of the interesting side-effects of the move towards the "social" web has been "online flash crowds", where a particular web page or video or site becomes the focus of attention of a large group of people very briefly and undergoes an enormous traffic spike.</p>
<p>The most famous site to cause the effect is slashdot.org, a technology news site with a huge readership and a regularly updated stream of news items on the home page. Having your site mentioned in a Slashdot story can have the effect of sending tens of thousands of visitors to you in the space of a few hours followed by a barrage of comments about it on the Slashdot story page. Then when the story falls off the bottom of the Slashdot home page the traffic to your site simply stops as if someone turned off a tap: the flash-crowd has moved on to newer stories and your hour or two in the sun is over. It can be quite a bewildering experience if you're not used to it!</p>
<p>Now with the proliferation of socially-driven sites there are far more ways your site can become the center of attention of a flash crowd. Types of sites that can drive flash traffic to you include:</p>
<ul><li> Blogging sites (<a href="http://blogger.com">blogger.com</a>, <a href="http://livejournal.com">livejournal.com</a>, ...)
<li> Micro-blogging services (<a href="http://twitter.com">twitter.com</a>, <a href="http://identi.ca">identi.ca</a>, <a href="http://jaiku.com">jaiku.com</a>, ...)
<li> Social networking (<a href="http://facebook.com">facebook.com</a>, <a href="http://myspace.com">myspace.com</a>, ...)
<li> Social bookmarking (<a href="http://digg.com">digg.com</a>, <a href="http://stumbleupon.com">stumbleupon.com</a>, <a href="http://del.icio.us">del.icio.us</a>, ...)
<li> Video sharing (<a href="http://youtube.com">youtube.com</a>, <a href="http://vimeo.com">vimeo.com</a>, <a href="http://blip.tv">blip.tv</a>, <a href="http://video.google.com">video.google.com</a>, ...)
<li> Photo sharing (<a href="http://flickr.com">flickr.com</a>, <a href="http://photobucket.com">photobucket.com</a>, <a href="http://picasaweb.google.com">picasaweb.google.com</a>, ...)
<li> Presentation sharing (<a href="http://slideshare.com">slideshare.com</a>, <a href="http://slidebank.com">slidebank.com</a>, ...)
<li> Topic-specific news sites (too many to mention!)</ul>
<p>For every one of those categories above I could have listed 100 examples, and many of these services have tens or hundreds of millions of users.</p>
<p>And then there are a multitude of socially-driven sites that don't seem to fit into any existing category: people are inventing new ways to connect socially via the Internet every day of the week!</p>
<p>As illustration of the impact these sorts of services can have, I've experienced flash crowds on my personal blog from a few different socially-driven sites over the last couple of months. One blog post I did in February about a good experience with HP customer service (<a href="http://jon.oxer.com.au/blog/id/305">jon.oxer.com.au/blog/id/305</a>) was listed on Digg.com by a reader and received about 6,000 visits in the space of a few hours. Then a week or so later I did a blog post about a light switch I designed and built that uses web services to link to a home automation system (<a href="http://jon.oxer.com.au/blog/id/307">jon.oxer.com.au/blog/id/307</a>) and a mention on stumbleupon.com resulted in 50,000 extra visitors to my blog over the space of about 4 days. And a few evenings ago just before sitting down to dinner I grabbed a video camera and spent a few minutes making a quick video of a web interface I wrote to control functions on my RX-8 using an iPod Touch and uploaded it to YouTube (<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqZj4ArrlhA">www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqZj4ArrlhA</a>) and after being mentioned on about a dozen of the top tech news sites over the last 24 hours it's now at 31,000 views and climbing rapidly.</p>
<p>That sort of massive exposure is the sort of thing most website owners only dream about and it can be very unpredictable, but it's not unachievable. On a less dramatic note I've noticed that <a href="http://twitter.com/">Twitter</a> has a very consistent but less powerful impact: if I do a blog post and then do a tweet linking to it, the blog post will typically receive a dozen or so views within the first 30 seconds of the tweet and then more tailing off over the next 30 minutes. Of course that effect is entirely dependent on how many followers you have on Twitter, but by growing your following over time it can become a powerful tool for alerting people to content updates on your site.</p>
<p>This isn't out of the reach of typical site owners. You just have to pay attention to what's happening online beyond your own website and become part of the broader conversation.</p>
<p>So here are some tips for maximising the benefit of online flash crowd exposure.</p>
<p>1. Be aware of it. Create Google Alerts for relevant terms including your company name and domain name so that you will be alerted quickly if anyone mentions you on a social networking site. I talked about setting up Google Alerts in a previous post titled <a href="http://www.ivt.com.au/news/id/102">"Online reputation management"</a>. If you don't discover that your site attracted a flash crowd until you see the traffic report a month later you've totally missed the boat. You need to know within minutes or hours, not days or weeks.</p>
