As you might heard Nokia is pushing connected location based devices and context aware Internet services. They announced Ovi in August 2007, a portal for consumers to get to and share music, games and maps.Now they have started a beta version of a sports tracking portal that extends their GPS enabled mobile phones. Funny enough, this is not integrated into Ovi but a standalone website for now. But let’s take a closer look.

With Nokia Sport Tracker you can keep track of training activities like running, cycling, skiing, and driving (of course!). First you need to register with the Nokia Sport Tracker site, set up your profile and download the Sports Tracker application for your phone. Sport Tracker basically works with all Nokia phones running the S60 software. See a full list of supported Nokia phones here. Then of course you need a GPS enabled phone. Either one that comes with GPS as a standard (e.g. the N95, N82, 6110 Navigator), or one you can pair with an external GPS receiver, like the nifty Nokia LD-4W.

Here is the route of my first go at using Sports Tracker. I did a quick drive around the area of my office. All you have to do is start the Sport Tracker application. Then select “new workout” from the menu und press “start”. Now the clock starts ticking and the tracking begins. It took a while for the N95 I used to pick up the GPS signal, but then everything was cool. The application started to record time, speed, elevation, and the route I was driving.

After I did my lap I simply pressed “stop” and then uploaded my workout to the portal straight from the phone.

Now back to the Sports Tracker web site where I can see the route I was driving and a nice graph of the speed and time it took me to get around my lap. I can’t wait to take this to a proper track next spring.

While I think this is a great demonstration of how to extend the physical Nokia phone products to the web, I wonder how many athletes will make use of Sports Tracker in the long run, literally.

The July issue of WIRED features two interesting articles – and you may have seen them already. If not, please find a brief overview and links to the articles below. I’m also pointing out some sections I found most interesting and like to share why I’ve picked them.

The first article is titled “Google Maps Is Changing the Way We See the World“.
The article gives some fascinating insights into how Google Maps and Google Earth developed over time. You will also learn who the key persons were to drive most of the cool usage possibilities these services are recognized for today. An interesting read beefed up with interviews of some of the leaders and pioneers of the (online) GIS industry like John Hanke, Director of Google Earth and Google Maps, Michael Goodchild, a professor of geography at UC Santa Barbara, Paul Rademacher, creator of the first Google Maps mashup, and David Weinberger, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined.

The second article is “Dispatches From the Hyperlocal Future“, written by no other than cyberpunk Bruce Sterling. His protagonist is Harvey Feldspar, a self proclaimed top tier geo blogger, typing dictating away on his Senseo-Transicast 3000 in the summer of 2017. Harvey is ranting and raving about geospatial and hyperlocal gadgets and feature sets.

While I very much recommend reading the two articles yourself first, here are a few quotes or paragraphs I liked most. And I’ll also tell you why.

About user generated map data:
“It didn’t take sophisticated software,” Hanke says. “What it took was a substrate — the satellite imagery of Earth — in an accessible form and a simple authoring language for people to create and share stuff. Once that software existed, the urge to describe and annotate just took off.”

We can argue about user generated maps’ data quality, reliability, and possible bias of POI entries. However, no one can deny the fact that the Internet has democratized the tools for production in many areas – map making being one of them. Chris Anderson wrote in “The Long Tail“: “Never underestimate the power of a million people with keys to the factory.”
So in case you might wonder whether this is the end of digital map providers like Navteq and TeleAtlas: I don’t think it is. It is just a perfect example of how you can allow people to add value to a product. “Give people the power to create their own ground truth,” as Mike Liebhold, a senior researcher specializing in geospatial technology at Silicon Valley’s Institute for the Future is quoted in the article.
I see great potential in allowing people to create a much richer hyperlocal detail level and then making those map layers available to a broad audience. Filtering will help find and boost the relevance of these layers to individual users in a magnitude never dreamed of before: The wine & dine layer, the scenic roads layer, the hip-hop culture layer, the shoe boutique layer, the Obscure-Street-Food- in-Eastern-Jackson-Heights layer … build your own and extent the long tail.
The call is for the map and map device makers to enable user-generated micro layers to be easily made, offered, found, and applied.

About hyperlocal advertising:
“I’m [...] careering along the Beltway [in a Hyundai GPS-King]. I downloaded a cool plug-in to block out the gas-food-lodging ads that hit my screen a quarter mile before each exit, so I’m free to concentrate. What do I care about lodging anyway?”

