Location in Mobile Social Networks

London-Location is at the very heart of the next generation of mobile services and the future mobile web. Last year, both Nokia and Google made big announcements highlighting location as one of their key strategic axes. Now Vodafone is keen to position itself in this space and its recent acquisition of Swedish navigation software provider Wayfinder is but the first step in that direction.

I presented the experience of GeoMe in launching a location-enabled mobile social network at the Informa Mobile Location Services 09 Conference in London on the 12th May, describing how to overcome some of the barriers to adoption, especially privacy, and new distribution channels that can be exploited for getting the product to market.

I was also priviliged to be in good company on a speaker panel on the next generation of location services together with o2, TIM, Qualcomm and content provider Spoonfed. The conclusion? To create demand, you need to offer a good product with a clear value proposition. Will 2010 be 'the' year of location based services? The answer: 'probably'.

You can see my presentation on Slidespace below:

Location Based Social Networking by Ric Ferraro

View more presentations from Ric Ferraro.

Dude, where's my Privacy-The Privacy Conundrum in Social Networks

I will be speaking next week at the Informa Mobile Location Services 09 Conference in London and one of the key subjects I was asked to present on was privacy.

One of the key issues has to do with semantics:what do we mean by privacy exactly? How private is private? My argument is that the privacy sphere, like it or not, is getting smaller and smaller for most people. Over time, the level of intrusion that each person is willing to accept in their 'private' sphere is also increasing.

I like to point to the example of Google Street View, as this is a full on example of a significant intrusion into everyone's private sphere which was accepted and ultimately embraced (I recommend you see also the example of the Japanese mashup of a Virtual Jog using Street View).

The other key issue is that legislation is dictating the approach that mobile social networks that use location should use. This is the key concept of 'opt-in', such that it is always down to consumer choice whether or not anyone has access to the location of a mobile subscriber.

This is fine as a preventive measure to assuage the public's fear of location based services in the interim period during which the key players (like Google) educate and inform about the benefits of location based services.

But ultimately, it is not the way in which 'push' services, somewhat of a marketing mecca in terms of delivering the right marketing message to the right customer in the right place, will be achieved.