<p>2. Respond to comments. Don't just watch what people are saying but get in there and be vocal yourself. The driving force of most social networking sites is the user commentary that is added to stories or posts or videos, so read through all the comments people make about stories relating to your site and post responses where appropriate. Keep it professional of course and be courteous at all times no matter how much other commenters may bait you. Even just a simple "hey, thanks for the story about XYZ!" comment can be a good way to show readers of the site that you're paying attention and being part of the conversation. You'll often find that interested people then seek you out directly via email or other methods to discuss things in more detail since comments are public and usually limited to a couple of sentences.</p>
<p>3. Plan for conversion. Drawing a flash-crowd to your site is all well and good, but if you have a business to run the important issue of course is whether you can capitalise on all that traffic. You don't want to just have thousands of people visit your site and then move on to the next big thing, leaving you sitting there all alone with no new customers and the feeling of cleaning up the house after a party is over and all the guests have left. Make sure your site is ready for it with appropriate hooks such as a newsletter sign-up form, your contact details, and anything else you might want visitors to make use of <b>before</b> it becomes the center of attention of a flash crowd.</p>
<p>I'd love to hear stories about the impacts of online flash crowds so if you've had this happen to you please <a href="mailto:jon@oxer.com.au">drop me an email</a> and tell me about it! Thu, 12 Feb 2009 14:22:04 +1000Thu, 12 Feb 2009 14:22:04 +1000http://www.ivt.com.au/news/id/124Web applications assisting with bushfire relief
It's been a while since the last eBusiness News and now with so many people dead, injured, displaced, or bereaved by the bushfire disaster here in Australia it hardly seems the time to be trumpeting the benefits of the latest online marketing techniques. If you or your family have been impacted by the disaster then please accept the sympathies of everyone here at IVT.
For those overseas who may not have heard the news, the last week has seen the biggest natural disaster in Australian history with bushfires burning out at least 3,000 square kilometres of land, destroying numerous towns and resulting in, at last count, 181 deaths with thousands more left without homes. The fear is that number is set to climb steeply as recovery teams work their way through the devastated areas.
To put the scale of the disaster into perspective, that puts the death toll approximately on par (per capita) with what the United States experienced in the attacks of 9/11. This is loss of life and property on an immense scale and we will no doubt feel the repercussions of it for years to come. It seems everyone knows somebody who has been affected in some way: right here at IVT we have staff who have lost family members so it's not just theoretical for us. It's very personal.
So this eBusiness News is a little bit different. It's a plea for help, and also a story of how a group of developers got together to use their skills to help out in a way only they could.
One of the biggest short-term problems being faced by survivors of the disaster is the simple question of where to live. Temporary shelters have been put in place and tent cities have sprung up to give people a place to catch some sleep over the coming hours and days, but looking ahead there is a medium-term requirement for actual housing: somewhere people can stay with running water, and showers, and kitchen facilities, and everything else we take for granted. With thousands of people displaced, many of them with no possessions other than the clothes on their back, it's a serious problem that has to be resolved very rapidly.
So a good friend of mine, Ben Balbo, got together with some workmates and over the space of a couple of days they worked around the clock to build an online service to assist with placing victims into short-term accommodation, matching those in need with people who have a spare bedroom or holiday house or even just a mattress on the floor and are willing to open their homes up to help those in need.
The service is called Australian Bushfire Housing Assistance, and it's accessible online right now at <a href="http://bushfirehousing.org/">bushfirehousing.org</a>.
This is a brilliant example of solving an unexpected information-sharing problem using Internet technologies. Last week the need didn't exist, and neither did the Bushfire Housing website. With the need came the solution, created very rapidly to suit the specific requirements of the situation.
So I encourage you to spread the word about the site: the more people who know about it, the more likely it will be that people displaced by the fires will be able to find themselves somewhere to stay while they work through their grief and start thinking about how to begin rebuilding their lives.
Think also about other ways to assist. There are obvious needs such as cash donations (through well-known charities only though - there have been reports of scammers taking advantage of the disaster by running false collection drives) and blood donations but there are also needs that most people won't even think of such as how to get feed and medical assistance to the tens of thousands of animals (pets, stock, and wildlife) that have been impacted. This is an ongoing disaster with ongoing needs, so please, I encourage you to contribute in any way you can. Fri, 12 Dec 2008 13:06:36 +1000Fri, 12 Dec 2008 13:06:36 +1000http://www.ivt.com.au/news/id/122Google search result personalisation goes mainstream
<i>By Jonathan Oxer, IVT Technical Director</i>
I've been blabbing on for years about how eventually search engine results will be personalised so that when you do a search the results you get may be totally different to the results of someone else doing the exact same search. The basic principle is that everyone has different interests and requirements, so one person searching for "eagles" may be interested in birds while another is looking for information about the 70's rock band.
