And this wasn’t just true in Iraq: Gourley’s team had also analyzed insurgent-led wars in other parts of the world — from Colombia to Senegal — and had discovered the very same pattern, even though the underlying issues in those conflicts were totally different.

Sean Gourley, Co-Founder and CTO, Quid Structure Data 2013 Albert Chau / itsmebert.com

Gourley has since moved on from war zones. He helped found a company called Quid that does big data projects for companies like Intel, Visa and Samsung. In March, he spoke at our Structure:Data conference in New York, where he talked about the difference between “data science” (which is about finding correlations) and “data intelligence” (which is about solving problems). He said we need to shift our focus toward the latter if we want to tackle the biggest challenges our world is facing.

I followed up with him after the conference to talk more about big data in wartime. In hindsight, we were fighting the data war in Baghdad with fairly primitive tools. It was before the explosion of social media and the flowering of open-source data. In future battles, he said, governments will be using data not just to predict violence but to fight “the war of ideas.”

Just what does that mean? It means using big data to track the types of conversations that people are having about a war — and then injecting counter-stories back into the system to change those prevailing ways of thinking. A government like the U.S. could use this tactic in a war zone to, say, try to weaken a violent insurgent movement, but the government could also employ it at home to build domestic support for the war.

We often talk about companies using data science to get people to buy more shoes or more airline tickets. But just as drones are helping to automate wars, we’re moving into an era where data can help automate propaganda — and that creates the potential for some pretty potent new experiments in brain washing. It makes dropping cookies on people’s browsers seem quaint.

Below is an edited transcript of my Skype interview with Gourley.

Q: How would you use data differently in Iraq if you were doing it all over again?

A: It’s important to remind ourselves in 2013 where the information landscape was at the start of the Iraq war. In 2003, the world was very excited about something called blogging. We didn’t have Twitter. Cellphone coverage at the start of the war was exceedingly low. What we’ve seen over the past decade as the war unfolded was one of the biggest changes in the information landscape from a militaristic perspective in a long, long time.

The reporters in the bureaus, from the New York Times, say, would be bunkered down in a fortified compound — they didn’t get out a lot. I mean, you wouldn’t if you were there, why would you? They would send stringers out on motorbikes with cellphones and they would text in if any attack happened. They would be paid based on their reporting of events.

A huge window shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope its not the start of something nasty :-S—
Sohaib Athar (@ReallyVirtual) May 01, 2011

Since taliban (probably) don't have helicpoters, and since they're saying it was not "ours", so must be a complicated situation #abbottabad—
Sohaib Athar (@ReallyVirtual) May 01, 2011

You had a crowdsourced version of Twitter, but it wasn’t Twitter. As the conflict went on, in 2008-09, you saw the first adoption of Twitter coming in. Most of that conflict, it was text-based, written by bureaus, and reported on by collating paid people. And that, in and of itself, gave us a landscape that was more complete and in many ways more accurate than what the military was able to do with their eyes on the ground.

Now, there is already more information being collected by the collective intelligence than by the military intelligence. One one hand, we’re moving into a world where you have drones recording continuous HD video. But we’re also seeing an upscaling in human reporting now with the likes of Instagram. You’re not just tweeting — you’re taking pictures that are triangulated.

The crowdsourced info is still going to be more complete and at a higher resolution than even the stuff that is done with the advent of drones and sensors by the military.

Q: You’ve said that what was missing in Iraq was “narrative structure” to the data. What do you mean by that? 

A: The stories being told in Iraq and around the world about why we were going to war, how the war was going. Numbers are one thing, but stories and being able to analyze the stories is another.

Now in 2013, we’re just now at that phase where we can start to process narratives, and that’s pretty exciting. Because as much as wars are fought with bullets, they’re also fought with stories.

There is a DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) contract out at the moment that is looking to South America particularly to track the formation of new ideas. Part of that is to inject new ideas back into the system. {You could say, for example} I don’t like the way people are talking about this, and then inject a new idea {into the conversation}. And not one based on my gut intuition or a random story, but one that recombines existing ideas and is positioned to nudge and manipulate a conversation in a particular direction. It means fine-tuned control of the stories people are telling each other about why the war is happening. We’re going to get a lot better at getting those stories and language adopted.

