Puny Little Human

The advancement of location based services and under prediction

Image via Wikipedia

When foursquare first came out, I had a thought that this whole location based service thing is all good and nice, but how many apps would I have in my life that would rely on location? I just could not think of any other applications for being contextually aware.

Today, it may be one of the most important aspects of mobility ever. Just a quick perusal through the Location Services menu in my mobile shows an astonishing 41 apps that use location. Some that I use constantly: foursquare, Yelp, Waze, Primospot, Facebook, Groupon. A quick read through shows that context matters a great deal for social, commerce, and transportation.

That just goes to show the limitations of my own imagination about how wide ranging the applications for location can be. Nokia, whose venture group I work for, has even created a dedicated business unit around Location and Commerce to exploit this opportunity.

And I think the ultimate point of this experience is: that it can be dangerous to be certain that we can predict the level of change in the future. It is easy to be overconfident about how little things can change, especially in the easily disrupted world of Internet and mobile.

This is discouraging and encouraging. It is discouraging because it shows the limits of our ability to predict and plan for the future. It is encouraging because it shows that we can and should be daring and courageous in our visions for the future and how things could be. That we shouldn’t be thinking about technology based on the how things are today. The computing power and connectivity that we have today are a pale shadow of how things may be in 10 to 15 years.