Google have experimented with a variety of personalisation techniques over the years but it's always been in special limited-test systems accessed through places like labs.google.com. A couple of weeks ago, however, they added personalisation features to the main public "www.google.com" search interface for the very first time - quite a historic moment, although it occurred without much fanfare! The event is indicative of a major change in the way search engines of the future will work.
To see the additional personalisation features you need to be logged in when you access Google. Up in the top right corner of the Google home page you'll see either "Sign in" if you haven't yet signed in, or your Google Account username (usually an email address) if you have.
When you perform a search you will notice that the results page may contain a couple of little icons next to each result: an up arrow that allows you to "promote" that particular result, and a cross that allows you to hide it. In effect it's a bit like a "thumbs up / thumbs down" voting system for results so that you can blacklist rubbish that comes up in the results page. At present the votes you submit only apply to your own results: one user voting up a site won't cause it to rise in the search results for all other users. However, I'm sure that Google will be amassing a wealth of data as people start using the system and it may well be factored into future updates to the PageRank algorithm.
You may also notice that the search results page says "Personalized based on your web history" near the top right. You can click the little "More details" link to find out exactly how your results were modified, typically based on previous behaviour such as which sites you clicked on in previous searches. Sites that you click on more often in search results will tend to appear higher in results for future searches.
It's certainly not Earth-shattering from a functionality point of view, but it's definitely an indicator of the changing landscape with respect to search engine optimisation. The old days of search engines providing the exact same results to every user for any given keywords will soon be but a memory and everyone who wants to promote their site online will need to understand how search engines customise their results on a per-user basis.
Which reminds me, I'm well along the way with writing my next book, "Quickstart Guide to Search Engine Optimisation". It should be available in all good bookstores as well as online retailers such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble around February next year and will include a lot of behind-the-scenes information on how search engines actually work, so I'll let you know when it goes on sale.
Finally, a wrap-up of some recent events to end the year.
In the last eBusiness News I asked for feedback about my tech predictions for 2009. I received more email about that than any other topic I've ever written about, and it was also picked up by Fairfax Media and used as the basis of a story that was the lead item in the technology sections of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald online for three days in a row. I had email responses from all over the world including from an old friend living in China who was good enough to provide his first-hand experiences with Internet censorship.
His comments were pretty much what I expected: attempting to censor the Internet can be effective against casual users who can't be bothered working around it, but to anyone who really wants to get around it they can using encrypted email, secure tunnels, The Onion Router project, and a multitude of other techniques. It's therefore an annoyance to regular users while not stopping those who it's actually meant to block! If it's ever applied in Australia it would be a classic case of penalising the innocent majority in an ineffectual effort to stop the guilty minority. I'm sure the news over the last day or so about the discovery of a major pedophile ring including a police officer and a retired QC will be used as additional ammunition to support Internet censorship, but in fact it's a classic example of why Internet censorship is a total waste of time in trying to solve the problem - they just send DVDs to each other through the post! Spending money on Internet censorship in the expectation that it will prevent the spread of child pornography is totally misguided, and that money would be far better spent on investigation and enforcement.
I also promised that I'd give one of my books to the person who submitted the best response, and the winner was Paul Wayper from Sydney! Paul wrote an insightful email about the possible motivations behind the push for Internet censorship, so when I went up to Sydney last week to present a paper at the Open Source Developers Conference I packed his prize in my suitcase and delivered it to him personally.
Although it probably won't be of interest to you unless you happen to be into programming, you can now access the slides from my talks on Slideshare. My main presentation was on "Self Healing Databases", and you can see the slides at:
http://www.slideshare.net/jonoxer/selfhealing-databases-managing-schema-updates-in-the-field/
I also did two lightning-talks, which are talks with a 5 minute time limit. The first was about my recent project to mount a computer in my car and connect it to the Internet:
http://www.slideshare.net/jonoxer/geek-my-ride/
The second lighting talk was about a joke programming language I invented a couple of years ago and demonstrated running on the computer in my car to communicate with the engine management system:
http://www.slideshare.net/jonoxer/osdclang-on-mobile-devices
A couple of my developers also presented papers at the conference. Antoine Osanz did a very well-received presentation about efficiently representing hierarchical category structures in a relational database:
http://www.slideshare.net/ivtantoine/managing-category-structures-in-relational-databases-presentation
And Peter Serwylo presented a paper on why uptake of Open Source software is so slow among typical non-technical computer users, generating some interesting discussion among the audience.
Have a great Christmas / New Year break, and I'll be back in January with the next eBusiness News!