From the standpoint of how you stop these wars and bring them to a resolution … One thing there is watching the language (in conversations) change from an “us” to an “us” and “them.” As soon as you have an us and them, you can have a war. You can’t really have a war without an us and them.

The second piece of that is the stories that are being told by the different insurgent groups essentially as a recruiting tool. If you want to disrupt an insurgency, one key piece of that is a story that attracts them away from those groups and into jobs that are paying that don’t involve killing. So combating insurgent narratives in a way that allow people to gravitate toward a different kind of activity.

There are patterns in the stories that are told. We can track them, and we can start to have narratives compete against each other. Exactly how that will be used and how it will unfold, we’re in the process of trying to figure that out.

Q: Would the government use this tactic of story manipulation domestically as well as in the war zones themselves?

A: You could have a much higher-resolution storytelling for convincing a nation to go to war. As the war progresses, you see words like “quagmire,” “civil war” and “intractable” — that language starts to pop up.

Could you change the story of civil war and quagmire to something that was made it seem more positive— like the story of the underdogs fighting back? I don’t know how that would play out, but it was the Americans’ willingness to go to war that the insurgents were fighting against. So they’re killing people to change a narrative that America holds. The violence is targeted against that idea. This tool is more likely to be used by political parties inside the country going to war than inside the country at war.

Q: It seems like the U.S. government had a pretty good handle on the marketing of the war. The problem wasn’t the lack of messaging — it was that over time, it simply became a harder sell. Do you think the government could have been more convincing if it had better data?

A: (Laughs) I don’t think I would have gone and advised the government on how to sell their conflict. But a hypothetical person using mathematical tools, yes, absolutely. It becomes a more difficult sell as you go on, but there is basic stuff. Like once 10 people die in an attack, there is a big bump in news coverage. So if you stabilize below 10 in an attack, you can keep the news at a lower proportion. Just how the news of the attack resonates — you can start to see those patterns and then play around with them. That’s one piece of it.

The other is we constructed stories at the start, and then the war got more difficult and the stories that we were telling didn’t evolve and adapt to keep resolution. Was there a story that the American people would have bought half way through the war? Yeah, quite possibility.  Would data have helped us get that story? It wouldn’t have come up with it for us, but I think it definitely would have helped us get to it.

You would try 10 different stories, 50 different stories, and see which started to get resonance. You would monitor those that were already out there to see which were getting traction and start to collect those to get a broader narrative. The monitoring and tracking of that stuff would have helped massively.

You could think of a war now using the simple tools of Facebook and Google and targeting ads, pictures and stories. How would you target those things using social networks? You could have hundreds of different stories. A war unfolding in a media landcape like we have today would have a very different set of tools available to manipulate public opinion.

Getty Images

Q: So it’s like the old-style propaganda campaigns, but supercharged by social networks and open-source.

A: That’s right, but it’s also supercharged by an understanding of how people hold ideas in their heads. It’s not just, we can organize a protest via Twitter and we can have a lot of people show up in one place. It’s that we can actually change what they are thinking. That’t the algorithmic side.

With all the sharing of information, we can process that algorithmically and determine the stories that people hold to justify different political beliefs, different idealogical beliefs and different reasons for why they would take certain actions. That’s the big difference. The real breakthrough here is the natural language processing that enables computers to understand stories.

Q: Does the government acknowledge that the majority of useful data now comes from open sources?

A: A former director of the defense intelligence agency said that 90 percent of our data comes from open sources. It’s the 10 percent that is the James Bond stuff. That’s the stuff that people get most excited by, but the reality is that most of the data is from open sources. They (the government) may be slow to the punch, but they’re not stupid.

Q: This war of ideas — you can fight it from some desk in a some office building in some random city, right?

Precisely. You can do a lot of this remotely. Yes, it’s very conceivable it would be done in Arlington, Va., it wouldn’t be done in Baghdad. The people making decisions off this stuff are still the higher ups. They are going to take these recommendations and combine with their gut instincts for what’s going on the ground, their feel for the political, and maybe a conversation they had with a young kid that morning.

