How to remake RIM

With all the news about RIM making some headway in recovery it might be suggested that the company will survive the frightening juggernaut comprised of Apple and Google.

One more factor enters stage left - the remarkable debacle of Apple's mapping app. Its not surprising at all that the app has very poor data. What is surprising is that Apple completely missed the flaws that any reasonably competent mapping or location intelligence company would immediately assume need to be managed.

RIM's VPN technology (secured server connections) and the massive market acceptance of them has often been touted as their edge over the other smart phone players.

If we take all these factors into consideration, it seems to me that there is an opportunity for RIM to unbalance the market for smart phones and tilt it very much in their favour. All modern smart phones are now based on the Apple model of a powerful processor, excellent screen and apps. Lots and lots of apps. What if the model were instead to provide the very best device for display, keyboard, secure high speed connections but very little in the way of compute power. And instead of apps on your phone, you subscribe to a powerful cloud based suite of Saas applications. Applications that can draw on the massive scaling now possible in the cloud. Applications that are part of a suite and don't require you to bounce between apps or use awkward and antiquated methods to transfer data around. Applications that provide a workflow that is conducive to fast, effective work anywhere.

I hasten to add that the old idea of applications in a browser is not IMHO the right answer. The answer is a compelling and powerful environment that is exposed through the phone but needs no apps to enable it and is unconstrained by the peculiarities of the browser. Limitations that frustrate us right now (like no Flash on an iPhone) go by the wayside. But even better, HTML 6 or Silverlight 6 or whatever elegance emerges in the future in the way of software architectures imply no demand on our patience with a cloud attached phone.

Sure, Apple and Google and Microsoft etc all have the rudiments of a cloud attachment but always from the point of view of the phone using the cloud and extending the phone to use cloud storage. I'm suggesting this is a feeble approach. I suggest this whole idea be turned completely on its head and the cloud be used to drive a relatively simple device.

Where does the mapping app come into this ? Well, there are players in our business with awesome suites of capabilities that are moving into the cloud. We don't need a mapping app. Given RIM's VPN technology, always on connectivity and a cloud attached phone, it would not be difficult to provide the smart phone community with an exceptionally powerful offering without a ridiculous investment in a device that rivals desktop computers in complexity and power.

Thoughts ?

Where were you on the night of ... ?

With the move by twitter to license its history of tweets, an interesting and heated debate intensifies about the moral and legal aspects of the use of fine grained location intelligence information acquired from voluntary contributors who mostly have no idea what they have given away.

Twitter has had a geolocation option since the 19th November 2009. Of course you have to turn it on in the settings page.

Given the lovely juicy and clever location based applications that have used the Twitter Geo API there is reason to suspect that a large number of tweets have location information attached. Challenge: If you are on twitter, do you know whether your location flag is turned on?

Even more interesting is that the twitter API has reverse geocoding. The location information is related to a physical entity rather than coordinates and so the association of the tweet data is immediately pertinent.

Rudimentary web research suggests there are 290 million tweets a day.

The Location Forum has set itself the task of looking at the implications of location data privacy. An assertion by the group is that location information in data, leads to inferences that may not be immediately obvious and penetrate privacy barriers in manners that are poorly understood and certainly not understood by the casual user of social media (like tweeters). This is referred to as "the power of where".

The Location Forum is working on a study to attempt to translate this into useful guidelines but in the meantime, in keeping with the title of this blog, lets look at a few examples of the dark side.

1.Hesitant about office romances, Jim quietly offers Julie tickets to see a movie. Jim tweets in the lobby that Hugo looks like a great movie and Julie tweets that the popcorn in the theatre is expensive. Busted ! But did either of the protagonists have any idea how effectively they were giving each other away ?

2.Facebook based Burglary

3.Intent on achieving a majority government, a political party charters a company to find ways to be sure of a majority. A study of multiple census variables establishes projected behaviour patterns over census areas. The census areas are of course generalized so that nobody can identify individuals. However, the company also accesses survey data available for purchase that is generalized over a different geometry set. This data is added to with behaviour data (purchased again) obfuscated over another geometry fabric. Combining and analysing the data infers knowledge about fractions of geometries that was otherwise impossible to reverse engineer. The data inferred is then matched to actual addresses (again available for purchase). A reverse lookup of the phone numbers (purchased) is followed by bot calls all those phone numbers to confuse the voter about which voting station to go to (from freely available data).

Perhaps this last one has also happened already.

Why do Spatial Systems need coordinates ?

It seems to me that coordinates in a spatial system have assumed an importance way beyond their geometric worth. Consider an organization that has large stores of information about their customers. Almost certainly the records will include an address.
Professional "spatialists" get called in when some analysis is required and what's the first thing on the to-do list ? Geocode the records of course.

Why ?

What relevance do the coordinates have for the record ? It already has an address. And the rest of the row of information is related to the address. And how many IT organizations are keen to add another column to a complex enterprise data store with a staging copy, a development copy and a QA copy and all the enterprise processes and DBA attention that requires ? Let alone a column with vaguely sinister implications like X,Y or even worse, an opaque BLOB that has dark secrets within (like WGS84 or EPSG:3162).

What exactly does a customer's insurance number have to do with an x,y coordinate pair ? Or the licensee of a car ? Nothing at all.

Why then should a customer considering the application of location intelligence suddenly need x,y coordinates ? Because those coordinates are needed for spatial analysis and the technology to produce coordinates from addresses for the sideshow that is GIS analytics cannot work from addresses directly.

But what if it could ? What if the addresses could always be recognized reliably and at extreme speed - such speed that the x,y coordinates (and the black magic in the spatial column) would be available when needed but ephemeral otherwise ?

Search would be address based. Attributes would be associated with the object they actually belong to instead of some doubtful point on the ground that might move depending on the geocoder.

There's one downer in this fine scenario and that is the spatial index that would be required for very fast spatial operations. Could this be ephemeral as well ?