Cheers :-)
Jonathan Oxer
PS: Some of the projects we've completed recently at IVT include:
* Apollo Bikes (www.apollobikes.com)
* Association Solutions (www.associationsolutions.com.au)
* Connect Trades (www.connecttrades.com.au)
* E-lift (www.elift.com.au)
* Greenacres (www.greenacreslawn.com.au)
Learn more about these projects at www.ivt.com.au/portfolio
Fri, 14 Nov 2008 14:23:50 +1000Fri, 14 Nov 2008 14:23:50 +1000http://www.ivt.com.au/news/id/120IT predictions for 2009
<i>By Jonathan Oxer, IVT Technical Director</i>
On Tuesday I participated in a panel session to discuss the future of IT and, in particular, what the hot topics will be for 2009. You know the deal: a bunch of "experts" sit in front of an audience and make grandiose statements about what technology will look like in 5 or 10 years, and you just know that in retrospect the predictions will either look obvious (if they came true) or naive (if they didn't).
This particular session was pretty interesting though because it maintained focus on the present and the near future, not some indeterminate point over the horizon that nobody can really see. It was about the issues facing businesses and consumers right now, and the issues they are likely to face in just a few months or a year.
Being part of these sorts of events can be a bit odd at times though. Because so much of my time these days is spent looking at the latest trends and investigating emerging technologies (or even creating them in the first place) I tend to live so far ahead of the bleeding edge that the knife blade is behind me somewhere trying to catch up, and I sometimes feel embarrassed raising issues that I feel are quite passe and so "last week" and then I'm surprised when other people think they're new and exciting. That's not to try to make myself sound good: it's just to highlight the huge variation across society in the uptake of technology. As William Gibson once said, "the future is already here, it's just not widely distributed yet".
Some of the things people are doing with technology right now may seem like science fiction, but it's not fantasy: it's reality, just a reality that isn't widely distributed yet. For example, my letterbox has a network connection and an IP address so my home automation system can be notified when the postman drops by, and my car is connected wirelessly to the internet so my mechanic can use their web browser to interrogate my engine management system and run diagnostics in real time - while the car is hundreds of kilometers away driving down the road. And I have an RFID microchip implanted in my arm so I can unlock my front door just by waving my arm near it and don't have to carry keys. Right now I'm working on a device that will detect when I leave the loungeroom so it can pause the TV automatically, then if I walk into another room with a TV it will transfer the program across to it and continue playing from the paused position without me doing a thing. The TV show (or music, or movie, or video phone call, or weather data feed, or news headlines) can just follow me around the house.
As I said, this sort of thing may sound like science fiction but it's reality for some people already. Predicting the near future therefore is really just a matter of paying very close attention to what the thought-leaders are doing, because in many cases what they are experimenting with right now is what will become reality for everyone else just a little bit down the track.
So let's cover some of the topics the panel discussed.
Cloud computing. This is one of the hot buzzwords in IT right now, and like many others it's very poorly defined. Just about everything about cloud computing has been done in some shape or form for decades, but now that a trendy label has been tacked on there's a sense of hype about it and just about every tech vendor is trying to find a way to associate themselves with the term. The general premise of cloud computing is that low-level computer resources (processor time, storage, memory, etc, and even software) can be abstracted away into a vast pool of resources that you don't need to manage directly: it just becomes something you have available "on tap" when you need it, and you turn off the tap when you're finished with it. Instead of building, deploying and managing servers directly, it enables "virtualised" servers to be created and destroyed on demand very rapidly. You don't need to care what hardware your server runs on, or even what data center it's in. You just click a few buttons and a minute later you have a server running for you to use, and when you're done you just kill it off. Amazon is one of the best known providers of this sort of technology with EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), where you can create as many servers as you like and pay for them on an hourly basis instead of buying them yourself. Instead of thinking about server cost as something that involves high up-front establishment fees and deployment delays and asset depreciation over several years, a server is just something you create for a couple of hours and pay 10 cents / hour to use. Want to run 1000 servers for a few hours for a big computational task? No problem, it'll cost you $100 / hour. No up front costs, and when you're done you just "delete" them. Much better than paying to buy, install, and configure 1000 actual servers yourself! The concept of the "cloud" applies at all levels of computing, too. For example, when you use a web application like Flickr or Gmail or Slideshare you don't care about installing the software or maintaining it. That all happens out "in the cloud". You just use it when you want it and don't think about it when you don't.
Broadband internet. The funny thing is that when this topic came up there was a collective groan from the panel because we're all tired of talking about it. It's been a sore point for years, and none of us see anything changing any time soon. It'll continue to be slower and more expensive than elsewhere in the world. Telstra will continue bickering with the other providers and the government about wholesale rates and anti-competitive behavior. Same-old same-old. Yawn.