This is not a machine that is going to be making all your decisions. The human side of it is still going to combine with recommendations. I don’t think if you were designing this thing you’d just have a computer spit out a message and immediately accept that. Although it might spit out a message that says “experiment and see what resonates.”

Getty Images

Q: How much money would it take and how many people to create this kind of idea-shaping machine for wartime?

A: At the moment, you’d have to do a lot of R&D to get this stuff up and running. There is as a lot of custom fitting that needs to happen. But I’d be surprised if in five years there isn’t something more off the shelf. At the moment, a team of a 100 could very feasibly do this. Maybe if it’s in government it’s going to be 200. But in Silicon Valley, a team of 100 could certainly do it. And that’s today. In five years, that could be cut in half.

You’re probably going to invest $20 million or $30 million in a team that does this.

Q: How close is all this to being a reality?

A: I don’t think we’d be surprised if in 2016-17, this stuff was at the same place that the self driving was at 2008. As far as the militaries of the world are concerned, this is still near-term science fiction. It’s certainly not stuff they’re running here and now today. The state of integrating open source isn’t done in s particularly coherent fashion or a particularly smart fashion. The models they’re running underneath this have little or no impact on the data they’re collecting. Any kind of analysis they’re running on top of the narratives are cutting short at the length of sentiment

The brightest minds in the world out there — they used to be at the NSA. They aren’t now. They used to go to finance. Now they don’t. They come out here to the Valley. The brightest minds doing these linguistic techniques are out in this part of the world — they’re not working for government. So we have a pretty good barometer in this Valley for what is possible.

Q: Propaganda and spin, of course, are nothing new. But now governments have the power to take it to a new level. Should we applaud that or be scared by it?

A: Technology is neither good nor bad — but then it is also never neutral. We as technologists have the responsibility that comes with creating this technology to ensure that it is used to make the world a better place. This, of course, is very difficult — you make bets to give the technology only to one government and not another, and you may end up on the wrong side of an unjust war. Don’t give it to anyone and you risk extending a conflict that could have been ended much sooner.

My own take here is that you ultimately have to believe in the goodness of humanity — that on average, there are more good people in the world than there are people that want to harm it. Thus, the more accessible a technology becomes, the better people will use it, and more good people will do good things with it than bad people will do bad things. A simple equation — but perhaps the right one — and one that requires us to distribute the technology as widely as possible.

As a final note, we already give corporations a huge amount of control over the information we share and in turn allow their algorithms to process and ultimately influence the information we receive. Should we be more or less wary of giving it to a government?

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Now, of course, we live in a thoroughly digital media world, and users can’t get enough of their Netflix and Twitter, their iPads and Kindles, their Tumblr and Instagram.

As digital media has evolved, so have we. There’s a lot of stasis in the media business, and we try to ignore that. In the last year, we’ve made a concerted effort to focus on the experimentation. We cover new platforms, new content creation tools, new distribution strategies, new business models and the new class of star content creators. Wherever the innovation is happening in digital publishing, that’s where we want to be.

As you probably know, about a year ago, paidContent was acquired by GigaOM Media. GigaOM is all about emerging technology, and the paidContent of today aims to be very much in keeping with that mission. We try to cover the most disruptive forces in new media, to look across the entire digital content ecosystem — from ebooks, apps and tablets, to curation tools, social media and streaming video — and report on the most interesting shifts in the way people and companies produce, distribute and consume media. Then we try to bring those storylines to life with lively and authoritative posts.

Please take a minute to take our survey — you’ll find it here. Tell us how you think we’re doing, and what you would like to see more of from us. A few lucky winners will even get a Jawbone Jambox, or a free ticket to our event next month, paidContent Live.

Meantime, let me introduce you — or hopefully reintroduce you –to the paidContent/GigaOM media team:

Mathew Ingram (@mathewi)

Mathew writes about the evolution of print media in all its forms, with particular attention to the ways that traditional players are evolving and adapting (or not evolving and adapting) to the digital world. He also writes about the challenges facing new players and the media ambitions of existing web companies like Twitter and Facebook.

