The New iPhone Is a Pointing Device For The Real World: The Ground Will Speak.
Where Is The iPhone Compass Pointing?
To a big pot of gold.
Apple introduced the mouse to the computing world in 1983, and now it is time to introduce a new kind of mouse. With a magnetometer compass built in, the iPhone will become a pointing device for the real world.
Knowing the orientation and position of an iPhone is the secret sauce for augmented reality, geobrowsing and location-based ads. The latter has the potential for generating huge revenues if it is implemented the right way.
What is the right way? Unobtrusive delivery of well targeted ads.
WORLD DOMINATION
When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone back in 2007, he called it a “magical” device that will “Change the world.” Behind him you could see a huge image of the Apple Logo floating in space, the sun about to go up behind it.
Steve Jobs knew exactly what he was saying when he said that the iPhone will change the world. There was a good reason for the image of the Apple Logo floating in space like the Earth.
The inclusion of a digital compass in the new iPhone is the last important step in a long running plan to snatch the world away from the competition. Their goal is to get a get a good head start on the competition in the field of location-based services and location-based ads, and they want you to help them along.
How?
By developing iPhone apps that serve up location-based ads and by annotating the earth.
GEOBROWSING
With automatic geotagging of images and video in the iPhone, it makes perfect sense for Apple to collaborate with Google in a framework for large-scale information sharing on geographic places — information that is floating in the air on a specific spot, waiting to be geobrowsed by an iPhone. If anyone easily can associate text, images, audio and video with a location, and all this information is shared, the earth will be covered with information that can be browsed by anyone passing by. “The ground will speak,” 1 and if the browsing device happens to know your interests — it will even say relevant things. And serve up well-targeted and relevant ads.
All this already exists in different forms, but the landscape is too fragmented with a plethora of different services. What is needed is a big player establishing a standard and supplying an easy-to-use global platform for the whole concept. The big player is going to be Apple and/or Google.
A lot has been said about the iPhone not being disruptive product and that it is not revolutionary. I think this is wrong on many levels.
DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGY
At the surface, it may seem like a small and evolutionary change, putting an electronic compass into a location-aware device like the iPhone, but the combination of all the technologies in the iPhone has the potential to change the world — at least how we look at the world, and how we interact with it.
Remember the story about how you are going to be able to order coffee at Starbucks through the iPhone and then pay at the counter? 2 Think bigger. The new iPhone 3.0 operating system and its push notifications and the in-app commerce features and abilities to pay through your account at the iTunes store, could completely change the way you shop. As you walk into any store, you could browse information about their products, order and pay and maybe have the goods delivered to your home, without having to stand in line and all the usual hassle associated with shopping. It is like on-line ordering with the added benefit of being able to squeeze, smell, and try out the products. The rumored improved camera with autofocus enables bar-code scanning. Sit in a comfy sofa at IKEA, order it, and that’s it. You just walk out. Or you could pick the goods up as you leave.
The digital compass in the new iPhone together with accelerometers, GPS, Wi-Fi, camera and various apps synergistically conspires to turn the iPhone into a device that can make a real and lasting connection to the real world.
It has all the necessary technology, ease-of-use, and momentum to make location-based services a lucrative business. I think Apple wants a piece of that pie.
BROWSE THE EARTH, AUGMENT REALITY
The world already is an interesting place, but any given location is usually much more interesting than we are aware of when we actually are standing there.
When we travel or move around in a region, there is a wealth of information related to the area that sits unused in libraries or on obscure web-pages.
The digital compass enables the location-aware phone to know the orientation in 3D-space so that it can deliver informational overlays on top of the scene in front of you. Soon, you may not only see grass, rocks and a few cow droppings when you look out across a field; you will see scenes from history, the natural forces that created the scene you are watching, and you may hear stories from people that passed by or the collected remembrances from the people that used to live there. You could subscribe to popular guided tours or make your own geo-podcasts. The possibilities are endless.
