Your Digital Sherpa

An über-gadget that pinpoints your location will become your mobile lifeline for on-the-spot information – like finding the nearest latte.

By Don Tapscott

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The last time I was at a museum, it occurred to me how useful those portable little audio guides are: I could stand in front of an object, press a button and quickly gain new insights into the painting or sculpture. It made me think about how great it would be if we all had audio guidelike devices for all our daily activities. Now they’re coming, courtesy of an ever-morphing Internet and a generation of yet-to-be-named über-gadgets. Before long, information and knowledge will be available anytime, anywhere to anyone who’s equipped with one.

We think of the Internet as an enormous network of computers, but that is just one aspect of tomorrow’s web (or Web 2.0, as it’s often dubbed). The Internet is evolving into a geospatial network – one that’s aware of your location (or as aware as you command it to be) and that connects the physical world with the virtual world. Just as you browse the web today, the geospatial web will let you browse the physical world; it will know what’s happening around you and allow you to access information on objects, places and other people.

To tap into this new web, each of us will have a small portable device that is always online. It will be part cellphone, part BlackBerry, part iPod, part digital camera, part video camera, part voice recorder, part GPS, part kitchen sink. Last year in enRoute, I suggested that we call these devices our personal Digital Co-Pilots (DCPs) since they will help us navigate the vicissitudes of day-to-day life at home and abroad.

If we want to know the fastest route to the office or need turn-by-turn directions to some country B&B, we’ll just ask our DCP. Ditto if we want to find the closest ATM in a new city or the best route to avoid traffic. And if we want to know where our friends are, our DCP will seek them out by exchanging data with their DCPs. We often think of the Internet putting the world’s information at our fingertips. Tomorrow’s DCP takes this enormous body of knowledge and extracts the data that is relevant to where we are or what we are doing.

No More Lonely Planet

Some of this is already happening in what cellphone companies call location-based services. Bell Mobility’s Seek & Find service, launched last summer, helps parents keep track of their children. By calling up a map on the Internet, parents can follow the movements of each child who is carrying a cellphone that is turned on. The phone constantly updates the network about its location. When a child arrives at a prespecified destination, such as school, the phone can trigger a text message confirming this to the child’s parents. Cellphone companies in other countries offer similar services, and some send a message to a parent if the child goes outside a specified safe zone, even if the phone is turned off. Such technology obviously has enormous privacy implications, which I’ll discuss later.

For the traveller, DCPs are a godsend. As you relax in your Miami hotel room, your DCP gives you the local weather forecast. It tells you the locations of all the steak houses within walking distance, along with reviews from Zagat. With time, your DCP will learn to make increasingly sophisticated decisions on its own. Since it knows the time you’re leaving out of Miami, it will also know that the traffic accident just ahead will make you late for your flight. It will ask for your permission to dial the airline to rebook you on a later one.

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