Laura Hazard Owen (@laurahazardowen)

Laura covers the book publishing industry and the ways that digital reading of all types is changing. That includes areas like pricing and consumption trends, new lengths and formats, and self-publishing.

Janko Roettgers (@jank0)

Janko writes about the rise of online video, including premium content, the engagement gap between TV and online, and the dilemma facing content owners over whether to provide a true over-the-top experience for consumers or keep the traditional bundled programming model intact.

Jeff Roberts (@jeffjohnroberts)

Jeff writes about new media and tech companies that are emerging as dominant sources of news and culture. He is also a lawyer who explains how court conflicts symbolize a clash between new and old media business models.

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But these big ideas weren’t always big ideas. They may have first popped up in a research paper somewhere, or surfaced when a couple of no-name startups began offering a new product or service. Over time, they’ve become powerful movements. We like to think we were ahead of the pack in spotting some of them before they became truly disruptive.

We’re looking for a reporter who can build on that tradition: We want someone who has a deep interest in technology and science, and business and innovation — and who has a knack for finding interesting and important stories before other reporters.

This person would be a sort of roving emerging-technology reporter, schmoozing with researchers and engineers and technologists to learn about cool projects in the works and ideas that are bubbling up. Who’s doing the most interesting research on 3D printing? What are scientists buzzing about in the world of robotics? What’s coming down the road in materials science? This reporter will tell us.

The ideal candidate will be able to take complex ideas and turn them into clear and compelling stories. He or she will be able to write news stories about research and technologies, and also come up with memorable features about the people and companies and challenges behind these projects. This person should be comforable writing a range of different types of posts — shorter, longer, newsier, bloggier, graphical and so on.

We’re looking for a reporter who is curious, plugged in, and, of course, a great colleague.

If this describes you, please drop us a email at jobs@gigaom.com

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Jordan grew up in New York City and went to college at the University of Missouri. Before joining GigaOM, he spent two years as a business reporter at the Bulletin newspaper in Bend, Ore., where he covered two things near and dear to developers’ hearts: beer and data centers. You can reach him at jordan.novet@gigaom.com.

Jordan will be working closely with the other members of our stellar cloud and data team: Derrick Harris, who loves big data and think pieces on the intersection of data and policy, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and other topics; Barb Darrow, who covers the big companies in cloud and the traditional enterprise companies (as well as some startups in Boston, where she’s based); and Stacey Higginbotham, who has begun to transition into a new beat — the internet of things — but who still writes stories here and there about software-defined networks and physical infrastructure.

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Today, we launched phase one of our new responsive site design, and the changes we’re introducing to paidContent and GigaOM will ensure that doesn’t happen to you here. At a time when readers are using so many different devices, one big challenge for digital publishers is retaining the quality and consistency of the reading experience not only across devices but also across different operating systems and browsers.

Now, whether you’re on a desktop or a laptop, a tablet or a smartphone, our sites will automatically adjust, rendering the content in the way that best fits that particular environment. We know, for example, that it’s harder to hit a target on the page with your finger than with a mouse, and so if you’re reading us on a tablet, we’ve enlarged the target to make it easier to strike. Similarly, rather than try to cram our entire site onto a 4-inch smartphone display, we’ve removed some content from the mobile view so as to focus the presentation of the most essential information. In all cases, the site simply readjusts to fit the real estate on the screen that you’re on at the time.

Below, you can see how the presentation of an actual story changes as the screen shrinks.

Those aren’t the only improvements that we’ve made. Among the other things you’ll notice about paidContent and GigaOM:

• More curation: If you’re time-stretched, our new “Must Reads” section tells you what you absolutely shouldn’t miss.
• Easier sharing: We’ve made it easier to share not only whole stories and also pieces of content within stories.
• Better performance: Because the pages are lighter weight, they will load faster.
• Crisper display: We’ve added blur-resistant icons and new text-size controls, so there’s no more squinting to read text or straining to hit a small target when navigating the site.
• A cleaner look: We’ve ditched a lot of widgets that had simply built up over the years but no longer serve their original purpose.

