Thoughts: Don’t forget content, but context is king.

Thoughts: Don’t forget content, but context is king.

Following on from my earlier post ”mobile” is now really about the blend of online and offline; enhancing one with the other – social + sensors.

Google are ahead of Apple at present as they have implemented this at the OS level with Google Now.

Google has the advantage of holding its own data whereas Apple is in partnership with various data providers (and will rely on opening up for other areas such as transit information) but that will change.

The one thing that won’t change (at least immediately) is the partnership with Facebook, by necessity that must get stronger, closer and more ingrained – after a disappointing IPO and a share price in free fall Facebook needs all the friend it can get.

And Apple needs the social data.

So how about this scenario:

iOS needs to have location awareness and Facebook integration with the expertise of the Glancee team is the perfect route to achieve this as easily as possible.

Combined with data from the central mapping engine (and maybe acquire some smaller developers that produce location aware apps) Siri could start providing us the type of information supplied by Google now. Google, however, still has the advantage of the Knowledge Graph.

The advantage of doing all of this at the OS level rather than by relying on apps is that you create a standard install baseline so you instantly know that all those with the latest OS running on (probably) the past couple of phone revisions will all be equally capable – and others will want to upgrade to achieve that capability.

No-one is safe

The question then becomes when does Apple acquire or develop its own data sources before dropping its partners? I’ve said before that dropping Google Maps shows all partners that no-one is safe from the cull.