AN APPLE LEAK
What do I base all this on? A leak, and some interesting connections between people working for Apple and Google. 3
The leak is supposed to be an anonymous leak from inside Apple, according to Apple iPhone Apps:
-Revolutionary combination of the camera, GPS, compass, orientation sensor, and Google maps
The camera will work with the GPS, compass, orientation sensor and Google maps to identify what building or location you have taken a picture of. We at first had difficulties believing this ability. However, such a “feature” is technically possible. If the next generation iPhone was to contain a compass then all of the components necessary to determine the actually plane in space for an image taken. The GPS would be used to determine the physical location of the device. The compass would be used to determine the direction the camera was facing. [...] According to our source, Apple will use this information to introduce several groundbreaking features. For example, if you were to take a picture of the Staples Center in Los Angeles, you will be provided with a prompt directing you to information about the building, address, and/or area. This information will include sources such as wikipedia. This seems like quite an amazing service; and a little hard to believe, however while the complexity of such a service may be unrealistic, such is actually feasible with the sensors onboard the next generation iPhone.
Other possibilities include automatic high-resolution building details in Google Earth, historical overlays over the real world and iPhone Lightsaber fighting over Wi-Fi. 4
Location-aware advertising is going to be a revolution. The next big advertising trend. Are Apple really interested in this?
Apple are already exploring and patenting the use of location-based iPhone ads, 5 and the iPhone is already ahead in many ways compared to most other smartphones.
THE POT OF GOLD
How can Apple make money from this?
Why not an Ad-Store? It could provide tools for designing iPhone-specific ads such as arrows pointing the way or augmented reality overlay graphics like virtual neon signs. Apple gets to review and approve your ad, and Apple also provides an API to let applications display these ads.
Maybe you have noticed that the 3.0 iPhone’s Safari Browser includes Geolocation capabilities. Many of the new location-based services for the iPhone may be web-services in Safari, but you would expect the Maps application to be the master application for geobrowsing points of interests, photos, audio, video and articles. This gives Apple a good way of selling ad-space for relatively unobtrusive ads.
A small art gallery in the middle of nowhere could automatically attract art buffs passing by. Local restaurants could offer your favorite meal, just as your stomach is starting to rumble.
If you want to serve ads to people in the vicinity of your current position as you are moving around, you could associate the ads position with your iPhone’s position.
CONVERGENCE - CONTINUITY - MOBILE ME
Always with you, always on. Devices like the iPhone provide continuity in your digital life. They will carry all important information and most forms of entertainment, but they could also automatically learn about your interests and preferences, building a rich profile from your activities and your position. If this profile is combined with preferences and techniques such as collaborative filtering 6, we can transform these mobile devices into tools for intelligent exploration, intelligently prioritizing high quality information that you are likely to be interested in — and they of course will be very good at serving targeted ads.
PANTS-BASED COMPUTING
Mobile computing as exemplified by the iPhone platform has been described as pants-based computing 7, and this is a very different beast compared to ordinary computing. It demands simplicity, quick access, and instant communication. The mobile computing industry is evolving into a vibrant and competitive ecosystem that continues to yield innovations that will fertilize the more stagnant PC-market, and the demands of mobile computing for quick and easy access will lead to solutions that transform the how we access and publish information on the Internet.
The term pants-based computing might eventually have to be renamed into shirt-based or hat-based computing when battery technology improve sufficiently, and you want to display your iPhone more prominently because of the benefits of always having the videocamera on, recording your day-to-day life.
Which leads us into the next disruptive phenomenon:
CITIZEN JOURNALISM
If you enable a large group of people to post information, articles, photos, and video on geographic locations and provide means for rating, categorization and various forms of social collaboration, you will also have created an alternative form of news distribution. If you have a team of writers that number in the millions that generate geolocated high quality content for free, what local newspaper will be able to compete with that?