For phase one of the redesign, we’ve intentionally simplified the look and feel of the site — it’s more akin to updating the plumbing in a house than redoing the facade. But without reliable plumbing, a house isn’t very habitable. These upgrades pave the way for subsequent phases of this redesign over the next few months that will include more changes in how we present our content.

Finally, I wanted to thank the fantastic team that has been slaving away on the redesign for last several months: our head of product management Raza Zaidi; engineers Casey Bisson, Matt Batchelder, Zach Tirrell and Jamie Poitra; designers Stephen Engert, Arlo Jamrog and Jonathan Koshi; and our product guys Adam Kazwell and Ian Kennedy. They’ve worked long hours — and tested countless iterations in QA — and we think the results are great.

We’d love to know what you think. If you have suggestions or comments (positive or negative), please leave them in the comment thread in this post.

Thanks again for being loyal readers.

Images courtesy of PlaceIt by Breezi.

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Today, we launched phase one of our new responsive site design, and the changes we’re introducing to GigaOM and paidContent will ensure that doesn’t happen to you here. At a time when readers are using so many different devices, one big challenge for digital publishers is retaining the quality and consistency of the reading experience not only across devices but also across different operating systems and browsers.

Now, whether you’re on a desktop or a laptop, a tablet or a smartphone, our sites will automatically adjust, rendering the content in the way that best fits that particular environment. We know, for example, that it’s harder to hit a target on the page with your finger than with a mouse, and so if you’re reading us on a tablet, we’ve enlarged the target to make it easier to strike. Similarly, rather than try to cram our entire site onto a 4-inch smartphone display, we’ve removed some content from the mobile view so as to focus the presentation of the most essential information. In all cases, the site simply readjusts to fit the real estate on the screen that you’re on at the time.

Below, you can see how the presentation of an actual story changes as the screen shrinks.

Those aren’t the only improvements that we’ve made. Among the other things you’ll notice about GigaOM and paidContent:

• More curation: If you’re time-stretched, our new “Must Reads” section tells you what you absolutely shouldn’t miss.
• Easier sharing: We’ve made it easier to share not only whole stories and also pieces of content within stories.
• Better performance: Because the pages are lighter weight, they will load faster.
• Crisper display: We’ve added blur-resistant icons and new text-size controls, so there’s no more squinting to read text or straining to hit a small target when navigating the site.
• A cleaner look: We’ve ditched a lot of widgets that had simply built up over the years but no longer serve their original purpose.

For phase one of the redesign, we’ve intentionally simplified the look and feel of the site — it’s more akin to updating the plumbing in a house than redoing the facade. But without reliable plumbing, a house isn’t very habitable. These upgrades pave the way for subsequent phases of this redesign over the next few months that will include more changes in how we present our content.

Finally, I wanted to thank the fantastic team that has been slaving away on the redesign for last several months: our head of product management Raza Zaidi; engineers Casey Bisson, Matt Batchelder, Zach Tirrell and Jamie Poitra; designers Stephen Engert, Arlo Jamrog and Jonathan Koshi; and our product guys Adam Kazwell and Ian Kennedy. They’ve worked long hours — and tested countless iterations in QA — and we think the results are great.

We’d love to know what you think. If you have suggestions or comments (positive or negative), please leave them in the comment thread in this post.

Thanks again for being loyal readers.

Images courtesy of PlaceIt by Breezi.

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Some tech sites want their reporters to debate the merits of iOS vs Android; we want ours to get a little nerdier. We’re looking for good reporters and writers who are also tech geeks. If you like to write about emerging technologies, drop us a note at jobs@gigaom.com. We may have a job for you in San Francisco.

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So how do these guest posts come to be? Every week, we get dozens of emails asking us that very question. Some of the emails include story pitches, others simply want to know more about the process for contributing articles. So, below, we’ve provided answers to the most commonly asked questions. Take a minute to read through this — hopefully it will clear up any confusion. We look forward to seeing your submissions.