I agree location based advertising is one of the many emerging possibilities often mused about. And above is the horror scenario, isn’t it? Given what is possible today I see a different scenario if only ad-serving technology would be used at its full potential. Context is king. And that means active context, initiated by the user – not passive context, observed by some software.
It’s really an old story: Pushing out messaging to users based on observed behavior rather than users’ explicit preferences does not work too well. But hey, the time will come and a broader level of marketeers and media agencies will get it too.

About social-localizing:
“It’s the most common question during cell phone conversations: “Where you at, dawg?” Those queries will soon be obsolete. Helio’s Buddy Beacon allows you to locate other “don’t-call-it-a-phone” users on MapQuest by glancing down at your screen.”

This is not the future. This is today!
Helio has indeed launched the Buddy Beacon service late last year. Read more about this location based socializing service on Matt’s blog. Yet another mobile friend finding service is Loopt, who according to Reuters where able to sign up about 40,000 customers in the first seven weeks of a free trial after signing a deal with Boost Mobile.
This may sound like a very geeky application, targeted at the young and footloose generation. But that’s not my point. I think services like these will have a great affect on how a whole range of future location based service will be adopted by this (and other) generations in the years to come.

The extensive coverage by WIRED will definitely propel the thinking to new height. So what do you think?

So TomTom is acquiring Tele Atlas and according to the joined press release, one of the main benefits is “more accurate navigation information” by utilizing “[…] TomTom’s installed user base of over 10 million GPS devices to effectively operate as map surveyors in an automatic and simple way.”
So let’s look at this in more detail.

The above seems to refer to the June 2007 announcement of TomTom to introduce a feature they call Map Share (see the press release). While the overall concept was greeted with a lot of applause, the first release of Map Share boils down to offer only very limited feedback possibilities and they will not be as automatic and simple as promised.

The features are:

• Block and unblock a street
• Reverse a street’s traffic direction
• Edit a street name
• Add a missing POI
• Edit a POI
• Report other errors

The Map Share feature will at first be offered with the newest yet to be released TomTom GO 520 and TomTom GO 720 – so it is essentially not installed on any of the over 10 million devices today.

TomTom enthusiasts have expressed their disappointment on online message boards about Map Share’s limited feedback possibilities and also about how participation is encouraged: Not at all.
One user wrote: “When I help to improve the map data, I’m expecting some kind of reward or a discount when buying a map update. Who am I to report map improvements via TomTom to Tele Atlas and then pay them for my own improvements?”
Another user suggests to simply find a way to post the corrections and improvements to a server for everyone in the TomTom community to download for free, bypassing Tele Atlas. Something that even TomTom has thought about already, planning to offer the exchange of non-validated map changes via their TomTom HOME service which over 1 million users have signed up for.

Without doubt there will always be altruistic enthusiast aka Social Utilitarians who are willing to submit correction for a better future. Tele Atlas has introduced Map Insight in late 2006, a process of reporting map improvements on the Tele Atlas website. Joy Morel, Tele Atlas Consumer Markets Director said they receive “thousands of reports each month for review” in an interview with ClubTomTom. He goes on to explain that “these reports go through extensive quality control checks to ensure only the most accurate reports are captured and expedited into Tele Atlas systems.” This sounds fair but I wonder how Tele Atlas is going to cope with a growing number of user reports, especially when contributors expect to see their submissions in the next map update release they purchase.

But let’s refocus on the promise of a large community of TomTom owners continuously improving Tele Atlas’ map data. The challenge is still ahead: How to get a large volume of user to contribute?

As we all know the obvious top incentive is filthy lucre. This can work in three ways.
Offer a relatively small incentive for every report, just like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk has built a business model around farming out simple desktop tasks for about 10 cents a task.
Or do it the other way around. Just remember the guy requesting a discount in exchange for submitting a report.
And then you can always advertise a really big incentive that will only be granted to one randomly winning contributor – lottery style.

TomTom’s management may want to take a look at how Luis von Ahn is trying to harvest the idle moments in our lives and turn them to productive use. WIRED has a great article with the punch line being: “People will contribute their brainpower, but only if they’re given an enjoyable, time-killing experience in exchange.” Yes, we are basically talking about something quite similar to a video game. Whether this is the road to follow I’m not too sure, but it definitely should spark some thinking.

While the acquisition of Tele Atlas makes a lot of sense in many areas for TomTom, I personally think they’ve exaggerated quite a bit when it comes to talking about an armada of loyal customers automatically reporting map improvements as they go.