Proximity Marketing: Opportunity for Rich-Attribute Conveyance

Real-time Location-based Services (RT-LBS or just RT-LS) is an important new concept in mobile marketing. These offerings are starting to tout the ability to deliver information and services based on the real-time location of a person. Some key examples are receiving a mobile phone-based notification of a restaurant offer while walking in a downtown area or a product coupon while shopping in a specific grocery aisle. (Although there would need to be a saturation algorithm adjustment as potential customers flock to a location.) As is true generally with the advent of newtech, there is a much richer level of attribute conveyance beyond that of economic incentive that could be demonstrated in new applications. For example, why not broadcast key real-time attributes that a user has affinity for beyond or in addition to price such as ambiance, noise level, wait time, including for example near real-time photos from the establishment. A time-to-be-seated comparison with map overlay app can be imagined, upleveling the concept from the harangue of groupon discounts.

For indoor locations where there is no line-of-sight to GPS, there are other solutions, and this is where imminent progress is being made. There are WiFi networks (where even having WiFi enabled is enough know that ‘you are here’ or at least that your phone is ‘here’), Bluetooth Low Energy (per most smartphones), and now iBeacon and similar technologies. iBeacon, etc. is essentially an RFID technology where there would be a beacon on each grocery store aisle that could track customers and deliver coupons or other notifications. However, Bluetooth would need to be enabled which most smartphone keep off. In all of the industry promoted excitement over proximity marketing with real-time couponing, one cannot help but notice that truly revolutionary progress, for example auto-checkout per item-level RFID tags or some other mechanism remains a hard, expensive, and unsolved problem. What about remote hover cam item selection and personalized drone delivery?

For outdoor retail locations, GPS is still a good solution as it can locate a person within a meter per satellite pings. GPS resolution is already available in centimeter resolution for professionals (at $1000 and reportedly now at $500). This cost/performance curve could continue to ratchet down and centimeter-level GPS resolution could harken exciting new classes of location-based technologies, for example medical applications that require sub-body level detail.

Daemon's bot-mediated reality

In the entertaining and new paradigm-defining ARG thriller Daemon, Daniel Suarez makes some interesting philosophical claims at a broader level. One is that democracy may not be viable in a technologically advanced society. This could be the case, but is more likely to be true due to other tweaked and adjusted political models, hopefully with the support and participation of a larger portion of the population, superseding the special-interest group democracies of today.

Power and counterbalances evolve in lockstep
The claim in Daemon regarding democracy and more generally about a society composed of unmodified humans is that individuals or small groups wield too much ability to destroy. This could be true, terrorism is a familiar current example, where a few people can impact many others, but a more likely possible future is that responses and countermeasures evolve in lockstep with any new power-wielding phenomenon. For example, top-down and bottom-up ubiquitous satellite surveillance, cams and sensor networks are problematic in many ways but a potential counterbalance to terrorism. Another classic example is that a society in which a nanovirus could circulate worldwide and dissolve all rubber tires overnight (a rather dramatic response to petroleum dependency!) might also have the norm of downloading open-source security patches from the web for quick printing via personal nanofab.

Childhood's End theme: bot-mediated reality
A second interesting aspect of Dameon is the exploration of the ‘Childhood’s End’ theme – that humans in their present state are incapable of operating a sustainable society and that order can only be achieved through outside intervention, also that present humanity is just a step in the evolutionary chain on the way to the next tier of intelligence. In Daemon there is a new kind of order which is more distributed and possibly sustainable but not really different in providing a better society for all but just in installing new hierarchies of video game-style leveling–up together with the usual story of enfranchising the disenfranchised, as ascribed by one person. Individual actions are snapshots and disconnected from their import.

Forget Reality TV - nextgen is Augmented Reality TV: botnet replaces Judge Judy, ARG players determine real-life actions and events

New world order in our hands
Daemon is laudable for taking on the grand challenge of envisioning how a new world order could evolve though a mediated narrowly intelligent botnet and artificial reality gaming overlay to the physical world. The key point is that we are already steps away from this world and that the building block pieces are in place now (e.g.; GPS networks, pervasive botnets); it is up to us to determine whether the future incarnation is positive or negative, whether it reinforces or destabilizes current interests and influences and how societal and individual actions are motivated and executed.