Social Networking and the Cloud: How Location Intelligence is "everywhere" - Alex MacKay, CEO

I was talking with Jeff Akers, CEO of Critigen this week about the advent of the use of location attributes in social networking offerings such as Twitter Places and Foursquare and we both agreed they will all increase the enterprise use of location intelligence by a significant factor. It’s very similar to what Google Earth and Microsoft Bing did to heighten awareness. Jeff makes a great point in observing that people under 35 have largely grown up in a world where just two dimensions (ex. spreadsheets) are a bit passé. Instead their world has been multi-dimensional and has been filled with location awareness, especially in digital games. As well he notes that the military has been 10 years ahead of business in the use of location (ex. The USA AirForce had a program by the year 2000 to map out every asset they had) and this knowledge and technology is quickly entering main stream usage. Just a few years ago everyone was excited to go to Microsoft or Google and see what their house looked like on the online maps. Today, they are at work thinking of how to take advantage of mapping out where the company’s assets are, how the management of those assets varies by location, and where is the best marketing or service enhancement opportunities relative to those assets locations. Jeff also pointed out that some businesses have been way ahead of the market using location. Walmart has grown to be the world’s greatest retailer by taking advantage of “where” the stores are and matching their logistics to just in time inventory of hot selling products. Other companies are noticing and following such leaders.

Jeff agreed with me that the use of location intelligence is growing, but that the key to its successful implementation is about the vertical application. At Critigen, they are seeing the greatest expansion of the “where” filter in asset based industries. Oil and Gas, Engineering, and Communication Service Providers (CSP’s) are the biggest new users. They continue to see it growing in Public Sector and Finance as well, but noted that even in their work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation the use of location is significant as determining the best location for a water plant or school in Third World countries is a very big “where” decision.

We talked about how the Cloud will also impact the world of location intelligence. Critigen are already seeing that companies are realizing that some information is most efficient coming out of public cloud offerings, but that for competitive and security reasons almost all clients are needing to have a private cloud for key sensitive information thus a “hybrid” model using both public and private is going to be the norm. Jeff commented that the big thing about location data, within the Cloud, is that location data is often the most or only consistent data inside disparate databases. And thus, location can be a special integration key when pulling together multiple sources. Jeff points to the example of the Gulf Oil spill crisis where 3 separate emergency operation centers have been established in 3 separate states. For this crisis the most consistent data available is location and the 3 emergency operation centers should be integrating their efforts and resources spatially via a cloud integration based on location knowledge.

Next week we begin a detailed series of posts on one specific industry (similar to the series we ran on insurance) when we drill into the growth of location intelligence within the Communication Service Provider vertical market.

Learn more about Address Governance - Christine Gemmell, Director Demand Generation

In one of our earliest posts on the DMTI blog dated April 30th, we discussed Address Governance. In that post we wrote in detail about this subject and we have had feedback that you’d like to learn more.

In working with Addresses, there are some fundamental tenants that organizations should apply to be able to leverage the power of Location Intelligence, and to be able to get the best possible performance out of their efforts. The 3Cs of Address Governance – Correct, Current and Context define the discipline and help organizations apply the power of location to make better business decisions.

The discipline of Address Governance certifies that you can trust, with confidence, that your data will support your business decisions. Address Governance is about implementing the processes that give you the most current, correct and contextual information on your assets, customers and facilities.

Chris Thomas, our VP of Solutions Consulting will be hosting a free webinar on the topic that discusses the basic principles of Address Governance by asking the following questions:

1. Are Your Addresses Correct?
2. Are Your Addresses Current?
3. Are Your Addresses in their proper Context?

By sharing his tips and experience Chris will discuss how the ability to answer “Yes” to these three basic questions can significantly contribute to the success of leveraging the power of Location Intelligence within your organization.

Date: Tuesday, July 13th
Time: 2:00pm EST

Register today to learn how your organization can profit from Location Intelligence!

