Summary: Context-aware computing in your pocket. How will smartphones reshape retail, and reality? And what's it mean for privacy? iTunes: cs.co/tnp - Listen to past episodes, subscribe or write a review. TRANSCRIPT for "Context-Aware Computing" written by Melissa Jun Rowley. Imagine living your life day to day with the most loyal, personal companion -- one that pays the utmost attention to your habits, anticipates your needs, makes the best recommendations and provides valuable information about surroundings at any given moment. This isn’t your spouse, your assistant or your BFF. This trusted right hand is your smartphone -- smart being the operative prefix. Thanks to context-aware computing, an onslaught of apps, and the rise of mobility, an emerging context market is poised to reshape retail for merchants and reality for consumers. According to Gartner, context-aware technologies are expected to make a 96 billion dollar impact on annual consumer spending across the globe by 2015. Gartner also predicts that in 2013, more than half of Fortune 500 companies will have context-aware computing initiatives. For marketers, having access to a consumer’s profile is no longer enough. It’s all about context -- a person’s specific situation, environment, and preferences are all taken into account. Context-aware advertising platforms, more specifically location-based services coupled with real-time data integration, can directly alert customers about special offerings when they are near or inside a store. Thanks to the advent of geotagging -- indoor positioning technology -- location is at the forefront of context-aware computing in B2C scenarios. So what are the benefits of digitally mining context for consumers? While location-based services provide valuable context for businesses and get customers some perks, both businesses and consumers can benefit when the primary context provided is information about what -- or who -- is nearby. By letting users tag people and things in their physical space, and monitoring radio waves -- such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and NFC -- the proximity platform NewAer automates smartphones to perform specific tasks taking place among those waves. So in real life this means: you can tag your car after parking, knowing you might forget where you parked. Your smartphone will notice Bluetooth going away and see a signal of a Starbucks you parked next to. A pin will instantly drop on a map where you parked, without using GPS. NewAer CEO Dave Mathews says that for NewAer, location is elastic and not necessary. Quote: "When you search Google, location information is being used to help with the results. Can you imagine using a map and it not taking into consideration where you are? Our platform allows apps to have that sort of granularity of filtering, but using proximity versus location. We can get even more macro in the data, and allow users to keep their location private." So how much of our lives will context-aware computing affect? For users who want to stay on time and organized via context-aware technology, SRI International recently launched Tempo, a smart mobile calendar that pulls together contacts, e-mails, documents and all the data a person needs to be fully prepared for meetings and events. Mikael Berner is co-founder and CEO of the recently launched, context-aware app Easilydo, which taps user-generated data to get things done for people. Berner says, in time, context-aware computing will begin to infiltrate almost every facet of every digitally connected consumer. Quote, "Many of the context-aware tasks that consumers perform are based on information that is readily available online, such as finding restaurant suggestions or mail carrier services in a foreign city. Contextually-aware computing is most beneficial to consumers when the service proactively searches and presents tasks and information that users plan to perform, before they think to do so. Companies like Easilydo are taking