It is already happening, and devices like the iPhone will accelerate the process since they provide users with all the necessary tools for generating and publishing geolocated content in the form of text, photo, and video on the go, without having to jump through various hoops in order to do so.
If you marry this with an automatic delivery system using classification, rating, collaborative filtering, and geographic location data to boost relevance for the end user, it is going to be an unstoppable revolution. Information will flow freely. Corporate and government entities will not be able to maintain control of the main flow of information, much to their dismay.
The internet is abuzz with disjointed units of information, dead irrelevant information, blogs no-one reads. The trend now seems to go from in-depth articles that tries to nail down the truth to brief twitterings about everyday activities, as if we have given up on real information. Superficiality rules the day. That is all we are supposed to have time for.
But is that really true? The right way forward must be to increase the signal to noise ratio. We want to lay our hands on good quality information that interests us. Regardless if it is long, complicated, and in-depth. Regardless of the number of incoming links, Google rank or number of diggs. Location is an important factor in finding relevant content, but why stop there?
PROFILES
Geobrowsing a system for geolocated information automatically reduces the amount of irrelevant information. You will only get data relevant to your position — but that is not enough. If you are on the go, you don’t want to start typing keywords and browse X number of items before you hit pay dirt. The system should be so well tuned that you can rely on it to serve up information automatically.
Central to the usability of any unmoderated system for user contributed information is rating, classification and user ratings that describe a users level of correct classification, correct rating and general trustworthiness. There is a need for a rich user profile which will evolve over time, containing semantic representations of your interests, ratings, etc.
You should treat your evolving user profile as something very valuable because it will decide if anyone ever reads your posts. This means you are going to make an effort to correctly rate and classify content, because you are reaping very important benefits.
If you create a rich user profile, why not use this profile actively to classify any piece of information or a web page? When you publish something, your anonymous but detailed profile could enable like-minded others to find your post immediately. No need to spend hours and hours promoting content. No need for SEO. No need for expensive ads. Google rank becomes irrelevant. Content that interests you will automatically gravitate towards you.
In order to make geobrowsing really usable on mobile devices, we must improve or invent new methods for distributing and accessing good quality information and this could impact the Internet as a whole, disrupt the power of corporately controlled media networks, and help make citizen journalism an unstoppable force.
REAL WORLD CONSEQUENCES
News has to a large degree been turned into a form of entertainment and when it does contain a message, it is made up of distortions of the truth that serve someone’s agenda. Most communication of ideas on television is done through the use of short sound bites that are so far removed from the complexities of real life that they are mostly meaningless.— About Newswyrdy
We need to rebuild the news delivery mechanisms from the ground up in order to protect us from being manipulated. Then, a small furry endangered animal called Truth, might stick its nose out, take a few whiffs of fresh air and carefully venture out in the open.
And we might get out of the comfy TV-chair and enter the real world. 8
Maybe we are willing to replace the rainforests of the world with palm oil plantations in order get palm oil for our potato chips, but we should at least be aware of that this is what is happening. How are we going to find out that indigenous people, like the Penans on Borneo, are being squeezed out of existence by the commercial interests we are generating ourselves by sitting in front of the TV, munching away at a bag of potato chips?
Perhaps it is time to rediscover the world we share. Time to bring the social networking sites out from the Internet and into the real world. Time to put some tools for learning and discovery into the hands of our children?
What if the Penans had the very same tools? The next time your child fires up Google Earth, a connection between two very different worlds may be made, and the words of the Penan Chief Along Sega…
“But we are dying…. Of this we can be sure.”
…would reach someone who cares.
– Pulling Answers from Thin Air, Yours Truly, Blog The Globe, 2007
So, where is the compass in the iPhone pointing? Maybe not only to a big pot of gold.
