Coronavirus and the end of herd impunity

Location based tracking apps, electronic ankles, drones... all technologies are being used to enforce lockdowns, quarantines and curfews, to search and destroy any will to ruin the common effort to flatten those damn curves.

At the herd level, our usage patterns brought precious insights about how both viruses (COVID-19 and STUPID-20) spread, most notably people flocking away from big cities to speed up curves across rural areas (Orange found that 17% of Parisians left the capital in the final hours before lockdown), or spring breakers sharing the fun during their spring breakout back home (see Tectonic's viral tweet below*):

When it comes to tracking individuals, Korea set the new standards very early with these alerts blaring on your phone each time a new case of COVID-19 pops up near you. You can't see the full individual's name but you know their age, their address, their nationality, and their exact path over the previous days. When on quarantine, you're tracked by GPS (three Vietnamese students were caught cheating in a Gunsan park - the truant officer found out that they left their phones home), you have to send every day your self-diagnosis on two different apps (one for the Ministry of Health, another for the Ministry of Interior), and you have to share your morning and afternoon temperatures by SMS - mercifully it's not intrusive to the point they send a drone to do it themselves.

And most of us are okay with the new safety-privacy trade-offs, because nowadays security means actual survival. Same thing with visual contacts. As we're deprived of basic liberties during confinement, we're willing to open our doors far wider than we would normally to co-workers, distant contacts or even total strangers. Somehow, as we grow our personal spheres, we're enabling more people to extend their reaches within them, break into our homes, Zoom into our interiors. Somehow, this virus has become the mother of all Troyan horses.

And when this pandemic is over, we probably won't return to normal. We won't mind when our operators charge us $5 a month for SD cards (as in Social Distancing), we won't flinch when they send electric shocks each time we come within 6 feet of other passers-by. 

As long as they let us graze on the greener side of the electric fence.


mot-bile 2020


* ICYMI

Want to see the true potential impact of ignoring social distancing? Through a partnership with @xmodesocial, we analyzed secondary locations of anonymized mobile devices that were active at a single Ft. Lauderdale beach during spring break. This is where they went across the US: pic.twitter.com/3A3ePn9Vin

— Tectonix GEO (@TectonixGEO) March 25, 2020

Cool summer

One year after launching a disposable 2G prototype, Apple decided to actually deliver a decent iPhone. If you're into mobility you'll notice the HSPA and GPS tags, if you're into music you'll chose between a 8GB and a 16GB version ($199 or $299). Steve said there were cool SDK gizmos on board as well.

Orange UK's Tom Alexander is talking about marketing issues. The guy came from Virgin and his predecessor Bernard Ghillebaert from Mobistar. Mr Ghillebaert will be learning about Customer Experience at the Group level. Orange customers may be learning about the brand's fabled cool factor - 90s stuff the younger generation could dig.

And the mother of all mergers may eventually reshuffle the cards on the US market : this summer's DNC Convention in Denver could turn out to be friendlier than expected for Barack Obama. So despite Colorado's scorching heats, no sweat there either.

Geotagging and slipping like a log

Context, context, context, location, location, location...
You already can sort your travel pictures on a map with Google-Picasa or Yahoo!-Flickr, and videos should follow soon. But you still depend on a mapping service provider for the location match.
Storing is one thing, organizing another. And it's scary how much digital content you can produce and forget.. ' better let the techno do the job and slip a few logs while you sleep like a log !
Some high end Nikon cameras already geotag directly photo-files through GPS plug-ins, and tomorrow's mobile picturephones / videophones should be able to do this seamlessly. Actually, your cellco should encourage you to upload any info you can add on any given location (photo, video, memo, the vcard of a store...), and share if possible.
Eventually, I guess we'll virtually carve on every tree we pass by : here I took a picture of a monument, there some crook stole my handset, there again he used it to purchase a watch... and I guess here is the public phone from which I called my lawyer.

Galileo Positioning System

In order to compete with America's GPS, Europe gave its satellite navigation system the name of a famous victim to Christian fundamentalism, Galileo Galilei. Despite the infiltration of endless meetings by Uncle Sam's experts in standard gasfactorization, Galileo seems back on tracks (sed movet). It will leverage on Europe's EGNOS (European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service), Russia's GLONASS (Glown Ass ?) and even China's PATHOS. The promoters of the technology consider themselves joint undertakers*, which gives you an idea of how much they believe in what they do.
To find the EU's home page for the Galileo program, you have to go down to http://europa.eu.int/comm/dgs/energy_transport/galileo/index_en.htm. The path to the NASA's Galileo space program looks much shorter : http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/. So short indeed the Americans crashed Galileo on Jupiter. Acte manqué ?
Galileo.org leads to the Galileo Centre in Calgary, AB. They are into networking, but of the educational kind. The program locked the URL back in 1997.
Galileo.com has been preempted since 1994. The owner is no other than Cendant Corporation, the owner of Avis and Budget Rent a Car, not to mention Century 21, Sotheby's International Realty, Days Inn, HoJo, Ramada Inn, Travelodge & co... Location based services if any, but located in Englewood, CO.
On the other hand, GPS.org leads to the homepage of a gay couple. Locating your mate as the killer app ?
But guess to whom belongs GPS.com ? A certain Microsoft Corporation - 1 Microsoft Way Redmond, WA 98052 US...
How to square the circle or from triangulation to quadrature...

