Geolocation technology

Geo-location innovation is something that has been on my periphery for a while. Something Mark Raskino said to me in a meeting piqued my attention – geo advertising based on tags on my iPhone would be worth something to someone. To me it meant if I was in the market for a new car, standing near a car showroom should trigger a buzz on my iPhone telling me there is one nearby in case I was interested.

So spam aside, the whole geo-location market is ripe for exploiting. I’ve been following Upcoming for a while, Yahoo! acquired it to help its portal-ness. The problem is that whilst being open and thus usable, its really not getting to the crux of things. User driven content means its value is as good as it’s footfall. So to really get an edge, what it really needs is a search engine behind it to trawl the web and auto-insert events based on a location. You’d think that would be easy huh?

And the killer app? A Upcoming iPhone app that basically uses your current location automatically. Come on Yahoo! Give it a whirl…

Effective Governance

Starting with a blank page is always a difficult thing. At first it provides the opportunity of endless boundaries and thoughts, but this soon turns into paralysis by analysis. Sometimes its much easier to have something in place to tweak and tune to fit a purpose. So what to do when you want to define a governance structure on a blank page?

Start with the requirements of what you want it to do. Set those as the goals in a terms of reference. Define sets of actions that build towards a strategy of effective governance that meet and eventually exceed the requirements. Through this process, the customer must not be forgotten – be they business, project, paying customers or even fellow technologists.

With this in mind, a blank page becomes a great opportunity to define something robust and yet flexible enough to fit a moving purpose. Good luck.

Space Engineers

Will need to be aware that perhaps its not as empty as it once was!

Space Debris

This a rather interesting turn of events, but if you think about it…not that surprising.