What Communication Service Providers need from Location Intelligence - Alex MacKay, CEO

As I thought about Twitter Places in last week's post and what it signalled, I immediately began to think about the concept of "big data" which David Sonnen, IDC Senior Analyst, raised in our blog post of June 2nd. The use of a lot of data to help make decisions is at the heart of location intelligence (LI). LI by its very nature, creates extremely large datasets. When you think about Twitter Places, it's the beginning of a form of the digital data steam rising off the planet that David referred to on June 2nd. When you also realize that all Twitter data effective back to 2006 is going to be digitally stored in the USA Library of Congress you realize just how important this information is and what the knowledge/intelligence is that will be available. The ability to analyze this type of big data and make smart business decisions from seeing the patterns and gaining the intelligence is going to be yet another race for those who want to compete in location intelligence. At DMTI we see this big data knowledge being served up within the context of different vertical industries. What's important to insurance companies (property specific information) may be quite different from the information required for a Communications Service Provider (CSP). For CSP's they use location intelligence for two main purposes:

1. Marketing & Sales - Knowing where your customers and prospects are relative to demographics and your network assets and coverage areas to maximize effectiveness and....
2. Engineering - More efficient network planning....using LI to make more cost effective decisions on where to deploy network assets at minimal cost and maximum effect.

The amount of data CSP's thirst for to help make these decisions is huge and while its different than the specific data insurance is after, they share one common characteristic: both want as precise and as localized information as they can get with the only restriction being privacy legislation. The thirst to utilize much more intelligence around location specific data is growing rapidly and the tools to analyze it are even more important. Twitter Places does provide a really simple example of how location context can add special value at the same time driving the awareness and therefore the advocacy of utilizing location intelligence.

Enterprise Business and Social Networking are getting closer through Location Intelligence - Alex MacKay, CEO DMTI

It was interesting to see the details of the much anticipated release of Twitter Places this week. It's another simple use of location in an ever growing awareness of Location Intelligence in ways that are similar to what Google Earth and Microsoft Bing did a few years ago. It has fascinating long term implications = you can now know the location context of where a tweet is coming from. The example Twitter uses in their announcement (is the tweet about the World Cup coming from inside the stadium or in front of a TV?) points out that the value of the location context can be significant.

What does that mean on an enterprise business level? Well in the enterprise usage of location the precise attributes of the information are always far more critical than in social networks. In recent posts we have talked about the need in the insurance vertical to know exact information about a specific property. As those needs get fulfilled (and they will) the quality of the information becomes even more important. Therefore information obtained while at the property site would have extra value (versus utilizing satellite or outdated government sources for example). What Twitter Places does in the social network game is essentially adding a similar context value. If I'm actually "there", my location and its associated information has special value. It's not surprising to see another example of how social/consumer use and enterprise use are slowing getting closer. As these types of examples grow, what will also become very apparent is that the combination of many sources of data (some real time, some from expert sources, some from trend sources) will become big time business, especially as the need for accuracy is paramount in the enterprise world. Visit our blog next week as we discuss how Twitter Places really represents the concept of "big data", and how that concept is translating into Location Intelligence for Communications Service Providers.

How Insurance Companies see a Good Payback from Location Intelligence - Alex MacKay, CEO

In recent posts we have heard from a futurist, an editor and an analyst about why Location Intelligence is important to the insurance industry. This week I decided to take the question to the actual "street" and talk with an insurance company. Speaking with Peter Silk, SVP at Lombard Insurance in Toronto, Canada we chatted about this question.....how important is location in insurance? Peter's experience says it's all about more and more data coming into use for decisions. He figures the importance of location information has grown at least threefold in the past couple of years. And while Peter agrees a main driving factor is risk mitigation, he also sees a number of business processes in insurance growing due to the need for more precise location information. He talked about these five in particular:

• Risk management around knowing specific property detail vs offering insurance in ways such as blanket policies where the specific risk on individual properties is not detailed
• Reporting to the various regulating bodies who are inquiring at a more individual property level (ex. Asking questions such as, are you drilling down to the location property level? OR do you have property policy specific exposure vs. aggregate?)
• CAT management and knowing where your risk locations exist. It simply means knowing more, such as your estimated probable maximum loss, your TIV, and being able to react promptly when events such as high wind storms cause damage
• Underwriters have many needs for this improved detail and right at the top of the list is to ensure that there is a managed balance level of exposure in any one geographic area
• And, having risk location information and location risk profiles for the re-insurance market makes the pricing of that business a whole lot better

These are all solid examples of just why insurance companies are seeing a good payback from investing in the capabilities of Location Intelligence.

I then asked Peter what trends he saw growing in importance in the upcoming years. He basically sees the need to get more information at the specific property level as the core need and that the data will just keep getting added. He says this is why getting the address correct is so critical. If you have the address nailed, then you can begin to overlay more and more data/knowledge on the exact location. He made a point of saying that if you can't be confident that two data sources are speaking to the same address then this greatly affects the ability to make an informed decision (knowing a property is mid street vs a corner property is a simple example with different decisions). The address trust is critical. With accurate confidence in the address, Peter then sees that insurance want the latitude and longitude to be precise and rooftop is what is ultimately needed. With rooftop accuracy he foresees that a lot of other maps and imagery can be overlaid for the decision needs. Next comes many other data sources such as loss information, credit information, and statistical history as examples.

As Peter said right in the beginning of our chat, it's all about more and more data. Location Intelligence is simply providing valuable information to help insurance companies make better business decisions.

It's not about Location, it's about Risk Management - Alex MacKay, CEO DMTI

We continue our focus on the insurance industry this week striving to further clarify why Location Intelligence is making such an impact in that vertical. And on that topic I was talking with David Sonnen, Senior Analyst of IDC earlier in the week and asked him for his thoughts. David reflected that with the economic recovery kicking in the insurance risk management teams are really digging into the details to make sure the overall system break down and recent meltdown does not occur again. In doing so they are seeing that knowing where stuff is, at a much more granular level is one of the key factors. Instead of doing risk profiles at state or county levels, many of the insurance companies are targeting right down to the property level. This is ambitious, but it drives the need for a lot of what Location Intelligence has to offer in terms of knowing property specific info, neighbourhood info and boundary or risk scores at that level of detail. Bottom line for David is "it's not about location really; it's about risk management. Location Intelligence, because of what it offers, is along for the ride."

As we chatted, David also brought up another real interesting point as he noted that this thirst for detail is spreading in many other ways. One of the strategic view areas is what David called "big data". What is big data? "It's the digital steam rising off of the planet" he stated. (I love that vision!) Big data refers to the growing realization among strategic thinkers, including the insurance companies, that there is a lot of digital data out there that can be found unobtrusively and used in good business decisioning. All of this type of data David refers to has geographic or location attributions. He is referring to cell phone data, GPS tracks, what is concerning a community info, crime rates, police info, and news info. It's about a situational awareness of what's going on at more granular levels like communities or neighbourhoods. David predicts that this big data phenomenon is going to help companies understand the relationship between people and their locations based on the trends and patterns in ubiquitous digital information, i.e. the digital steam rising.

I concur with David on both points. It really is about risk management in insurance. The clients we work with would say the exact same thing. And David is not alone in the outlook that more and more data is going to be analyzed (big data) and at significantly more granular levels. All this will lead to better business decisions.