The purpose of guest posts

Similar to op-eds, guest posts are unpaid, bylined articles by our readers. They’re a place for you and other industry experts to discuss what keeps you up at night — and gets you going in the morning. What are you most optimistic, or concerned, about right now? What do you find yourself excitedly talking about over beers with your colleagues? Which new technologies do you think will change the world? And how will they have this impact? This is what we want to hear about.

CEOs, VCs and startup founders look to our guest posts to have their own ideas challenged, to discover new technologies or better solutions to their business problems, and to learn something that they couldn’t learn elsewhere. They’re not interested in hearing the conventional wisdom on well-covered issues (no matter how masterfully crafted the piece is). So stop haranguing your spouse and co-workers with your brilliant idea, and share your contrarian viewpoints with us.

What to include — and not include — in a guest post

Aim for about 800 words. That’s not a lot of room, so stay focused on one main idea. Clearly make your case in a sentence or so in the first or second paragraph. And then back it up throughout the rest of the post, with examples, data points, anecdotes or other evidence. To put it bluntly, our readers have a really high bullshit detector. So your article needs to provide fresh, well-articulated insight into a topic that is important to them.

Guest posts should not be overly formal. Avoid jargon, acronyms and highfalutin words.  Cut out the middleman (sorry, publicists) and write in your natural-speaking voice. It’s your name in the byline — it should sound like it was written by you.

No self-promotional posts

We want to hear your insider take on things, but we won’t run anything that is either explicitly or implicitly self-promotional. Guest posts aren’t a platform to tell us how great your company or industry is — the purpose of the posts is to enlighten readers and provoke them to think about important and topical issues/questions in new ways.

We’re very strict about all potential conflicts of interest. If you (or the company that you work for) have had any relationship — paid or unpaid — with any company mentioned in the story, you need to clearly disclose the nature of that relationship within the post and in the two- or three-sentence bio at the end of the piece. This includes (but is not limited to) partners, customers and advisors.

We prefer to receive guest posts as .txt or Word docs, with any links to outside sources pasted below the relevant paragraph.

Is there an editing process?

Yes, guest posts go through our regular editing process. We’ll add comments and questions to your first draft. We might move a few paragraphs around, so that the ideas flow better, or change the wording here and there to add clarity. We will send you the final text before we publish the piece to make sure that we didn’t alter your meaning in the edits. We never publish an article without getting the author’s approval first. Please note, however, that we do not fact-check guest posts, so you are solely responsible for the factual accuracy of the post.

After we get your okay, we will slate it for publication. GigaOM retains all publishing rights to contributor posts, and we ask that the content not be published elsewhere — either before or after we publish it.

But your role doesn’t end when we hit publish. Like all posts on GigaOM and paidContent, our guest posts are meant to be part of an ongoing conversation. After the post is published, we expect you to jump in and engage with readers.

How to pitch a post

Send your pitches to guestpost@gigaom.com. If your guest post is connected to a news story, or is time sensitive for any other reason, please say so in the subject heading. Because of the volume of pitches we get, we can’t respond to all of them. If you don’t hear back from us within two weeks, you can assume that we won’t be taking the piece, and we’ll understand when you run it with a different publication.

If you’ve already written the post, of course, include it in the pitch. If you haven’t, please include the following information in your pitch email:

1. A sentence or two — or short paragraph — explaining the point of the piece.
2. A sentence or two outlining how you you will tell your story or prove your thesis.
3. A sentence or two telling us why now. What is the larger context for the article? What is happening in the industry that makes this post particularly important to our readers today?
4. A sentence or two with your bio, including where you currently work and your relevant background. Why should people listen to what you have to say about the proposed topic?

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As the mobile game is shifting from hardware to services, Apple needs to have more deep services of its own, rather than relying on competition. Important mobile service platforms include mapping, commerce and payments, social, and search. Across these categories, other companies are in the lead, not Apple. Of all the things that Apple might invest their vast cash in, maps is actually an important and strategic control point.

Maps and navigation are very popular on smartphones all around the world. Location is one of the few ways people organize and understand their world, which is why maps are also integral parts of lots of different mobile services. So mapping is both a popular service in itself and an “atomized” ingredient in a range of other services.

