Some day our bodies — or at least the clothing or accessories that adorn them — could become key network nodes in the internet of things. European researchers think that sensors and transmitters on our bodies can be used to form cooperative ad hoc networks that could be used for group indoor navigation, crowd-motion capture, health monitoring on a massive scale and especially collaborative communications. Last week, French institute CEA-Leti and three French universities have launched the Cormoran project, which aims to explore the use of such cooperative interpersonal networks.

The concept of wireless body area networks (WBANs) isn’t a new one. WBANs could be used to sever the cord between patients and their monitoring equipment. Companies like Apple and Heapslylon are exploring the possibility of connected clothes with embedded sensors. We’ve already begun embracing a new era of wearables, such as Google Glass to Fitbit (see disclosure), designed to become extensions of our senses and movements.

All of these devices will become key end-points in the internet of things, but what Cormoran proposes to make them pull double duty. Rather than just remain terminuses, they could route bits to and relay data from each other, becoming a distributed ad hoc network that constantly morphs as we move through physical space.

Better living through distributed networking

Why would you want this kind of network? For one, there is an inherent inefficiency in the point-to-multipoint transmissions that dominate mobile data communications today. Wearable tech usually connects via Bluetooth to a smartphone, which then transmits its info to some distant cell tower. Many medical and connected home devices use proprietary technologies requiring their own dedicated wireless gateways.

Assuming your device can even get a connection to the internet, it’s often using an expensive, power-hungry and highly suboptimal means to transmit tiny specs of data. A distributed wireless network, however, could aggregate data from hundreds if not thousands of nearby devices and then find the most efficient link to offload that collective data to the internet at large. This kind of collaboration is the same principle proposed by mesh-networking outfits Open Garden and the Open Technology Institute as a means of optimizing wireless systems – if everyone shares their connections and relays each others’ data, then everyone benefits.

But there’s an additional benefit to this kind of collaborative communication: by linking to one another, body area networks could create new useful data about users’ surroundings and location. By measuring the signal strength of nearby connections, the network could determine the precise location of every node, or person, within it.

You can imagine some of the possible applications for such technology. In a busy airport or train station, proximal location-based services could route departing passengers en masse to their proper gates or trains or arriving passengers to the proper baggage claim. City planners could use the technology to track and manage the flow of pedestrian traffic, and emergency agencies could use it to coordinate the evacuation of a building. Sociologists could use it to study group behavior, and game designers and movie CGI could use it to digital map crowd movement.

The big “what if?”

On the flip side, though, creating such collaborative networks has ominous security implications. Our own notions of individual privacy suffer if we know every transmitter in a hundred-foot radius is talking to our devices and even helping to carry our personal data back to the cloud.

There are a lot of similarities between collaborative body area networks and the vehicle-to-vehicle connected car technologies pursued by the automotive. If all cars on the highway could talk to one another, they could coordinate their activities, preventing accidents and getting drivers to their destinations faster. But the danger is that these networks would get hacked. Personal information about a car’s driver could get in malicious hands, or data intended to prevent accidents could be falsified to actually cause them.

It’s an exiting project, but Cormoran is going to have deal with similar questions. It will have to not only create the protocols that will allow our body area networks to coordinate, but ensure that the data they relay remains secure and most of the information they share remains anonymous.

Disclosure: Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Networking diagram courtesy of Cormoran. Privacy image courtesy of Shutterstock user Johan Swanepoel.

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Aruba has acquired Meridian Apps, a Portland, Ore.,-based startup that uses Wi-Fi triangulation to determine location indoors where GPS signals can’t penetrate. (The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.) Meridian is one of many companies using Wi-Fi signals to gain its bearings, but Meridian, like its competitor Wifarer, also builds apps for businesses that want location-awareness to be key part of their mobile offering.

Meridian has designed museum guide apps for the Art Institute of Chicago and the American Museum of Natural History. It’s built department locator apps for Macy’s and incorporated casino floor plans into the Bellagio’s mobile app.

While this kind of kind of technology can be used to bring the usual bevy of location-based services to building interiors, it has the potential of making those services much more granular. For instance, many of the museum apps developed by Meridian and Wifarer are able to determine not just what room you’re in, but what exhibit you’re actually looking at — the app can immediate populate your smartphone screen with details about the wooly mammoth or Van Gogh painting you’re admiring. This kind of hyper-local content is attracting the interest of the big mobile services players, including Apple and Google.