How Underwriters are using Location Intelligence in Insurance Risk Management - Alex MacKay, CEO

The future success of Location Intelligence equals how quickly it offers vertical industry applications. It must explode away from the traditional GIS world which has unfortunately been too much of a back room operation and not integrated into the key operations of corporations. Earlier this week, a few of us DMTI folk were talking with Natasha Leger, Editor of LBx Journal and we spent the better part of an hour talking about just this point. As we were comparing notes with Natasha about what really drives Location Intelligence success, we were in sync that its really about the business applications of Location Intelligence within actual business processes that counts. Its about the payback. And that verticalization of the business applications is where the real success of Location Intelligence lies.

Take insurance underwriting as a great example. It's one of the real hotbeds of LI. Understanding where a property is in relation to risk elements is a key decision affecting an insurance carrier's profitability. Using LI is a simple solution to a complex, real-world problem for the insurance industry. Insurers depend on geographic and demographic information to assess underwriting risk, handle claims, match coverage, expand markets, serve existing customers and develop new business.

What complicates matters? The sheer volume of data - claims histories, natural and man-made hazards, risk factors, and the competition. Storing, retrieving, interpreting, and applying all of this data in a meaningful way can be a staggering and expensive proposition.

Location-based technology has become an invaluable strategic tool to many leading insurers. Mapping allows insurance professions to quickly access information, recognize patterns and trends, and drill down into data for detailed analysis and sound decision-making.

Insurance companies can realize the most immediate benefits in productivity and efficiency in the discipline most driven by complex data - underwriting. With Location Intelligence solutions commercial underwriters can quickly assess risk for any given address.

Address cleaning and geo-coding are the essential beginnings of the policy lifecycle. They provide instand location validation and correction to ensure "clean" data. They also assign precise geographic coordinates, which are used later in other applications such as underwriting, claims, call-centers and marketing.

Due to the fact that addresses can be accurately identified on a map, underwriters can assess risk and set premiums in ways that may otherwise have been difficult.

When you net it out, a ton of insurance business process is about assessing the risk of a property. In simple terms, what is a property? It's the heart of Location Intelligence to know as much information to assess a property as possible.

LBx Journal has a great idea about creating Industry Forums and we have advised them we think it's a winner!

Making the Right Rating Decision More Quickly is a Competitive Advantage to the Insurance Industry - Billy Ormerod, Insurance Account Executive

In the Insurance industry, portfolio development, with the optimal goal of increasing profits for a healthy combined ratio and advanced underwriting is a key component to increasing revenues. Reduction of claims through risk management and fraud mitigation increase your profit by reducing costs. A crucial component in these activities focuses on the actual policies issued. If rated too low or too high, these policies can mean either inadequate funds to pay out claims or the potential of losing business to competitors respectively. Location Intelligence can represent significant gains for insurance companies by improving processes, enhancing competitiveness through customer satisfaction, refining underwriting and ultimately improving your loss ratio. Due to the adoption of Location Intelligence one major Canadian organization saw a 31% improvement in address matching against property valuation models and consequently reduced the need for more costly manual underwriting while at the same time enhancing its decision-making and risk management. So how can Underwriters, Agents, Brokers and Vice Presidents of Property Lines use Location Intelligence to make dramatically better business decisions?

Visit our blog next week as we explain why Underwriters have found Location Intelligence to be the new competitive advantage.

Why is Location Intelligence so important to the Insurance Industry? - Christine Gemmell, Director of Demand Generation

In the first week of the blog Alex MacKay, our CEO talked about an executive roundtable luncheon with Senior Executives from leading Canadian organizations that was held during our user conference, Expedition 2010. One of the discussion points centered around whether Location Intelligence was mainstream. As it turns out, it really varies based on industry and business function. However, in insurance for example Jim Carroll advised us that location is on the agenda of the top 25 insurance companies in the world. So why do these organizations find this topic so interesting? Here’s the top 6 reasons insurance companies need to know about Location Intelligence…

1. Create Advanced Accumulation Rules – improve property underwriting accuracy and quality with real time accumulation knowledge to reveal exposure with accurately located recision address authentication

2. Reduce Claims Exposure and Detect Fraud – utilizing address and proximity data to identify patterns and opportunities will immediately improve decision making regarding new and existing risk exposures