Apple’s tough competition in mapping

The challenge for Apple is that mapping is an inherently complex game, and the competition is both far ahead and moving fast. Competition comes in the form of mapping-focused heavyweights but also nimble start-ups. At Fjord we’ve collaborated with both Nokia and Foursquare, two of the location pacesetters.

The Google Maps service is very popular, and Google is constantly enriching and evolving it. Google Earth, Google Street View, and photos from their Picasa service make the mapping experience more engaging. Their newly launched Field Trip application is starting to hint at proactive location services. With all their location investments, Google is starting to merge the digital with the real world.

Nokia acquired the global map business NAVTEQ in 2008, and has designed an end-to-end mapping offering. Beyond the maps on their own phones, Nokia’s mapping platform now powers lots of other services, including 90% of in-car navigation systems, Microsoft’s Bing Maps, and also the maps on Amazon’s Kindle Fire. Nokia allows you to scan your surroundings using Nokia City Lens, and they’re also busy mapping indoor locations like airports and shopping malls.

Foursquare – which like Apple defected from Google Maps recently – is a playful, engaging, and increasingly contextual service. When you realize that Foursquare intends to take on Google in search, it’s no surprise that they jumped ship. Foursquare is starting to put the billions of data points that their users have created to good use, as their focus is shifting from simple check-ins to smart recommendations.

Apple naturally knows that the competition is fierce and that the mapping domain is complex and fast moving. Yet it decided to create its own mapping platform, which will be an expensive move without obvious monetization options. It decided to get involved in order to reduce reliance on core competitors, to generate rich data that it can use in its own services, and to create a tighter link to other apps and services. Maps will become Apple’s smart service glue.

How Apple might use its mapping platform

Apple will naturally add new novel mapping user experiences, and its 3D flyovers is a first attempt. But the top priority for Apple will be to capture usage data to enrich its mapping platform. Google benefited from the crowdsourced location data generated on iOS. Now Apple will keep all that data goodness. The data is created both when people use the Apple Maps application, and when they use other apps or services that utilize Apple’s location APIs. The data will make Apple Maps smarter and more accurate over time.

The other priority for Apple will be to use its mapping platform to enrich its own services. A few predictions:

• Siri will become significantly smarter, as she’ll learn a lot about locations, navigation, traffic patterns, and more.
• Passbook, Apple’s hesitant entry into offers and commerce, will become truly smart. Apple will be able to control end-to-end solutions for location-based offers, recommendations, and payments that will compete with Groupon, Square, and Amazon.
• Smart location metadata will be added to any photo or video that iOS users take, and the photos and videos will be able to be found and re-lived using location. User-created photos can also enrich any location entry, and Apple users might be able to “play” the media from any place.
• The iOS calendar will take the location from your next calendar entry, it will calculate the time it takes to get there from your current location, and it will alert you when you need to leave.

When it’s more mature, Apple Maps will make a range of its services smarter, and the rich location data will also give Apple a chance of making credible and differentiated entries in key service domains like commerce, search, and social.

Apple’s dilemma

Seen from the outside, the “downgrade” from Google Maps to Apple’s own maps might seem like a dumb move. But it’s, in fact, evidence of Apple’s long-term bet on service platforms as strategic control points. In order to secure its own long-term prosperous future, Apple chose to risk alienating users with some imperfect maps in iOS 6, a decision it has publically acknowledged with an apology from CEO Tim Cook.

To preserve its iPhone and iPad profit margins and sales volumes in the future, Apple needs strong ecosystem glue, which attracts customers and keeps them in the Apple family over time. As the iOS app advantage has diminished, Apple is now betting on maps as the service glue they need to prosper over time.

Olof Schybergson is CEO and Co-Founder at the service design consultancy Fjord. Fjord has provided strategic direction and design for such brands as Citibank, Foursquare, Nokia and Qualcomm. You can follow them on Twitter at @fjord.