Aruba’s particular interest in Meridian probably has something to do with the fact that its technology is largely infrastructure-dependent. As Meridian CTO Nick Farina explained in his blog, even though smartphones have the ability to sniff out their own locations by measuring Wi-Fi signals, Meridian’s technology relies on access points to make those measurements, thus sparing the phone’s battery and allowing it to work on more restricted devices like the iPhone.

Aruba is the No. 2 enterprise WLAN supplier in the world, supplying networks for every manner of hospital, corporate campus, convention center or mall. You can imagine that many of those customers would be very interested in buying not just a network from Aruba, but also a means to use that network to provide location-aware content and services to their employees and customers.

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Given the importance of the topic, this report provides an end-to-end view of consumers’ experience, from discovery to shopping and buying to post-purchase activities such as service and support. Data from a recent immr survey (co-sponsored by GigaOM Research) of U.S. smartphone owners was used to answer questions relating to:

• Shopping experiences in brick-and-mortar stores: Relatively few (one in four) consumers are happy with their shopping experiences in brick-and-mortar stores. As an online retailer, Amazon leads on this important metric by a 2-to-1 margin.
• Satisfaction with specific shopping experiences: From discovering to shopping to buying and using products and services, consumers reveal substantial opportunities to improve the overall shopping experience. Opportunities also exist in a number of special cases, including shopping for gifts, services, and events and entertainment. The latter two are especially important for local businesses.
• Mobile’s impact on the shopping experience: Mobile apps significantly improve consumers’ experiences. Individuals who use a mobile app for a specific shopping experience, such as finding or comparing products, are much happier with their shopping experience than non-users.

Recommendations are presented for retailers and brands to fill these voids and help consumers along the shopping journey.

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A new app just hit the iOS App Store called Shopster that uses the geo-location services in the iPhone (or iPad or iPod touch) to not only keep track of where you frequently buy your groceries, but what you buy at which store. Then it can notify you when you’re near those locations and what you might possibly need to run in and grab.

Shopster costs 99 cents and it’s iOS only right now. The developer is Quadion Technologies, a software company based in Buenos Aires. Previous iOS titles under its belt are games; Shopster is the first utility app.

The design of the app is simple and cheerful. There are just a few screens: one for your items you’ve said you need to buy, one for items you’ve previously purchased, and another that shows you the stores you’ve frequently purchased a specific item at on a map.

There’s not much to learn either. There’s a sliding bar on the right hand side that suggests quantities (so you don’t have to jump to the numbers keyboard on your iOS device). You select a quantity then start typing “sourdough bread” or whatever you need to buy. Once you’re at the store and you tap the check box to mark sourdough off your list, the app makes note of the geo-position of the store for that particular item. It doesn’t delete the item, but moves it to the “purchased” page for later.

Just after playing with it for a bit, I can see a few ways this would come in handy. For example, if you really like the produce at your neighborhood market, but prefer to get your meats at the butcher across town, Shopster will notify you when you’re near those places of what you’ve noted you need to pick up. Another way to use it: if you hunted all over town in a panic for fenugreek seeds before a dinner party and then later can’t remember where you found it, if you marked it off your Shopster checklist at that store, the app will be able to tell you the name. It’s also just a simple way to keep a running grocery list. Once you check something off as purchased, it goes to the “past purchases” tab. Need to remind yourself to buy it again next week? Just uncheck the box and it goes back on your “to buy” list.

Shopster is aimed at keeping lists of frequently bought items, so groceries is the natural application. But it doesn’t have to be used that way: if there are supplies or parts you often need to pick up locally, Shopster would work with that too.

They’re not doing it yet, but it’s easy to see that one day Quadion could begin to incorporate coupons or deals from grocers or other retailers if they know what you shop for at their store. It could be similar to what ZipList offers with coupons, but with the added twist that Shopster actually knows when you’re in the store or nearby.

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The director of Nokia’s Here mapping platform, Sylvain Grande, is leaving the company to join SoundCloud, GigaOM can reveal.

Grande, who will manage partner relations for the Berlin-based audio platform firm from next week, worked on Here Maps (formerly Nokia Maps) since the end of 2008. He ran the teams – also located in Berlin — that develop Here for Windows Phone, the web and other platforms. According to his LinkedIn profile, he was also “strongly involved in Nokia Maps’ key partnerships (from negotiation to delivery) with Yahoo!, Microsoft and others”.