It could make cyberspace more relevant to the real world and the real world more relevant to a generation of computer nerds, gamers, and entertainment junkies. Pale, covered with dust, and cobwebs, they will venture out into the sunlight, wielding a new kind of disruptive tool for exploration, entertainment, information sharing and social interaction that have the capability to transform themselves and the world at the same time.
– Say — what is that twitter I hear?
– Birds, my friend, the feathered kind, perched up yonder in that tree.
– The green thing of high dimensional complexity?
– You speak the truth.
- 1 Geocorder, Halfbakery. ¶
- 2 Order coffee directly from your iPhone, DVICE. ¶
- 3 I wrote about these connections back in January 2007: “The Location Aware iPhone”, Blog The Globe, January 11, 2007:
If you look for connections between some of the people working for Apple and Google, you will find Andy Rubin (co-founder of Danger) at Google, hard at work, you might assume, implementing Googles mobile strategy after selling his company Android to Google.
What Android is working on has been a well guarded secret, but Rubin shares his interest in location based applications of technology with Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak, who was on the Board of Directors at Danger.
In a 2003 interview with BusinessWeek, Rubin said there was tremendous potential in developing smarter mobile devices that are more aware of its owner’s location and preferences. “If people are smart, that information starts getting aggregated into consumer products,” said Rubin.
Travis Geiselbrecht, working together with Rubin at Danger, can now be found working for Apple.— The Location Aware iPhone, Blog The Globe, January 11 2007
- 4 Where Is The iPhone Compass Pointing?, Newswyrdy. ¶
- 5 Apple ogles location-based iPhone ads, The Register. ¶
- 6 Collaborative filtering is the use of an algorithm for matching people with similar interests for the purpose of making recommendations or for helping people find relevant content. It is based on the assumption that if users A and B rate a number of items similarly, they are considered to share similar tastes and should rate other items similarly. It is powerful and simple algorithm in the sense that it works without any direct knowledge about the items it is recommending, but it also have a number of weaknesses. These weaknesses can be avoided if you combine collaborative filtering with rich user profiles, semantic representation and classification of both data and users fields of interest. ¶
- 7 Location-Aware Computing with iPhone, Tuaw. ¶
- 8 Global Voices Online, Malaysia: The Plight of Penan. ¶
Posted: June 8th, 2009 at 05:42 →
Sounds nice. Truth, Justice and…
On the other hand, who writes the “answers” in Wikipeda? Are these entries to be trusted when so many are obviuosly distorted or from a way-left point of view? Will the “answers” in this new system be free of the Wikipeda taint? Who will decide?
Will this lead to “group think” among a subset of people using this system? Where will that go - to truth or to some disguised agenda?
People somewhere, somewhen will always say something like “we are dying” Ask the Hugonauts, the Cathars, etc.
Just some idle thoughts…
Posted: June 8th, 2009 at 10:20 →
Pif, get over it with the vast left wing conspiracy at Wikipedia nonsense. If there’s an overwhelming tendency for the majority of the world’s population towards left wing thought, then that’s because it brings with it social justice. Only the narrow minded greedy elitists who control the wealth and capital cling to the selfish notions of right wing politics anyway - hence the domination of the west (Europe, North America, Australasia) by corporatism (aka fascism).
Citizen journalism will hopefully break the information control of this greedy minority and change things about the world we live in at a fundamental level, but only if the citizenry can move quickly to usurp corporate interests in this arena. If the big money investors get in there and dominate from the start it may kill the opportunity for this to become something beyond just another marketers wet dream.
Posted: June 8th, 2009 at 13:09 →
check out the iPointer by IST. already doing this for a few years.
Posted: June 8th, 2009 at 17:03 →
PIF, You said “Will this lead to ‘group think’ among a subset of people using this system? Where will that go — to truth or to some disguised agenda?”
It is a very good question, you could easily see subsets of “group think” forming. Maybe this would not be a problem if the system is designed in such a way that your rated “integrity” goes up if you frequently enter into discussion with opponents, especially if your opponents give you high ratings?
