Tag Archives: mass market

New House Telecom chair promotes net neutrality

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How often do you open the paper and see an intelligent quote from a politician on technology policy? I was pleasantly surprised to see just that today in a Boston Globe article. Massachusetts Congressman Ed Markey is taking over the House subcommittee on telecommunications, and on the issue of net neutrality, Markey says,

Innovations such as the Web browser, search engines, and the Internet did not emerge from large established companies, and forcing firms to pay more to reach users would stifle creativity

I think that’s a no-brainer, although it seems to be controversial in some big business circles.

What could be really interesting is if this principle were to be applied to the wireless industry. We have seen barely a trickle of mobile location services in the last decade for no other reason than there is no concept of net neutrality in mobile data networks. You have to pay to play, and you have to make separate deals with every wireless provider out there to get an application to a phone. This is clearly stifling innovation in the mapping industry.

Congressman Markey, please bring net neutrality to our cell phones!

OGC and the Mass Market

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I’ve been inspired to start writing more regularly in this blog for two reasons:

  1. There’s going to be a lot of interesting mass market, or geoweb-related developments in OGC in 2007.
  2. I think a few people might actually read this thing every now and then. I hope to keep it worth reading.

So, on to the purpose of this post. Sean Gillies started an interesting thread in response to Ed Parsons’ report from this week’s OGC meetings. He basically says OGC’s current W*S service stack will not geo-enable the Web.

Well I’m here to say OGC agrees. Yes, the current services are targeted squarely at the mainstream geospatial community. That’s a good thing, and there is a huge community of professionals who need that level of detail, functionality, and therefore complexity. But there’s a much larger Web community out there that we are not serving.

The intent of the mass market working group is to go in to this with no preconceptions. Study the consumer, “hacker”, and even the mainstream corporate IT communities and architect a geo strategy for those markets. That strategy may or may not align perfectly with what OGC has developed in the past, and if it doesn’t, that’s OK. There seems to be general consensus that every standard doesn’t have to fit nicely together on the drawing board. Adoption, or as John Herring said, “ubiquity”, should be the primary goal. (I had better note here that this is my personal opinion, not OGC’s, etc.)

So I’ll end by saying the future is wide open. OGC members are generally excited by this new direction–the support for starting the group was overwhelming. The problem is that most of them have traditional geospatial jobs and problems to solve, so the mass market requirements aren’t going to come, without larger participation.

And finally a note about the name, Mass Market. I’m not in love with the name either. Don’t hire me to name your next product. But what if we had called it the geoweb working group? Would I be getting flamed like Google did over that new geoweb layer in Earth? ;)

posted from the OGC Technical Committee meetings in San Diego, CA…

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