Engage Brain Open Mind: Indexing the Real World: The Enormous Potential of Hyperlocal Data

Indexing the Real World: The Enormous Potential of Hyperlocal Data

via Mashable! by Shane Snow on 4/5/11

Shane Snow is a Mashable contributor and the co-founder of Contently.com.
Do you think there’s a lot of data on the Internet? Imagine how much there is in the offline world: 510 million square kilometers of land, 6.79 billion people, 18 million kilometers of paved roads, and countless objects inhabit the Earth. The most exciting thing about all this data? Technologists are now starting to chart and index the offline world, down to street signs and basketball hoops.
For the past decade, social technologies such as Meetup and Match.com have used the web to help people connect in person. Cheap geolocation technology in cellphones over the past few years gave rise to apps that connect people with physical places. As developers build rich layers of information atop location data, our understanding of the world is changing. Foursquare is the tip of the iceberg.
The new wave of hyperlocal data is surging. Here’s how it’s going down.

Step 1: Location-Based Infrastructure

At SXSWi 2011, Internet luminary, publisher and media thinker Tim O’Reilly called President Ronald Reagan “the Father of Foursquare.” That’s because in the 1980s when the U.S. government launched its global positioning satellite network into space, Reagan pushed to allow anyone access to the data.

At the time, laypeople weren’t generally interested in spending thousands of dollars on GPS receivers. Fast forward a couple of decades to the iPhone, complete with cheap, built-in GPS receiver, and tinkerers such as Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai from Foursquare, Josh Williams from Gowalla, and Sam Altman from Loopt were creating social networks based on GPS. Incidentally, these networks began indexing and categorizing places in the real world, sending digitized information about them into the cloud and back down into people’s pockets.

Today, companies such as SimpleGeo are building location-based infrastructure that supports a massive wave of applications interacting with the physical world.

Step 2: Crowdsourced Data Capturers Armed With Phones

Jordan Cooper, founder of the geo-data company Hyperpublic, notes: “With meaningful smartphone penetration and more powerful cameras on mobile devices, photography is becoming a more frictionless form of mobile information capture than textual input.”

Consumers are using cameras to capture moments, documenting their memories rather than simply taking photos for aesthetic value. Thus, ubiquitous camera phones have become utilities that power local data sets.

Take, for example, Foodspotting, an app foodies use to snap and share photos of their lunch. The app pegs photos of food to locations so other hungry smartphone users can see nearby dining options, dish by dish. Twitpic, Instagram, Flickr and even Facebook can attach latitude and longitude to photos. Each photo becomes another piece of data.

Step 3: Indexing Local Objects and Adding a Data Layer

There’s more to the physical world than food and Foursquare venues. Any physical object around you can be made useful when digitally catalogued. Cooper started Hyperpublic after observing just this.

“I’d walk to work every morning, with a knowledge that one block to the left or one block to the right from my everyday path there were hidden gems that were, by definition, actionable opportunities that I was missing because nobody had indexed and surfaced them to me.” It’s geo-data at a much more granular level: people, places, objects inside those places, curiosities and more.

“If we do this right,” Cooper says, “we’ll have indexed every object that exists in every major city in the world and created a rich enough data layer on top of these objects that we will be able to provide not only an incredible local discovery and organization tool … but also an incredible experience [for] the users of an army of third-party applications and publishers that wish to leverage local/physical data.”

Cooper’s mission is to “kill the unknown” and make the mile outside every person’s door “completely searchable and actionable.” For example, Hyperpublic considered hiring someone who tagged himself “developer” within a 2-mile radius of the company’s office. “Our thesis is that there is a correlation between proximity and actionability, and I figured someone who could walk to our office would be more likely interested than someone who lived over the river in Brooklyn,” Cooper explains.

Other companies such as Thingd are in the local indexing fray at a granular level, producing and procuring an impressive amount of data. “We want to build a database of every thing in the world,” said Thingd CEO Joseph Einhorn in November.

While most geo-social apps focus on real-time use cases — when you’re standing in 15 degree weather searching for a Moroccan restaurant — vast indexes of hyperlocal data will power asynchronous utility and discovery in addition to on-location help.

Step 4: App Development Bonanza

Software developers are hungrier for data than they are for beer and pizza. Whenever a company releases a large data set to the public — especially through an API (akin to a beer and pizza faucet for data geeks) — programmers race to develop piggyback applications. Twitter’s gargantuan data stream has given rise to thousands of Twitter apps. Facebook’s API has spurred thousands more.

As more hyperlocal data shoots out the fire hoses of companies such as SimpleGeo, Foursquare and Hyperpublic, more applications will be built. And because of the sheer amount of potential data that will shortly be available, possibilities are vast, particularly when it comes to things like augmented reality.

The local data explosion is upon us. And like Google’s indexing of the virtual world’s information, the future of hyperlocal data is going to be — dare I say it — revolutionary.