The Next Web - Joe Stump: SimpleGeo

The basic premise of Joe Stump’s presentation was that content is no longer king. The new king in town is context. Basically meaning that the real business potential on the web now are applications that adds context to the users’ position in the time/space grid. It is all about giving you the right information at the right time and in the right location.
Stump talked about the value of contextual information and concluded that the value of knowing someone’s location decreases as the distance increases. In other words: It is quite valuable to know that your friend is at the bar just down the street, but it is not very interesting to know that he is in a bar in a different city altogether.
And the same applies to time. Events that are temporally closer – are simply more valuable than events that are far away.
Stump then listed a number of areas where there is obvious business potential in the world of contextual information.
1. What is physically nearby. A lot of physical items have not been indexed yet, and there is huge business potential in increasing the amount of businesses, events or objects that are spatially indexed.
2. Who is physically nearby. There are a lot of services like 4square and Gowalla that provide these services, but there is still huge potential in services that build interesting user experiences on top of theses services.
3. What’s virtually nearby. Virtual objects can be tagged in the physical world – creating the potential for virtual/real games, where people interact with virtual objects in the physical world.
4. Games. We should be able to shoot missiles at each other or throw rotten apples – all virtual games taking place in a geo-indexed physical world. It is all about combining the physical world with compelling game play.