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You’ve heard the cloud marketing spiel … faster, better, cheaper. Those are seductive adjectives. But for some organizations, cloud benefits like that can remain out of reach. Cloud Computing is just so…new, and as some industry experts have oh-so-astutely noted, “much can go wrong.” And that’s reason enough for many to fear cloud computing.

But it shouldn’t be enough to preclude it. Perhaps it goes without saying, but your enterprise will enjoy the cloud’s benefits only with the commitment of organizational buy-in. Will your enterprise’s cloud-computing initiatives succeed? Let’s hope so. Winning in the cloud isn’t difficult, but it’s also not guaranteed. If you’re an IT leader, avoid these rookie mistakes … or your enterprise cloud might just rain down on you.

1. Plan for yesterday

It’s classic IT short-sightedness: “Invest now and relieve your immediate pain!” But here’s the thing: Cloud computing changes everything. Yesterday’s planning involved provisioning hardware for a ten-year lifespan. Today’s planning involves spinning up 10,000 VMs. Overnight. Yes, you must migrate your legacy apps to the cloud. But you also must ensure your cloud supports new, as-yet unimagined, multi-component, polyglot-developed, infinitely-modifiable, dynamically-redeployable applications. That is hardly the status quo now.

Today — yes, today –your application developers are leveraging the cloud to work in completely new ways. Cloud computing has the power to change the way your team thinks about delivering customer value. Change the way you think about IT management. Start from your end user customers and work backwards up the value chain. Then map out a cloud computing strategy to get there. You’ll end up with an IT org that’s proactively strategizing for the future instead of reacting to yesterday’s pain point.

2. Go public…if you’re big

How big is your enterprise? How costly is downtime? How much of a control freak are you? If you answered “massive,” “massively costly,” and “massively type-A,” then the public cloud probably isn’t for you. Outages—though extremely rare—can still occur. “Four nines” uptime sounds great, but it’s also unrealistic. Can your org can handle downtime if your public-cloud data is unavailable?

Public cloud is a great IT-outsourcing option…in a one-size-fits-all kind of way. And when something goes wrong in a public cloud, remember that you’ve also outsourced disaster recovery (and limited your own visibility into recovery efforts). No big deal as long as you don’t mind twiddling your thumbs while someone in hosting tech support seeks the root cause of that outage in the Eastern zone.

3. Go private…if you’re small

Private cloud is great, but it’s not right for everyone. Is your enterprise a small business? If you’re looking at a private cloud solution (even a dedicated hosted solution), expect significant upfront investment in hardware, maintenance, and IT management. Or, look at something more convenient like a cloud hosting provider service. And get to the cloud…faster, better, cheaper.

4. Don’t worry about security

Public cloud providers deliver best-in-world security. And it’s fast and easy to push data to a public cloud like AWS. Your proprietary data’s safe there. Probably. But public-cloud breaches — though extremely rare — (say it with me) can still occur. And they can be costly. (What’s your cloud data worth to you?)

“Hoping for the best” is not a sustainable strategic approach. Plan for redundancy and disaster recovery, whether your cloud is public or private. The private cloud route can be safer, but security is under your control (and as good as your own firewall). In a public cloud, consider advanced security layers—Some private PaaSes served from a public cloud can “individually wrap” your applications, so if a neighboring tenant gets hacked, your data stays protected.

5. Ignore data sovereignty

Does your enterprise have international operations? With most public cloud services, enterprise customers have little control over where their data resides. That’s a sticking point for companies doing business in jurisdictions that require corporate or public sector data to remain within a specific geography. If adhering to such data sovereignty mandates is a priority for your enterprise, consider a private cloud solution…running in your organization’s own datacenters in the appropriate subsidiaries.

6. Wait

Don’t wait and see. Cloud computing’s not a fad. It’s a game-changer. And if you’re not moving to the cloud, then you’re Goliath and your nimble competitor is David, using cloud-computing models to advantage. The sooner your enterprise gets to the cloud, the sooner you’ll realize its benefits.

Bart Copeland, CEO of ActiveState will speak about the evolution of  private PaaS adoption on a panel at GigaOM’s upcoming Structure Europe conference in Amsterdam. 

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user  Vladitto

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