* For the Galileo Joint Undertaking, type http://www.galileoju.com. Sounds like a Korean alcohol to me.

Prime time and fare play

Speaking of mobile TV, one device is changing the way people watch it big (prime) time : your car. I guess I would have a tough time driving a car without GPS and TV in Seoul now that I'm hooked to it. No wonder prime time is moving towards traffic time there.
I'm not sure Italy's MICE TV (Mobile Information Communication Entertainment TV by Advanced Communication S.r.l) or UK's CabVision propose the best business model : a cab is as good a hotspot as an airport but specific video content didn't prove to be the killer app there. On the other hand, these players mixed technologies an interesting way : broadband wireless for video (WLAN for MICE, DAB for CabVision) + GPRS for news tickers (MICE) and remote monitoring (CabVision). MICE adds an interesting feature : movement sensors make sure passengers are comfortably seated before starting the potentially 50 mn long program. Only 22% of CabVision users find the concept intrusive but I wonder how many cab drivers will turn mad and the whole shebang down before their fifth customer of the day.
You want your personal in-car video system to be a touch screen you can hop on, plug-in, tune-in, surf on as much as you want but that would be a terrible idea for a cab concept. I guess the passenger should be able to zap and reach a selection of non specific channels and wouldn't mind part of the screen being devoted to sponsors (with the possibility to zoom on and out of an ad, for example - that would mean a pad of half a dozen keys next to a screen you don't want to look greasy : on/off, program +/-, volume +/-, adzoom +/-). Autistic me would enjoy such a gizmo, especially since more than 22% of cabdrivers prove to be intrusive.

License to bill

SK Telecom will enter the European market through GPS (their "i-Kids" service could sell with the help of Netherland's SF-Alert, starting with KPN) and implement RFID trials at home with the country's leading retailer (Shinsegae) and a producer with stamina (Korea Ginseng Corp, the king of insam / hongsam). Wireless service it is, no license needed.
At the other end of Eurasia, Alcatel and Nokia start working on cellular / Wi-Fi convergence trough UMA. Not the Thurman show, you know... remember Unlicensed Mobile Access ?
Elswhere, shareholders still rely on ye good ole business model where you pay for a license, you pay for the roll-out, and you pay for telling people to pay even more for your service.

RFID - you're in the Army now

Korea and the US are simultaneously pushing RFID the way they're used to push new technologies. Amerika focuses on sekurity applikations, targetting crossborder hoppers, drug dealers, Kerry voters and other terrorists (in other words : federal and military spendings will as usual show the money and accelerate the private sector's ROI), while Korea plans to maintain its R&D edge in mobility, the MIC leveraging on ETRI's work to launch a Mobile RFID Forum and get some handsets ready by 2007. Up to now, the biggest RFID lobby was EPC Global Inc, EPC standing for Electronic Product Code because the killer app used to be "revolutionize the barcode". Unlike that old tag, RFID provides an ID for each item and can be read at a distance of a few meters without being directly beamed at - some kind of a short range GPS. Provided your system covers the right areas with the right techno and the right links to the right databases, this can be the ultimate "spyware / spywear" all experts in tracking (retailers, marketers, supply chain managers, security managers, customs officers...) have been dreaming of for ages. A quick look at EPC Global's board and you meet major league marketers (Gilette, P&G, Johnson & Johnson), retailers (Wal*Mart, METRO), and pervasive computing heralds (HP, Cisco)... plus the office of the Secretary of Defense (bekause this is Amerika and this is where frequencies meet wallets).
As usual, mobile players seem remote. Yet, RFID being about Radio Frequency IDentification, every player with some ambition in the wireless and/or customer control fields has been keeping an eye on the issue. Some vendors already claim so called "mobile RFID solutions" (ie the chip triggering applications in Nokia's Field Force Solution). The first MNOs which will come to it will have a strong marketing / commerce drive and a tradition of launching technos that are potentially "coopetitive" with theirs. Once again, you can bet a buck on Korea.