Been at Google Office in Zürich this afternoon for a Tech Talk about "location awareness and mobile social computing". Google's R&D office in Zürich is actually very well into maps and spatial applications, which is why I wanted to confront my ideas to them. Although this is my usual talk about barriers and problems of location-aware applications, the version is evolving constantly since I started presenting it. See here for the slides. I try to take into account people's comments and the things we discuss are a lot different depending to whom I present it to.

The discussion revolved around notions such as:

"- are there different perception of storing personal data such as location, how do people accept that? know that their location is stored? - are there different cultural or behavioral reactions depending on countries, wrt usage of location-aware devices - people found interesting the fact that the location-aware application which seems the most successful is not really a location-aware system as it is Jaiku. We had a discussion about how I found this platform relevant as it can allow people to disclose the information they want (and to show others how and where they want to look like). - if the mobile phone is a bad platform, what about navigation devices such as TomTm or GPS artifact, can they be a solution to reach a critical mass (interestingly the same point that was brought forward at Cisco the other day). - what about the ecology of interface: is-it only about mobile location-awareness? can we use other outputs? combine them? what does location-awareness mean on a mobile phone in conjunction with a web-interface?"

Thanks Giorgio and Christian for the invitation!