Maps are about to get clever
Six months ago I was unemployed – I’d been made redundant by a company that made every decision by committee (except my redundancy). To be honest, it was a relief when it happened. I still hate them for their cowardice, though.
But that’s not the point. The point is that I didn’t have a job. So I spent all day on the internet, looking for jobs, writing blog posts to get noticed, and generally having a good think about where my poxy excuse for a career was heading.
One day, I stumbled upon Flamingo International. According to their website, they do research, thinking, and strategy. I was sitting around all day thinking, so getting paid to do it seemed like a good idea. Fortunately, they were taking applications.
To be considered for a job at Flamingo, you had to write a few words about The Next Big Thing.
This is what I came up with:
Imagine a London Underground map that showed passengers by time of day. Planning your journey becomes a whole lot easier.
Imagine the map of a department store that mapped customer journeys. What’s the busiest point in a store? What time of day? Planning promotions becomes a whole lot easier.
Imagine you could view a map of your town based on traffic. How would that affect where you wanted to live?
Maps. They’re the next big thing.
Not traditional maps. Traditional maps show an area. New maps show traffic in that area.
By tracking movements of people, maps become more useful.
Mobile phones, they’re the key. Nearly everybody has one.
Using mobile phones, track the movement of people around houses, shops, towns, airports. Whatever you want.
Privacy? Well, the signal doesn’t necessarily need to tell anyone what number the phone is. Anonymous tracking is fine, we’d still be measuring traffic.
And when people choose NOT to be anonymous, things get interesting.
“Where’s Mum?”
“Oh, she’s in town. With Grandma.”“Where’s Dad?”
“He’s on the golf course. Playing with three other people by the looks of things. Oh, one of those people is Uncle Dave.”“Are you going to the party tonight, cos I’ve no idea how to get there?”
“Yeah, leaving about seven - track my movements”
“Will do, cheers mate.”“What time’s Bill getting here?”
“Just a sec… oh, he’s on Wallace Road, so two minutes away.”Track people. Track people in cars. People on trains, planes, and boats.
I live in Ipswich, and let’s assume that I’m going to drive to Manchester tomorrow. Imagine if I could track people who had travelled from Ipswich to Manchester in the last few days and find out what routes they took.
Imagine if I could get stats on people who drove to Manchester versus people who took the train. What were the cost implications? What are the environmental implications?
Miles per hour. Pounds per hour. CO2 per mile.
Whether you’re making personal decisions or business decisions, interactive maps with traffic flows become incredibly useful.
Follow the route of your average customer around your shop. What do you see that they see? How can you change and improve things? How long does your average customer stay for? What areas do they visit more than once? Are they static for a long time in certain areas?
Tracking movements online has long been possible. Tracking people offline is getting easier.
Maps are about to get clever.
Flamingo International never did contact me. Perhaps I wasn’t radical enough. After all, this technology was always bound to surface at some point. But they did say Next Big Thing
A few days ago, Google Latitude was announced.
It’s surprising what you can achieve given plenty of thinking time.