Tag: context

Google goes "livestreaming", acquires Jaiku

On 09/10/2007

Now, this is not strictly mobile BUT then it is considering that the target of which I report here today is heavily using mobile as a tool to feed its community, namely SMS (plus web and IM). It morphs online and offline worlds (nicknamed “bothline”; see here), and mobile is a huge component of this.

Anyway, Google, it was announced, has acquired the good folks from Jaiku. For those not that familiar with the radically new web 2.0 applications: Jaiku is a Twitter competitor where you basically “speed-blog” or “live-stream”. Jaiku adds proximity settings: users in the same area can/will be able to get in touch with each other and interact.

At PICNIC’07, I recently had the pleasure of listening to Jaiku’s co-founder, Jyri Engestrom (plus the good guys from Twitter, Plazes, Dopplr and Hyves), talking about the relevance of applications such as Jaiku. There is a video of the session available here.

It is (still) all about relevance and context. Jyri observed that context evolves around objects (such as office, Manchester United, kite-surfing, babies, red Bordeaux, and, yes, location…). The object defines the (social) context: you might be interested in the capability of webservers in your professional environment and discuss this wholeheartedly with someone else with who you would not have a single point of mutual interest outside of work. Change the object, change the context. Jyri (in his rather interesting blog) calls this object-centered sociality (yes, he is a sociologist).

Jaiku supposedly helps making focus on any object easier as it provides quick and universally accessible tools to see the activity streams of your contacts. The mobile version does this by getting those streams directly into your phone’s contacts. Cool stuff.

However, why would Google buy them (apart from it being cool and Google being cash-rich)? Relevance and context, again. These are the core pieces around which Google’s core business evolves: put ads in a relevant context and you improve click-through. Jyri characterized this by drawing the history of content discovery from catalogue (Yahoo!) via pagerank (Google) to what he termed “facerank”, combining the power of the search algorithms from Google with the power of the social network from Facebook. The latter is e.g. a search result that would take the social context of the, say, search string (the object). Friends, people close to you, colleagues, other fans of your club, etc are more likely to have come across something that is relevant to you than someone who has no touch-point with you whatsoever. You don’t have to know them personally: connoisseurs of Bordeaux wines might only have “met” in the virtual world. Still, since the context evolved around a common object (Bordeaux wine), it is more likely that you will hit a relevant spot through them. The higher the socially-enhanced rank of a search result, the more relevant it is likely to be… Compelling and rather inspiring!

So this is what Google may have in mind: bring the context to the people — again! Well done, guys!

Nokia maps it out, buys Navteq

By Volker

On 02/10/2007

In Deals

Nice thing if you can get it: for a modest $8.1 bn ($7.7 bn if you discount the cash the company has in its coffers), Nokia acquired the provider of digital maps, Navteq. Even though this marks Nokia’s largest acquisition ever, it is a hardly surprising move given the recent activities of the company to flex its muscles in the content space. Its Nokia Maps application cried out for something like that (it ran on Navteq-supplied maps anyhow). To combine GPS-equipped phones with the people who power loads of todays digital maps seems smart, in particular when one fairly apparent new competitor in Nokia’s courtyard runs a fairly successful digital mapping solution itself, namely Google: If the proprietor of Google Maps enters the handset market with the already somewhat fabled GPhone (another article here), Nokia is arming itself to withhold and defend its still impressive market share of c 1/3 of the global market for mobile handsets, errh, multimedia devices. Last year’s acquisition of Gate5 seems to not have been enough for that. No other big OEM has come out with GPS-enabled devices with force yet, so Nokia’s move would also cement its positions amongst its current peers.

So what will we see? Easy, huh? After turning mobile phones in multimedia computers and slashing away on the digital camera and music player market along the way, navigation systems (or “sat nav” as your ubiquitous salesman affectionately calls it) will apparently be the next victim: who needs them if one has a GPS-equipped Nokia N95 (which, yes, also comes with a digital camera powered by a prestigious Carl Zeiss lense and has 8GB space to accommodate your music and videos).

This is the near-sighted and easy bit and I am all for it: if I can have the quality of specialist devices merged into one, then that is my device of choice even though the challenge is that you then have to beat every leader in the segment. But the history of camera and music phones shows that there is a niche that is rather a gaping cleft, in particular when also cleverly branded, and one that is apparently growing. So why not for sat nav, too?

The magic word however is context-awareness. It can probably be called the holy grail of service and product discovery and the provision of relevant offers: if I am being offered something in a context that makes the offer relevant, I am much more likely to be lured into using/buying it. This is exactly how Google’s famed AdSense works (and advertising is an area Nokia recently focussed on, too, i.e. with the acquisition of Enpocket).

The principle of context increasing relevance naturally applies to everything: if I am hungry, I am more likely to visit a restaurant. If I am at an airport, I am more likely to be interested in flight times, or travel offers, etc, etc. So combining a device that adds an important context parameter, namely location with a platform like Nokia’s Ovi that adds an array of different services (games, music, maps, etc) looks like a model that should increase the likelihood of a purchase – because it can offer the user a more relevant offering in the context in which he uses the device. Nokia seems to be finding it easier to get its content-loaded multimedia devices past the carriers’ doors, too, that is if Graeme Ferguson, ex-Vodafone Content Meister, is to be believed…

However, I will continue to call it a mobile phone…