OSLO- Appworks is one of the leading mobile conferences in Scandinavia (organized by Mobilen.no, famous for their Telecruise conference that takes place on a cruise ship) and it was a real pleasure to speak about Location-Aware apps during the 1-day event at the end of May.
The conference attracted a great mix of mobile entrepreneurs, developers and 'big guns' like Samsung, LG, Blackberry, Nokia and HTC, with a conference format running in parallel to a workshop format (Klubbscenen).
Location-based services were one of the main items on the day's agenda, so it was perhaps provocative of me to kick off my keynote by stating that Location-Based Services were extinct today. The reasons for stating this is that location is no longer a service but a feature that is embedded everywhere. You can see my full slide deck above, by the way, and check out the other themes I presented.
Location on mobile is also firmly in the mainstream today -with Facebook in particular achieving what Foursquare couldn't.I'm a big believer in the fact that contextual search (with mobile apps knowing what I'm more likely to be interested in according to time of day, previous searches, ambient temperature etc) will unlock the full potential of location. It is still early days for this, but as Google (and others) invest in research in this area and processing power on mobile devices keeps increasing, we will see some real examples of this soon.
There were some great presentations at the event by other speakers - I particularly enjoyed the ones by John Valentine (from SCVNGR), Megan Miller (on usability of iPad apps) and Ola Larsen (from RIM). Ola showed a video that I thought was pretty cool, on Hyper-Augmented Reality. You can see the video below and get an insight into what one version of the future of AR could be like. Enjoy!
Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.
