We are going to live in the age of Iron Man’s J.A.R.V.I.S., not Batman’s Alfred. That is the gist that I get from reading Shel Israel and Robert Scoble’s new book, The Age of Context: Mobile, Data, Sensors and the Future of Privacy. Okay, I declared sides in the eternal Marvel vs. DC debate, and my pro-technology bias, but for good reason.
The Age of Context is a tour-de-force documentary of the state of technology in 2013 looking across a broad number of fields: healthcare, transportation, the electronic home, urbanization, mobile devices, marketing, and understanding customers. There are so many references to real companies, inventions, and people in this book, it is encyclopedic—yet only in 276 pages in my e-book copy.
This is an expert-guided trade show-in-a-book to a future most of us don’t yet realize. The authors quickly get to the value point and operational description of many dozens of projects so that you can get a feel for the greater impact of a trend such as wearable computing, or driverless cars.
The authors therefore focus what they mean on five core driving technologies: mobile, social media, data, sensors and location. Even given this, the categories organized by chapter for each of these topics are somewhat separate of each other. They are adjacent with the common wall being that they use one of the five core technologies.
I think this is a hard book to write for the simple reason that the word ‘context’ itself is overloaded in meaning. There is a world of distinctiveness in concepts that we try to boil down into simple words as ‘context’ and ‘complexity’, as well as their derivatives: predictability, variability, or interdependence. For example, there is the context around your physical body, health and healthcare provider(s); a context between you and your home entertainment, and environmental systems; a context between you and a retail store. I could go on for quite a while differentiating contexts but while these are all personal contexts, they involve different uses of technology, have different participants, and different related issues.
Rather than an academic debate of what it means, they dive right into stories. It begins, of course, with the Google Glass story made additionally famous by one the authors’ (in)famous photo of wearing Glass while in the shower. This Internet-meme-worthy event actually underscored a reality that (a) he is a consummate marketer, and (b) the device becomes part of your self.
However, this is more than about context of wearable technologies. It is about what information they can collect, how to process that information, correlate and cross-reference with multiple other sources, and produce relevant responses. It is taking possibly millions of points of what we call Big Data and place it in a small context—the authors refer to this as Little Data.
Little Data trumps Big Data
BitCarrier is a Barcelona-based startup with projects in Panama City, Helsinki, Barcelona, Madrid and Zaragosa, Spain. They created a system that gathers data from over 20 million sensors across a city’s grid to create municipal traffic “heat maps.” These sensors replace cameras, thus increasing privacy, but also reducing costs—they are simply much cheaper and easier to deploy. It allows traffic planning managers to reroute traffic, reduce congestion, noise or air pollution in different parts of town. Emergency services can also respond quickly to accidents.
Libellium is another startup that deploys insect-like swarms of tiny sensors called “motes,” which report on changes in a wide range of activities that impact safety, efficiency, vegetation growth and sustainability. For a practical implementation,
Libelium’s main business is creating smart parking systems, mostly in urban areas, all over the world. Magnetic sensors are installed under pavement to determine whether a car is parked in a space or not. The system sees the GPS of a car looking for parking and can direct it to the nearest open spot via a mobile app.
BitCarrier is a Big Data analysis scenario. Libellium is a Little Data one. One refers to patterns across an entire city for understanding broad patterns; the other helps individuals track with a very common daily concern: Do I have enough in the parking meter?
That simple example relays the reality of how the Age of Context helps the human condition. Said simply, it gives us one less thing to worry about.
Another humanizing example is the story of Dr. Jennifer Dyer, a child endocrinologist in Columbus, Ohio who has designed a Serious game mobile app that encourages, downright bribes, teens to note when they took their meds, ate right or exercised, through taking care of a virtual pet dog named Cooper.
The game deals with a very common challenge in the healthcare field where people simply don’t remember to take medication that leads to a “cost $258 billion in emergency room visits, hospitalizations and doctor visits” broadly across the field, per the authors. Another thing to worry about less.
I’m focusing on the humanizing aspects here but there is a great deal of focus on the commercial potential of sensors, location, and the other forces as the authors describe. The aspect that many of us are familiar with, and also very concerned about, is exemplified in the Tom Cruise movie, Minority Report. His character, Chief Anderton, walks through a mall where the stores scan him (his eyes apparently) as he is walking by and starts to make recommendations on new clothing and other products.