Clean feed. In case you haven't heard about it (and it's surprising how many haven't given the potential impact of the proposal), the Australian federal government is actively pursuing a plan to censor the internet by forcing all ISPs to filter out unwanted content before it gets to end users. Under their plan it will be illegal for an ISP to provide a direct connection to the internet: all connections (not just domestic, *all*) will be filtered and an undefined list of "unwanted" websites and web services blocked. What's more, it will be illegal for the ISPs who are forced to do the filtering to reveal which sites are being blocked. They will simply stop being accessible with no explanation. What a stupid idea! From a freedom-of-speech viewpoint it's dumb because they will be able to censor anything they like without explanation. It starts with the obvious stuff that nobody can argue against (kiddy-porn), then extends to other adult content and gambling sites, then ... who knows? Any site considered to provide information of use to terrorists, even if it's of general interest? Personal blogs that criticise government policy? Wikipedia, because it contains articles about sexual health and maybe an unsupervised child using a computer might come across it? Where does it end? But even laying aside the social reasons that censorship is a bad idea, from a technical point of view it's totally ridiculous. Ask any tech-savvy computer user about whether government-imposed censorship of the internet will work and they'll laugh in your face. They'll point to projects like TOR (The Onion Router, a project to allow political activists and journalists in repressive regimes to bypass national-level filters and connect anonymously to the internet so they can't be tracked down by the secret police). They'll point out that a simple VPN connection to a server in another country provides an encrypted tunnel that the government-imposed filters can't see into, and through that tunnel you can access anything in the world without them even knowing what you're looking at. They'll point out that many protocols used on the internet now use encryption and it's impossible to see what's passing through it: think of SSL certificates for online credit card transactions, which could just as easily be used by a kiddy-porn ring to prevent the filters seeing what's being transferred - but the government can't ban SSL, because then all online commerce in Australia (including online banking) would cease to operate overnight! And even if they did become totally draconian and ban all encryption and block access to all but a few selected "family-friendly" websites and throw us back into the dark ages, it still wouldn't have the slightest impact on access to porn which (presumably) is the whole point of the project. Porn and illegal content would just be transferred by email instead. *Encrypted* email, that can't be inspected. Summary: worthy (so far) intentions, but a totally ridiculous plan. It won't work, it can't work, and the government should stop wasting our money and give up on the idea right now before they make themselves look even more stupid.
The internet of things. The examples of "the future here right now" I mentioned earlier are examples of this, which is basically the concept that in time every single device will end up connected to the internet somehow. Early products such as overpriced and useless internet fridges (really just a fridge with a laptop molded into the door) have given the concept a bad name, but the phenomenon has now gained critical mass as the incremental cost to manufacturers drops. It now only costs in the order of $2 to $5 for a manufacturer to add a network connection to an appliance so it can use your home broadband connection to increase its intelligence. You can buy an alarm clock that connects to the internet to play online radio stations and display the news headlines and stock prices on its touch screen when you wake up (<a href="http://www.chumby.com/">www.chumby.com</a>). You can buy an umbrella that uses a wireless internet connection to download local weather data and tell you as you walk out the door whether you need to take it with you or not (<a href="http://www.ambientdevices.com/">www.ambientdevices.com</a>). TVs have internet connections so they can download program guide data. And as I mentioned previously, my letterbox has an ethernet connection so it can report when mail has been delivered. Soon there will be cat doors which connect to your home automation system to tell you whether your cat is inside or outside, and let you automatically prevent it leaving the house after dark. Eventually none of this will seem exotic or far-fetched: it will simply be *assumed* that every object around you is part of a huge mesh of information constantly being updated and commands being sent. Devices that aren't part of that mesh will seem as old-fashioned as kerosene-powered refrigerators.
Windows Vista. The consensus of the panel was that Vista has been largely bypassed as a technology. Take-up has been pathetic, with many businesses preferring to stick with XP until the next version of Windows (Windows 7) is released and never migrating to Vista at all. Even Microsoft themselves have made statements that they expect many businesses to totally bypass Vista and hang on to XP until Windows 7 comes out. Vista is now gaining traction in domestic use largely because it's extremely difficult to buy a computer without it bundled in, but in the corporate environment it basically doesn't exist. MacOS and Linux continue to slowly grow in popularity, but the underlying message from the panel was that in the long run it really doesn't matter what happens with desktop operating systems because they're becoming less relevant by the day. As more of the day to day tasks we do with computers move "into the cloud" as web applications that can be accessed using a variety of devices from your desktop computer to your mobile phone to your TV, nobody will really care much what operating system your computer runs. The operating system will become just a hardware abstraction layer to deliver cloud-based applications to your screen. Eventually we'll care about the OS about as much as you probably care right now about the BIOS in your computer, or the firmware in your network card. It'll be there just to allow other stuff to run and you won't think twice about what flavor it is.
Identity management. Right now you probably have either a huge list of usernames and passwords for all the sites you use, or you use the same username and password on every site (a very bad idea, by the way - what happens if any one of those sites is hacked and all the usernames / passwords is exposed? Whoever gets them can log in as you into all the other services you use, of course!). Technologies like OpenID provide a good basis for solving that problem but have taken a while to gain critical mass. The prediction by the panel is that identity management systems will continue to grow in importance because it touches just about every aspect of what we do online, from logging in to Flickr to entering into online contracts. The lack of strong identity management is even what allows spam to exist. If all email senders were verified, spam would cease to exist. The panel didn't see a magic-bullet solution, but it is certainly a topic to watch in the near future.