3. Increase Automated Decisions – having the whole picture will help Underwriters reduce the need for pre-loss inspections to assess risk exposure, right from their desktop

4. Visualize Your Book of Business – having the right data and analysis tools will increase an Underwriter’s capacity for identifying migration, risk, growth and retention opportunities

5. Manage Re-insurance Treaties – utilizing accumulation and exposure knowledge derived from Location Intelligence

6. Improve Take Up Rates and Decline Ratios – through the utilization of advanced pre-screening tools that know positive and negative property risk factors, Underwriters and Brokers can speed up decision cycles with confidence

All of these applications can represent significant gains for insurance companies. Savings realized by improved processes, competitiveness through customer satisfaction and improved underwriting and loss ratio.

Location is the New Intelligence: Jim Carroll, Futurist, Trends and Innovations

A few weeks ago at DMTI's customer conference our keynote speaker Jim Carroll gave the crowd his view on Location Intelligence......here's a re-post of his blog on the subject. What do you think, is Location the new intelligence?

Location is the new intelligence
April 28th, 2010

It’s big, and its’ getting bigger!

That’s the location intelligence industry, which is resulting from the rapid dominance of location-aware mobile devices, the rapid emergence of massive sources of spatial (geographic oriented information, i.e. Google Maps), the rapid user adoption of location-based applications (i.e. iPhone Apps), and a significant amount of innovative thinking as to how to capitalize on these very fast paced trends.

There’s a lot of people building a lot of new businesses around these trends. And it’s happening extremely quickly:

•in a just-announced test of location based advertising in Finland, MacDonalds’ has reported that location-relevant mobile ads resulted in a 7.0% click-through rate. Of those who clicked through, 39% then used the click-to-navigate option to find the closest restaurant. These are significant numbers

•one if 4 American’s uses location based mobile services, and half of those who noticed an ad while using such services too some action

•there has been a 68% increase in the use of mobile mapping and direction services in Europe in ONE YEAR according to comScore

•MarketResearch.com predicts increases of 37% compound annual growth for mobile advertising and 65% for mobile commerce, influenced by the speed of adoption of location-based services

•Juniper Research suggests that location based service revenues will top $12.7 billion by 2014, up from $3 billion last year

•another survey by RCNOS suggested that the mobile locations technologies market will grow at annual compound rates of 20%, reaching $70 billion by 2013, which includes both consumer and business intelligence/application (survey, mapping etc) applications

•it’s estimated that 1 billion people will access social networks by 2014. Most of them will use some form of location based application as they do so.

•GPS-enabled mobile phone devices will dominate the technology space, comprising 66% of all GPS devices by 2013

This is pretty significant stuff. Actually, its more than significant – it’s huge. Location is set to lead to significant industry transformation; some pretty dramatic business model disruption (think real estate); changes in consumer behaviour (product promotion and uplift); new business models (mobile, text message based banking which starts out via a proximity relationship.). There’s a huge amount of velocity out there!

There are two angles to the emerging market: consumer (i.e. iPhone) driven applications which will involve marketing, branding, product promotion, customer loyalty, point-of-purchase and a huge variety of other opportunities. The second involves corporate applications such as risk-minimization (i.e. mortgage risk analysis based on spatial data).

Regardless of how you look at, the overall impact of location intelligence is going to be dramatic.

Last week, I did a keynote for DMTI Spatial, a leader in this emerging space, particularly in the corporate application world. He has an interesting blog post that summarizes some of the unique issues that go with this fast emerging trend.

Location is the new intelligence. And its’ happening faster than you think!

And an increasing number of my keynotes and clients are asking me to focus upon the business opportunities that are emerging in this world. Stay tuned.

