by John Corbett

• Added February 05, 2010

Hello and welcome - a first entry...

One challenge facing just about everyone is the sifting of all the options, data, information we confront each day/hour/minute and the subsequent decisions. A colleague asked me about 'the last mile' - traditionally the high cost of that last bit of connectivity a la cable to the household...

A technology issue.

Repurposing this last mile to addressing the buisness challenge of 'the right information to the right person at the right time' drives home what is one of the underlying principals of location intelligence (LI).The location signal not only enables specific relevance it easily serves to reduce and even eliminate options, data, and information that is simply not relevant. Time and space - key elements to business decisions - are lost in the absence of LI.

We are seeing and will continue to see a wave of technical innovations that embed location (i.e. GPS). What is only now emerging are the information filters that enable that device to serve as a distributed data collection and rececption device. Though comsumers may balk at the concept of walking down a street and having a local ad hit their handheld, the technology to do so would serve many other perhaps more welcome business services (ok, not to mention alerts similar to reverse 911!). As a data collection sensor, imagine the value to a post Katrina or Haiti resource and rescue effort if every individual carried a location based 'sensor' the data from which rolled-up to the managers...

That last mile - of information filter.

The technology will be there and the challenge and opportunity this creates for business is profound. The spatial lens is of profound value to these filters...