Social networking. This was another topic that brought a collective sigh from the panel because we're all sick of talking about it. A comment was made that many businesses allowed access to Facebook and other social networking sites for a while just to keep their gen-Y staff from whining too much, but then discovered that there's not much point having happy staff if they spend all their time chatting online about the party last weekend rather than doing actual work. The result in the last 12 months has been a big backlash against social networking in business, with many social networking sites now blocked at the corporate firewall. The agreement was that from a business perspective the important thing is not so much the social aspect like getting in touch with long-lost school friends, the real benefit is using social networking as the framework for collaboration inside virtual workspaces. We want to be able to create ad-hoc project teams bound together via a social networking infrastructure, and share documents and resources transparently within the context of projects so everyone is kept in the loop. That will all come, and very soon.
Government policy. Right at the end as we were running out of time the panel was asked what IT-related advice we would have for the government. Ditching the "Clean Feed" censorship project was the #1 item mentioned, of course. My suggestion was that the government should kill off the remaining technology commercialisation grants that are still hanging around because all they do is provide a good soundbite ("State Government commits $120M to the local ICT industry!" right before an election) but then most of the funds are soaked up within the bureaucracy and paying "consultants" and very little of it gets into the hands of the innovators who could use it to, you know, actually build the local ICT industry. Instead it would be better to look at successful schemes overseas in places like Canada, where a percentage of superannuation funds are invested into start-up ventures which are also provided with advice and assistance to get themselves ready for investment. Most ICT-related government initiatives at the moment are about helping us be technology consumers rather than technology producers, which is not a good long-term strategy if we still want to call ourselves "the clever country".
Whew, an epic email today!
I'd love to hear *your* predictions about where you think technology will take us in the next 12 months, so if you have a great idea bouncing around in your head please let me know at <a href="mailto:jon@ivt.com.au">jon@ivt.com.au</a>. In fact, to up the ante a little I'll send your choice of any one of my books to the person who comes up with the most interesting prediction.
Cheers :-)
Jonathan Oxer
Technical Director
Internet Vision Technologies Fri, 31 Oct 2008 10:06:58 +1000Fri, 31 Oct 2008 10:06:58 +1000http://www.ivt.com.au/news/id/118Google Analytics gets an event-tracking feature... at last!
<i>By Jonathan Oxer, IVT Technical Director</i>
Just over two years ago I made a prediction about major changes that would need to be made in web statistics / analytics systems to enable them to keep track of the way people use websites. My prediction (made in October 2006: you can read the original article at <a href="http://www.ivt.com.au/news/id/78">www.ivt.com.au/news/id/78</a>) was that the old "page view" methodology was obsolete and that stats systems would need to start caring not about pages but about "events".
I'm happy to say that a few minutes ago that prediction finally came true!
Google Analytics, one of the most popular web stats systems in the world, has just started testing an "Event Tracking" feature on some selected customer sites.
Just to re-cap my original prediction, the basic problem is that websites have traditionally been "page-based". Users view one page on a site, then click a link to go to another page, read it, click a link to go to another, and so on. As a result, analytics packages have traditionally been very focused on this "page based" concept of user activity. Everyone in the industry talks about metrics like pages-per-visit and time-per-page when trying to analyse how well a website is working.
But new techniques and technologies such as Ajax, Flex, Silverlight, and other "rich Internet application" (RIA) approaches break out of the "page" paradigm and instead let users interact with websites and web applications in a way that's much more like a regular desktop program. They allow drag-and-drop, and in-page updates, and transitions that aren't really page-loads at all. In many cases a user viewing a web application will only perform a single "page view" when they first load it in their browser, and after that all the interaction will be through "asynchronous" communication between their browser and the web server.
So analytics systems need to go beyond recording a sequence of page views and start caring about "events", such as actions the user performs while they stay on the same page. An event could be something like dragging a picture of a product onto a shopping cart icon to add it to their cart: it wasn't a "page view" in the traditional sense, but it's definitely a critical event that the site owner would like reported in their analytics system!
It's great to see Google Analytics now trialling event tracking, which is a very strong indication of the growing popularity of online systems being built as web applications rather than traditional page-based websites.
I'm just surprised that it's taken so long!
<i>Jonathan Oxer
Technical Director
Internet Vision Technologies</i> Thu, 23 Oct 2008 15:19:00 +1000Thu, 23 Oct 2008 15:19:00 +1000http://www.ivt.com.au/news/id/116Give your website a location
<i>By Jonathan Oxer, IVT Technical Director</i>
In the last eBusiness News ("<a href="http://www.ivt.com.au/news/id/114">The Power Of Place</a>") I talked about the rise of location-based services, such as upcoming search engine features that let you search by geographic area so you can find a Thai take-away within 5km of your house, or a SCUBA training facility located within 10 minutes drive of your next holiday destination. Location based-services are one of the things that will change our world by stealth: they'll become a habitual part of our daily lives before we even realise it.