Jim Carroll, Futurist, Trends and Innovations Keynote Speaker

Address Governance: How Is Your Organization Managing Their Addresses? - Chris North, VP Customer Advocacy and Product Management, DMTI Spatial

Last week Alex MacKay talked about the 7 most important topics concerning Location Intelligence in business today. One of the key topics that continued to surface was Address Governance.....today I’m going to discuss that in a bit more detail.

Wikipedia defines “Governance” as “... the activity of governing. It relates to decisions that define expectations, grant power, or verify performance...”. I like this definition for a couple of reasons. Mostly, I like it for the fact it talks about power and performance.

In working with Addresses, there are some fundamental tenants that organizations should apply to be able to leverage the power of Location Intelligence, and to be able to get the best possible performance out of their efforts. You can think of these as the three tenants of Address Governance: Correct, Current and Context. It’s easier to remember them as the “3Cs”.

1) Are Your Addresses Correct?

This seems like such a simple question. Yet, many organizations are surprised at just how complicated it can be to keep addresses correct.

What usually jumps to mind is address scrubbing; correct and full postal codes, proper spelling, and proper formatting. However, this is where traditional “address scrubbers” and geocoders start and stop – it’s all they do. For example, SERP certification is a way of ‘correcting’ an address, but even that is limited. What an address scrubber or address standardization tool doesn’t tell you is whether or not an address is valid. My house is #11, my neighbours are #9 and #15. There is no #13 on my street, but if you put down #13, my street name and the correct postal code and municipality – most scrubbers will happily process it and tell you it’s good to go.

For any organization it’s important to go beyond standardization and know if an address even exists (is it valid)? Are addresses in the correct location? This can be accomplished by companioning robust rules around address validation and standardization with a rich content environment. In other words, not only should addresses be checked against rules, they are checked against known existing addresses, Canada Post content, streets and other corroborating sources.

2) Are Your Addresses Current?

This speaks to the notion of address churn. Postal codes change, street names change, municipalities change. Here’s some statistics. In an average year in Canada, approximately 50,000 postal codes change, and this impacts about 1.75 million addresses. Also annually, roughly 100 municipalities change their name or geographic extent which affects over 3.3 million civic addresses. On average, 15% of the addresses in your database changed last year from this alone.

Beyond external change, there is change within an organization: customers move, are added, are removed. How do organizations track this churn? If you accept the principle of the first tenant of Address Governance (that you need to compare address to known content), then you also have to take into account that this reference content will change, and you need to keep that up to date as well. Some sources are updated quarterly, some monthly, and some sources are updated weekly. It’s also important to note that customer data is updated constantly. This attention to frequency ensures that you have the most up-to-date version of the truth.

3) Do You Understand the Context in which your addresses exist?

This is - in my opinion - the most interesting, most valuable and most important tenant of Address Governance. There are a number of ways organizations can exploit context. Proximity (to risk, to fire stations, to crime, to fraud) is a form of spatial context that impacts an organization’s assets (which are referenced addresses). The demographic profile of the neighbourhood in which an address lives is a form of spatial context. What sales territory is this address in? What wire centre is this address in? Consolidating two or more address lists or getting address infill is another form of context. Bottom line, context provides the business value that typical address management systems fail to provide.

So, ask yourself these three questions about the addresses you manage in your organization today. When you can confidently answer “yes” to all three, you are well on your way to being able to leverage the power of Location Intelligence in your organization.

First Issue, April 23, 2010 - Alex MacKay, CEO DMTI Spatial

Welcome to the DMTI blog on Location Intelligence. Our ambition is to provide a medium of collaborative effort to advocate the usage of Location Intelligence for business improvement as well as share stories of best practises.

In this first post I want to tell you about an event that took place in Toronto yesterday, an Executive Roundtable on Location Intelligence, at the annual DMTI user conference called Expedition 2010. The Founder of DMTI, John Fisher, and I hosted a roundtable for 20 Senior Executives from multiple industries, including Banking, Insurance, Telecommunications, Utilities, Postal and Public Sector.