Posted: June 9th, 2009 at 00:45 →
How is this groundbreaking when your article shows a video of a T-Mobile G1 doing the exact same thing? Oh wait, I get it - it’s only special because Apple is doing it, right?
Posted: June 9th, 2009 at 02:15 →
Bl0ke, I am well aware that the iPhone is only catching up with the T-Mobile G1 in features, and I don’t care if it is the iPhone or the G1, Apple or Google that will popularize the concept, as long as they do it the right way, but Google and Andy Rubin have been tinkering with location-based services on mobiles for ages, and they never seem to be able to make something really interesting out of it.
With over 21 million iPhones sold and just over a million T-Mobile G1’s, perhaps it is more likely that Apple could make something happen — turning it into something people would want to use. 10,000 small start-ups might not be able to get it off the ground. What is needed is a big player deciding to make an effort to get it right from the start.
Posted: June 9th, 2009 at 02:18 →
The iPhone needs more than a compass- it needs background processing.
Posted: June 9th, 2009 at 07:37 →
Re Mark B: absolutely right. Despite everything said in the article, even the incredible technology and advances Apple is making, none of it is any good unless you have the background processing. Wikipedia is certainly a great start here but it still lacks a lot of coordination.
I wrote an article re a Japanese firm 2 years ago who invented a chip to install in headstones and when ’swiped’ reveals details about the family interred and also shows photos. Consider if these chips where on the corners of buildings, bottom of monuments/statues, on front doors of businesses etc and then you swiped your iPhone over it, there’s all the free and collaborative info you could wish for. BUT, how do you get to this stage in the first place becuase it’s no easy task finding all that geo-based info for one single place? I’ve been working on this for 2.5 years now and my site http://www.iGuidez.com has over 600 videos that process all this background info - I make video guides that are published on maps and loaded with all the local information you cannot find in any guide book, internet site or anywhere else. Now all you need (in future) is an iPhone to view it all when you’re walking down the street! So, anyone care to help me encourage the spread of this model?? Contact me: mmacphil at yahoo dot co dot uk
Posted: June 9th, 2009 at 09:12 →
I hateto rain on your parade, but Xerox had the first mouse not Apple. Apple was just the first to mass market it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_mouse
Posted: June 9th, 2009 at 15:14 →
Jeff, I know that. I didn’t say they had the first mouse, I said they introduced it to the computing world, but maybe I should have phrased that differently. Anyway, Xerox didn’t have the first mouse either.
From the wikipedia article you linked to:
“Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute invented the first mouse prototype [...][and] received patent US3541541 on November 17, 1970 for an ‘X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System’ [...] Bill English, builder of Engelbart’s original mouse, invented the ball mouse in 1972 while working for Xerox PARC.”
Posted: June 9th, 2009 at 16:59 →
MarkB, On Background processing: You are right; background processes are crucial. It seems that 3rd party background processes will be allowed eventually, but until they are, we need something better than push-notifications to be able to continually report location data.
The iPhone already allows background processes — Apple’s own. You can play music in the background; mail works etc. Until 3rd party background processes are allowed, there should be a daemon running that continually is sending out location data to servers. You could speculate that the reason this possibility currently does not exist is that Apple is ready to launch a location-based service of their own soon…
The new location-aware Safari seems to be able to run in the background, so maybe we should expect all 3rd party location-based services to use Safari?
Posted: June 10th, 2009 at 08:06 →
I am 100% sure that if the “any store” and “pickup as you go” or “have it delivered at home” without the cue thingy will work… that 50% of the western world will start using this -on the spot-.
Posted: June 10th, 2009 at 10:40 →
GeoVector is the first pointing search. Have been live in Japan for years and had a pointing search prototype (GPS & compass) in 1998.
Check out this video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA3JGx76x-I
And their website http://www.geovector.com
Posted: June 10th, 2009 at 11:36 →
Impressive patent portfolio…