One of the critical-mass elements for location-based services to actually be useful is for online content to have a sense of geographic context. We're already seeing it to some extent with services such as Flickr allowing photographs to be tagged with GPS coordinates: camera-phones with built-in GPS can automatically tag each photo with the exact location at which it was taken, and that meta-data can then be used to search for photos of a particular area or place.
But what about plain old websites? They're often overlooked in all the excitement about online video streaming and virtual reality mashups and microblogging and mobile browsing, but they're still the foundational content of the internet. If you're running an eBusiness you almost certainly have a website at the center of it, even if you're also making use of all the other options available to you.
With so much action associated with location-based services at the moment it's a good idea to tag your website with a geographic location so it can be included in location-based search results. Note that the "location" of the site in terms of the server doesn't mean anything: if you're going to tag your site with a location it should be to represent the location of your business, not the location of your hosting provider!
As it turns out, tagging a website with a geographic location is actually quite simple and usually only takes two steps.
The first step is determining the location of your business. If you have a GPS unit you can probably obtain the latitude and longitude values from it, but you can also use online systems to find the coordinates of any location on Earth. One good site to try is <a href="http://www.satsig.net/maps/lat-long-finder.htm">www.satsig.net/maps/lat-long-finder.htm</a>, where you can double-click on a map to zoom in on your location and see latitude and longitude values displayed below it. For example, the location of my office is reported as "-37.8162, 145.2874".
The second step is to put those coordinates into special hidden meta-tags in the HTML of your website so they can be read by search engines and other systems that may want to try to assign your site to a specific location. There are several competing formats for how to do it, but the two most common seem to be the venerable "ICBM" tag that pre-dates the web, and the more recent "geo.position" tag that provides essentially the same information in a slightly different format. Which reminds me, there's a weird story about the reason it's called the "ICBM" tag, but I'll get back to that in a moment.
If you're maintaining your own website you can put the meta-tags in yourself. They should go in the "head" of the document, and look something like this:
<meta name="geo.position" content="-37.8162;145.2874" />
<meta name="ICBM" content="-37.8162, 145.2874" />
Of course you should substitute your own latitude and longitude values in place of mine!
Some content-management systems such as SiteBuilder (<a href="http://www.sitebuilder.com.au/">www.sitebuilder.com.au</a>) have built-in support for geotagging, so check with your developer: it may be as simple as logging into your CMS and updating the location settings for your site.
But what about sites for companies that serve multiple locations, such as businesses with retail outlets or dealerships around the country or around the world?
No problem, you can set your website to provide the appropriate location tags for each dealer along with their address details. That can either be done using a special HTML "micro-format" that can be embedded with each dealer address, or by having a separate web page for each dealer and putting the appropriate meta-tags on their page. In either case it will mean that the nearest dealer or office can be found by people doing a location-based search.
Oh yeah, about the naming of the "ICBM" tag. Back in the 80's when the tag was first invented the cold war was still alive and well and the threat of nuclear war was very real. Hackers who wanted to tag online content (remember that this was years before the web was even invented, so it was all text-based stuff like Gopher) humorously referred to their physical location as their "ICBM address", ie: the location at which an inter-continental ballistic missile would have to be aimed in order to hit them. The hacker terminology stuck, and when a tag was needed to specify the location of content it was natural to just use the term that they already used in their regular slang. And so the "ICBM" meta-tag was born: literally, the place to send a missile if you want to destroy the tagged item.
Cheers :-)
Jonathan Oxer
Technical Director
Internet Vision Technologies Thu, 28 Aug 2008 13:21:02 +1000Thu, 28 Aug 2008 13:21:02 +1000http://www.ivt.com.au/news/id/114The power of place
<i>By Jonathan Oxer, IVT Technical Director</i>
Just like the hottest rock bands, the latest "hot new thing" in e-business may seem to suddenly appear over night when in fact it's been in gestation for years, bubbling away below mainstream consciousness and appreciated by just a few bleeding-edge early adopters who saw the potential before it became famous. Then at some point in time a confluence of events results in an "ah-ha!" moment in the collective psyche, and all of a sudden the latest hot new thing seems to be everywhere you look.
I believe we're currently right on the cusp of just such a moment, and in the next 12 months we'll see a certain concept go from obscure "why on Earth would anyone want that?" status to "can't live without it!" ubiquity.
That concept is location-based services.
The great catch-cry in the early days of the internet was globalisation: the concept that an obscure little company in a backwoods country town could throw up a website and gain instant access to a global market and compete with existing multinationals, with their location being irrelevant. Nice in theory, but of course there were all sorts of catches and even now it's a rare business indeed that can trade online without consideration for the geographic location of its customers.
