A Perspective on Location Services, Mobile Entrepreneurship & Startup Life

Last week I gave a presentation to the Sensor Middleware Unit showing an overview of the research I am doing as part of my master thesis at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute. Any feedback welcome, slides are below.

Pervasive sensor networks are the source of continuous data streams about our physical environment. With the rise of the Mobile Web people-centric sensing yields a new layer of spatiotemporal contextual data, from qualitative user-generated content (e.g. geo-referenced multimedia messages) to quantitative sensor measurements (e.g. earthquake or hazard alerts). This mobile sensed content is made accessible within an ecosystem of heterogenous service providers, from social networks to social data networks. The mining, analysis and processing of these streams provides many challenges and semantic technologies can be utilized to overcome this heterogeneity. The integration of sensor data with a user-generated context will provide an increased situational awareness and contextual knowledge, resulting in application scenarios from more efficient emergency response management to improved urban planning.

The Father of the Internet, Vint Cerf, talks about the future of the Web.

Some clear trends:

• Increasing amount of networked applications on mobile devices
• Increasing network speeds
• More and more Internet-enabled devices (e. g. smart home automation)
• Increasing amount of sensor type systems (e. g. sensing your surroundings from temperature to humidity)

Why do I blog this?
Three minutes I cannot agree more, the future of the Web is predictable from a broad perspective, now it’s time to think about new use cases and services where the real innovation happens.