Today I was interviewed by CBC News – The National for a segment they are doing on Facebook. It was taped and will air in the future. It was my first time being interviewed for TV so I’m pretty excited to see the segment. In the interview, I cited stats from themeaningofweb.com regarding how 10.6 million Canadians use Facebook while talking about the popularity of Facebook.
Here is a quick video I made prior to the interview:
Relevance: Do you think about what you are saying before you post to a public Facebook group? Do you have concerns about what people might say on a Facebook group you’ve created or are the admin for? Do you monitor the wall conversations?
Convergence 2008 takes place on Thursday May 22nd and it is organised by Cossette West as part of the Vancouver International Digital Festival (VIDFEST). As I wrote about earlier, it is a digital marketing and communication event taking place on Granville Island, Vancouver.
Their offices are located in Yaletown and the view from their balcony on the fifth floor is quite spectacular. The interview took place outdoors as it was a sunny day. You can hear the traffic in the background, so I have provided a transcription of the interview below.
Sandy Fleischer, VP and General Manager of Fjord Interactive
Me: Hello, it is Phillip Jeffrey here. I’m with Sandy Fleischer, VP and General Manager of Fjord Interactive and I’m asking a few questions about Convergence 2008 which will be coming up next week. The first question I want to ask you is who you are and what do you do for Cossette West?
Sandy: My name is Sandy Fleischer. I’m Vice President and General Manager for Cossette and I run Fjord Interactive Marketing and Technology and we’re the digital marketing group within Cossette.
Me: How did Cossette get involved with Convergence?
Sandy: Convergence was actually our idea. In the past we’ve held digital marketing events but they have been closed, invite-only open only to our key clients and we’ve just received really positive feedback on that. Based on where the industry is now, we felt it was a really good opportunity to open the event up to the broader business community.
Me: How does Cossette 2008 differ from last year?
Sandy: The main thing again is that it is open to the public and we have invited some speakers in outside of the Cossette family on a national and international basis.
Me: Who are the types of people you’d like to attract to Convergence?
Sandy: Really a broad group. Business community in general with a specific focus on marketing and communication professionals, people who are new to digital marketing who are looking for some practical advice, and people who are experts in the field that are looking to broaden their knowledge and learn about what other experts are doing.
Me: How does the diversity of speakers (e.g. Grant McCracken, cultural anthropologist, Darren Barefoot, Social Media expert; William Azaroff, a force behind community engagement) relate to the overall theme of digital marketing and communication?
Sandy: Great question. I think the diversity of the speakers reflect the diverse state of digital marketing right now and really our intent was to focus on a few of the main trends and areas of interest within digital marketing and our speakers and panels are really reflective of that.
Me: What would you like the take-away message to be for Convergence 2008?
Sandy: I think that given it is a broad event it is hard to focus on any one message, but ultimately the idea behind the forum was to provide practical, results oriented advice that people can put into practice on an immediate basis.
Me: Thank you for your time, is there anything else you’d like to add?
Sandy: Just some particulars around the event. It is happening Thursday May 22nd, that it will be part of VIDFEST and that together we are joining forces to create a digital week in Vancouver. We are very excited about that.
Me: Thank you
Sandy You’re welcome.
Relevance: It is great that Convergence is open to the public this year. It should be a great opportunity to meet interesting digital marketing and communication professionals from across North America.
Shortly after SXSW I was contacted by Kate Imbach who coordinates the developer program at Skyhook Wireless as a Location Awareness Marketing Manager the Director of Marketing and Developer Programs. She wanted to tell me about their current applications in the emerging area of location-based technology on-campus. As someone living on a college campus, I was interested in learning more about this and discussing with her possible applications for benefiting the lives of students on campus. I decided to interview her via Skype on March 28th and she was happy to oblige. I have been using the service since late March and I will also provide further analysis on my demoing of their product.
What is Loki? Loki works with any wifi-enabled device in order to provide precise location positioning which can be shared. Loki uses the Skyhook Wireless’ Positioning System (WPS), a software-only location-based system to accomplish this task.
There is worldwide coverage for the service available in about 8500 cities/towns at the time of my interview. The skyhook reference database is continually being updated as drivers/walkers map the location of Wi-Fi access points (also called war-driving). The signal is picked up based on the mac address of the Wi-Fi enable device being used.
Relevance for Campuses
There are a number of possible applications for campuses such as campus security, location-based games, or integrated into a campus transportation system.
I was interested in how this system might be integrated into my own campus such as our shuttle bus system. I know that sometimes the bus just doesn’t show up on the route and having a way to let people along the route know its present location might be useful.
A White Paper report which described results by Skyhook and independent third parties conducted a series of performance field tests comparing the WPS capacity against GPS. One of the key findings within what they described as an Urban Canyon (a downtown area with buildings averaging more than 6 stories) found median accuracy to be 20-30 meters and availability to be 97% indoors and 98.8% outdoors.
Demoing Loki
In order to demo Loki, I went to their download page for firefox mac users from their webpage. Once downloaded and activated, an icon appeared to the left of the URL location on the toolbar. Pressing the Loki icon will activate my location. I have always found it to be very precise as shown by the example when I typed in Vancouver Art Gallery instead.
There is also a location feature called my.loki which I have yet to try. According to the website:
MyLoki location-enables social networking. As you travel around MyLoki can automatically let your friends know where you are using your favorite platform — Facebook, RSS Feeds, badges for your blog or even Jaiku. You can pick and choose how and where you want your location displayed.
There are a couple of posts on the topic of location awareness that I have read recently. The first is by Chris Messina and the second is by Todd Sieling regarding location and identity.
Relevance: Location awareness applications are becoming more commonplace whether automatically or manually shared as more people desire to let their friends know where they are. What are the implications for society as we continue to share where we are and what we are doing?