So people are now starting to realise that things like search results really need to take into account geographic location. I can't even guess the number of times I've done a web search over the years and wished I could apply a rule such as "only show me results for businesses within 20km of my current location". When you're searching for somewhere to buy a washing machine it really matters where it's located: the electrical goods retailer with the best washing machine website in the world isn't going to be a lot of use to you if you're in Melbourne and they're in Minneapolis or Mayfair. I dream of the day that Google Maps and Google Search are merged into one, and I can select an area on the map and say "search for 'dog grooming service' right *there*", or "search for 'scuba dive operator' right around this area *here*".
Most of the time we *want* location to be relevant, but on the internet we've lost the sense of physical context and proximity that is so important when dealing with people and businesses in the real world. We've been stripped of something that is fundamental to the way our brains are wired.
Another application where location could provide enormous additional value is social networking. For years I've talked about a hypothetical device that people could carry around in their pockets that would be a sort of "proximity alert" that tells you when a friend or colleague is nearby, allowing you to stumble upon chance meetings that right now are probably passing you by. Walking down the street there are times you meet people you know, but it's likely that far more often someone you know will have walked down that same street one minute before, or one minute later, or have stepped into a shop while you walk past, or been on the other side of the street. Wouldn't it be cool to have a device in your pocket that could say "hey, your friend Mark is just over the street in that coffee shop!" rather than walk past totally unaware? And for someone like me who travels a lot it would be particularly handy, because by expanding the "alert" range from say 100 meters to perhaps 20km when I travel to another city it would help me catch up with people I don't get to see very often.
You know what? You may not have heard about it yet, but those devices are in mass production right now by big-name companies including Samsung, Sony, and Nokia. In fact you probably already have one in your pocket. It's called a mobile phone.
A moment ago I talked about location-based services suddenly becoming a recognised mainstream phenomenon, and there are a couple of trigger events that are bringing it about.
The first trigger event is that almost all new mobile phones now have GPS built in: a while ago it was unheard of for phones to include cameras, but now many of them have two. Likewise phones with GPS have been few and far between, but very soon it'll be almost impossible to buy one without it. GPS will be everywhere, in everyone's pocket, and nobody will think twice about it.
The second trigger event is the release of simple, easy-to-use software and online services that take advantage of the ubiquity of personal GPS. That's the stage we're at right now: the hardware platform is out there in people's pockets, and now enterprising developers are dreaming up new ways to utilise that platform. One perfect example of the sort of building block currently being put in place is a new service from Yahoo! called Fire Eagle (fireeagle.yahoo.net), which might sound a little bit obscure at first but has enormous potential to change the way online business is conducted. The simplest way to understand what Fire Eagle does is think of it as a pinboard where you can post a note stating your current location, and that information can then be used by third parties to provide you with more relevant services. Fire Eagle itself doesn't do anything "useful" as far as an end user is concerned, but as a building block for other services it's critical.
The way it works is that you create a Fire Eagle account, and then use one or more methods to regularly update your location within the Fire Eagle system. You can do it manually by logging into the website and setting it, or you can run a little program on your mobile phone that regularly checks your location by GPS and updates it automatically, or by linking your Fire Eagle account to a travel planning service like Dopplr that knows what cities you will be in and when.
With your current location in the Fire Eagle system you can then authorise other services to make use of that information. Examples include websites like wikinear.com, which looks up your location and cross-references it to Wikipedia articles related to places nearby - a great way to find random interesting things in your vicinity that you may never have been aware of previously! Or rummble.com, which is a search engine that personalises your search results based on factors including interests of people within your social network and your current location. Or outalot.com, which (provided you're in New York or San Francisco!) uses your location to find nearby restaurants, bars, movies, and shops. Or zkout.com, which does the same thing but for people you know who happen to be nearby. Zkout even provides a live map which updates to show what's going on around you.
How does this relate to e-business? Right now: not much. In the near future: a lot.
As users become aware of the power of location-awareness we're going to see a lot more services spring up that take advantage of it, and people are going to start expecting websites to "locate" themselves geographically. For example, websites will need to have location metadata embedded so that they will appear in search results when users search for things like "cheap washing machines within 20km of my current location".
And if we're really lucky we'll see an end to those really annoying websites that ask you to select from a country before you can proceed: websites should just know automatically where you're located, and behave accordingly. As a side issue while talking about this, one of my all-time most hated websites is www.bunnings.com.au, and for one specific reason: it won't even let you get to the home page until you tell it your postcode! They've got the right idea, but it's implemented in such an obnoxiously obtrusive way that it drives me nuts.
So in a year or two when you're doing a web search and restricting the results to your local area, or walking down the street and your phone tells you that your best friend is two blocks away, it will probably seem like the most natural thing in the world. Once again science fiction becomes a typical everyday event.
Cheers :-)
Jonathan Oxer
Technical Director
Internet Vision Technologies