In the photo above you see the conference floor at LeWeb’12 in Paris, aka the place where you go to get food, coffee and wine. The previous sentence demonstrates the importance of location and context. This blog post is about just that!
The theme at LeWeb’12 being the Internet of Things, there was no shortage of presentations on Things that connect to the Internet. Those Things may be sensors or actuators, or, literally by definition, anyThing. Regardless of what they are, in all cases, these Things are exchanging information, they’re creating, consuming and moving data.
Data scientist DJ Patil opened his presentation with a slide of the Internet of Things, with the word Internet crossed out and replaced with the word Data. He argued that it’s not just about connecting Things and generating data, but adding context and putting the data to good use. In fact, that’s quite possibly a greater challenge than connecting the Things in the first place!
Cyborg anthropologist Amber Case followed his presentation with excellent complementary arguments. She spoke of the need for frictionless data correlation. In other words, what good is it if the Data of Things lives in multiple, separate silos? Another key argument: “location should empower people”. Imagine the “invisible button” where the presence of a person (or Thing) is enough to trigger an action. Location matters!
Nokia’s Marko Ahtisaari also spoke of the “importance of place”. He presented the City Lens project which visually augments your surroundings with contextual data. According to the Nokia booth staff, this is equally applicable to indoor environments, which may explain Nokia co-launching the In-Location alliance three months earlier.
Finally, during Om Malik’s interview of Matt Mullenweg, the Internet of Things discussion turned toward the effects of an increasingly connected world on individuality. Fortunately, Om thinks the IoT will create hyper-personalized experiences rather than turn humans into conformist robots. And that is our hope too: by creating more data with full accessibility, and by including location and establishing context, the hyper-connected world becomes a progressive hyper-personalized world for its human (cyborg) inhabitants!
The reelyActive Blogs 