You are your location

As a location based game designer i was hoping for a little more from this talk. But that was follie and went against my #1 panel principal. ie don’t go to panels about things you know about and expect to learn or be enlightened.  Its easy to get carried away here thinking us brits are ahead of the game on all kinds of stuff. but its important to remember the focus of this festival is not digital arts but digital commerce. Now i know the tag line is tomorrow happens here  and thats probably true. but next week happens somewhere else. [maybe TED ]

anyway there  were a couple of ace soundbites i took away from this talk care of @sama (loopt) and @moneyball (google)

i don’t remember who said which and they kind of flow together nicely anyway so i’ll just paraphrase them ” there is no such thing as private location data” and” you can definitively identify a person from just a couple of days of their location data”

That said its somewhat supprising to see the rise and rise of location based services and apps like latitude, foursquare and gowalla
ut rise they do.

this could be to do with what was described in #dangerouscurves as the hype cycle.

infact the presenter of the dangerous curves talk used foursquare as an example of a compant at the peak of the hype cycle curve.

Even if thats true ther can be no doubt that with stats like nokia shipping 35 million GPS enebled phones in 2009, location services are here to stay. Unless something crazy happens.