Jim Carroll, Futurist and Innovation Consultant, kicked off the discussion. Jim consults with the Global 1000 every day and he is seeing Location Intelligence as one the hottest inflection points being discussed. In particular, he is seeing it on the agenda of Finance and Telecommunication companies. And different than 12 months ago when cost savings was the rage, today he hears the C level wanting to take advantage of “location” to drive new revenue. One interesting guiding principle that Jim shared was to “think big, start small, and scale fast.” He believes we have only scratched the surface of what Location Intelligence can offer, however he advises that with all new innovation it’s important to find early wins to gain momentum. In addition, the pace of the change around the use of location for business benefit is moving so fast, we all need to be ready to scale and quickly.

The main topics discussed during the 90 minute Roundtable dialogue included the following, which were considered by this Senior Executive crowd to be the most important in Location Intelligence today:

1. Is Location “mainstream”?

• It varies based on industry and business function. In insurance for example Jim Carroll advised us that location is on the agenda of the top 25 insurance companies in the world. In many companies the location of key assets has been “mainstream” for some time (utilities) but for other functions, it’s not been utilized. In telecommunications Location Intelligence is making large impacts on marketing and serviceability but there is still a lot more opportunity.
• The consensus of these 20 executives was that location is rapidly gaining recognition as a key business advantage, but for most industries “we have barely scratched the surface.”

2. Are silos still a big issue?

• It is more an obstacle in some industries than others but there is agreement it is absolutely still a significant issue. It is the one key issue that seems to drive the need to get the involvement of the very top of the organization on side. In many cases this means the CEO or COO needs to get involved.

3. Where are the quick success hits in location?

• This was a hot topic for this group. In Finance it would seem “risk” is the number one topic by far. In many other industries the fastest function to find wins is in Marketing. When it comes to building the ROI justification, there are many who feel cost savings is still the best method. However, it was recognized that as the economy fears of last year in the USA recover there is a rapidly growing need from the CEO level to target new revenues.

4. How are we all dealing with “privacy”?

• We had a really healthy amount of commentary on this item, particularly around personal privacy as it relates to location privacy. For example, is an address part of personal privacy? There was a strong consensus that it was not, however there is a definite recognition that privacy is an important issue and one that needs to be carefully managed and respected. While all organizations seem to see significant marketing opportunities for Location Intelligence, they all are all experiencing the need to be “privacy” smart. In a future post, Kara John, DMTI’s SVP of Privacy and IP will delve into this topic in a lot more detail.

5. Are we underestimating the impact of social media in the “arms race” for location data?

• With the level of executive in the room, this was a real interesting topic as the average age was senior to the generation that is embracing social media the most. The awareness of the growing power and opportunity of social media and networking is great. Everyone recognized that social media needs to be top of mind for anyone strategizing the use of location for business advantage.

6. What is the impact of the Cloud?

• There was a lot of comparison to the evolution of ERP with the rapidly growing acceptance of many services in a SaaS or Cloud offering. It was generally also agreed that ERP tried but never really succeeded in providing enough cross company collaboration. It would seem Executives feel that Cloud strategies may represent an opportunity to have information sharing achieved at a much more advanced level that with ERP. Inside certain industries, and Finance was specifically cited, there may be many areas where data about certain geographic properties could be shared for the mutual benefit of the entire industry.

7. How is mobile changing the landscape?

• In a word, “staggering.” There were a lot of examples that came out in this particular discussion. There is a Bank in South Africa that is totally based on Text messaging. Another interesting example of a new idea is a company named Waze, who give you points for driving roads that have not been driven on its network before. Simply put the new ideas being born every minute for mobile are huge.

In future posts, members of DMTI and invited guests will be talking about the above key topics in much more detail as well as many others involving Location Intelligence. I’m curious to hear what other topics you feel are really important to advance the usage of Location Intelligence for business improvement?