That Tom Cruise-Chief Anderton moment in the Mall
This is where we are getting to some of the harder debates about the reality that the Age of Context brings out. The focus chapter on Pinpoint marketing towards the end separates itself from the idea of contextual advertising systems such as Google’s AdSense network currently in use, by giving the following example:
Sometimes such ads are beneath worthless; they are downright tasteless. When tech author and journalist Steven Levy tweeted that a plane had crashed at San Francisco International Airport in June 2013, he reported that an Expedia ad suddenly appeared “urging me to fly somewhere on vacation.”
…The ad system cannot tell if we are hungry or cold, thirsty or lonely. It does not know our intent. Marketing messages would be a lot better received if they could be targeted not to our eyeballs as they are today, but to our intentions and our immediate environments as they increasingly will be in the Age of Context.
It explains the distinction well enough that I don’t feel the need to elaborate it further. What the authors do point to next is the comparison to Doc Searls’ ideas in The Intention Economy. I interviewed Mr. Searls back in 2012, where he shared his view perhaps we should put the decisions of what gets shared in the hands of each individual and using a software agent, handle what can be used by vendors, for how long and for what reason. The authors however disagree:
Searls, we think, may go too far in trying to give all the controls to the buyers—a marketplace needs some give-and-take to operate optimally.
Actually, I think Searls idea is that in-between, that give-and-take, they asked for, and that the authors declared that this model takes it to the extreme and simply puts all the power in the hands of the buyer. Rather, it is that negotiation of what the seller wants and the buyer is willing to give.
Pinpoint marketing is about right-time experiences, as described by mobile industry analyst Maribel Lopez of Lopez Research. There is not only a time and place for the experience but taking input from the situation of the environment beyond one’s self, their relationship network, preferences and the overlap with the possibilities of vendor offerings in that same space. It then follows with that negotiation of all this contextual information from the individual buyers viewpoint, and the sellers. There is a world of proxy agents coming for each side, consummated by the final purchase decision of the buyer.
What about Alfred versus J.A.R.V.I.S.?
You may remember Bruce Wayne’s butler Alfred, played by Michael Caine in the most recent Batman movies, who was also his guardian and parental figure since being orphaned as a pre-teen. Alfred (in the Christopher Nolan movies version of the character) is far from a servant, but the voice of reason and guiding hand for Bruce Wayne, and Batman’s moral compass.
J.A.R.V.I.S. by comparison is an artificial intelligence created by a young prodigy Tony Stark to assist him in all the ways he needs, from adjusting the room temperature, to sensing when missiles are incoming and the shielding for his Iron Man suit is in potential danger. He’s a super-butler that surrounds Tony Stark’s life; an intelligent subservient entity, though not a person.
Both Batman and Iron Man have no super powers, but are just extremely wealthy, powerful, and driven, yet still human. Their super-ness comes from the ability to harness their individual potential and aided by information systems.
J.A.R.V.I.S is the epitome of such an information system, created in only a way a storyteller can. It (and not ‘he’) has the power to bring together, analyze, present and to some degree react to information as it considers is relevant to Tony Stark’s needs. It is assistive in a broad sense, in many of the ways described in The Age of Context.
But J.A.R.V.I.S. has no face. Alfred provides something we still need: not we can do logically, but what we should morally. Batman has the technology of the Batcave to support him in many of the ways J.A.R.V.I.S. might. Yet, with all his martial arts skill, his wealth, his intuitive genius, he still needs Alfred to guide him. It harks to something we each still can’t do without, and if we were to do so, we would lose a key aspect that can make us great.
Summary
The Age of Context brings out that there are yet still many new ways we can dream up imagine that the sci-fi and other storytellers never thought of. It documents stories of where these uses of technology have emerged in real businesses and organizational cases in operation. I fully expect this to become a live video documentary on perhaps PBS, National Geographic, The Science Channel, or other similar educational TV channels. I would have liked less of a fast-paced romp through many possibilities and more delving into the details. The book serves a good purpose by collecting the various contexts into one place. It also opened my mind as to the reality that this is already either here, or will be in less than the 25 years from now that the epilogue suggests.
