Mapping moving markets, or Magellan 2

It is said that the true innovation that lead to Ferdinand Magellan's historic circumnavigation was the ingenious use of an underlying grid to map the geographical layout of the continents. This essential open source technology allowed people to pull together personal experience in a way that connected each individual experience in a meaningful way.



Think about it. Before the use of a universal grid, each traveller had to rely on simple routes, outlined with simple observations. The spacial accuracy was never guaranteed as the scale was not applied consistently. The river that looks so huge in one sketch can be a minor stream in another traveler's sketch book observation. Confronted with disparate pieces of information the confused adventurer had to make it up as he or she went along. The resulting maps were patchworks that have little relation to the real space as this map of 1544 shows.

By unifying all these observations in an open source environment it was possible for a traveller to know exactly where they are relative to landmarks and destinations. They could plan and interact in a way that was unprecedented in an age where everything over the horizon, or beyond the amateur sketches of personal experience contained dragons.

I believe that google maps and it's sisters google earth and wikimapia will prove to be the most significant innovations of this century. They structure context. This enables people to pinpoint personal experiences and relate those to the local knowledge of others against the backdrop of a defined open source realworld reference. (The interplay between IRL and URL) By overlaying this basic grid of human endeavour, we now have immediate context of our daily adventures. The key has been delivering access to this context in a live and interactive way. Think about your own travels, and the power that individuals have when they have "the in" on the local know how. The iPhone has shown the way, and many more such devices will follow to enable quick access to such local know how. An enhanced reality where we begin to see in four dimensions. The accumulation of information over time will enhance the experience to give depth and options to every moment.


The real revolution however will only come when the environment becomes intelligent as well, responding to the people who move through it. Websites do it now. The cookies and data that warn a site of who is about to enter it is used to "customise" the experience for the visitor. How long will it take before the environment starts showing more intelligence and responds in kind. This was often talked about in the heady days when MIT medialab was an iconic reference point. Will we need to wait for Samsung to show us all the way?

For the marketer this will be unprecedented. Where the word "marketing" literally means "to bring to the market place" we have an opportunity to redefine the design and operation of the organisation to stay in step with the moving market. Rethinking communication and display, packaging and distribution in line with an intelligent environment, sensitive to the actual people in it. This impact will be most pronounced in the poor countries where existing infrastructure is being leapfrogged for an open, mobile infrastructure. Have you figured out how to make money in India and China?