Nokia tells me Grande won’t have a direct replacement as such. He reported to Thom Brenner, Nokia’s vice president of applications, location and commerce, and various members of Brenner’s team will take over his responsibilities.

The move comes at an interesting time for both SoundCloud and Nokia’s Here platform. SoundCloud has done a great job becoming the so-called YouTube of audio, but is only now starting to get serious about making money. Meanwhile, last month Nokia announced that it is opening up the Here platform to third-party developers, a shift that I reckon points to a strengthening of the platform’s significance for the company.

Grande’s jump to SoundCloud isn’t unprecedented. Indeed, SoundCloud co-founder Eric Wahlforss used to work at gate5, the Berlin mapping company that, along with Navteq and Plazes, was acquired by Nokia to form the underpinnings of what is now Here. Sources tell me at least one other developer from Nokia’s Berlin operations has also found his way to SoundCloud, so there may be some active courting going on.

UPDATE: Wahlforss has confirmed the hire and given me this brief statement:

“We’re very excited to welcome Sylvain Grande to SoundCloud. His proven experience across companies including Nokia and Myspace make him the perfect hire to help oversee our product development. Sylvain will be directly involved with managing our recently launched beta Pro Partner profiles, assisting our music, audio, and brand partners to have an even greater presence on our platform.”

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Except, according to research published in Scientific Reports on Monday, people’s day-to-day movement is usually so predictable that even anonymized location data can be linked to individuals with relative ease if correlated with a piece of outside information. Why? Because our movement patterns give us away.

The paper, entitled Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility, took an anonymized dataset from an unidentified mobile operator containing call information for around 1.5 million users over 14 months. The purpose of the study was to figure out how many data points — based on time and location — were needed to identify individual users. The answer, for 95 percent of the “anonymous” users logged in that database, was just four.

From the paper:

“We showed that the uniqueness of human mobility traces is high, thereby emphasizing the importance of the idiosyncrasy of human movements for individual privacy. Indeed, this uniqueness means that little outside information is needed to re-identify the trace of a targeted individual even in a sparse, large-scale, and coarse mobility dataset. Given the amount of information that can be inferred from mobility data, as well as the potentially large number of simply anonymized mobility datasets available, this is a growing concern.”

Just because you’re paranoid…

For those already worrying about the privacy-busting implications of mobile device use, this should come as no surprise. As CIA CTO Ira “Gus” Hunt stressed last week at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference, mobility and security do not go hand-in-hand. You can be constantly tracked through your mobile device, even when it is switched off. What’s more, those sensors you’re pairing with your device make it ridiculously easy to identify you.

From Hunt’s speech:

“You guys know the Fitbit, right? It’s just a simple three-axis accelerometer. We like these things because they don’t have any – well, I won’t go into that [laughter]. What happens is, they discovered that just simply by looking at the data what they can find out is with pretty good accuracy what your gender is, whether you’re tall or you’re short, whether you’re heavy or light, but what’s really most intriguing is that you can be 100 percent guaranteed to be identified by simply your gait – how you walk.”

One of the explicit purposes of Unique in the Crowd was to raise awareness. As the authors put it: “these findings represent fundamental constraints to an individual’s privacy and have important implications for the design of frameworks and institutions dedicated to protect the privacy of individuals.”

But this isn’t just about mobility; it’s also about the implications of our big data society. These are effectively two sides of the same coin – mobile devices make it easy to collect data, while big data capabilities make it increasingly trivial to take the resulting mass of supposedly anonymized data and tease out the kind of specificity that the anonymizers were trying to erase.

This was precisely the sort of problem foreseen by Europe’s cybersecurity agency, ENISA, a few months back when evaluating the continent’s proposed “right to be forgotten”. If a citizen really wants all traces of their personal data removed from the web, ENISA pointed out, that would have to mean removing their data from anonymized datasets as well as from more obvious repositories such as social networks and search indices.

As ENISA said at the time:

“Removing forgotten information from all aggregated or derived forms may present a significant technical challenge. On the other hand, not removing such information from aggregated forms is risky, because it may be possible to infer the forgotten raw information by correlating different aggregated forms.”

Shall we just give up now?

The Unique in the Crowd authors stressed in a BBC interview that “we really don’t think that we should stop collecting or using this data — there’s way too much to gain for all of us — companies, scientists, and users.” So what can be done?

Personally speaking, I have been writing about issues around data privacy for many years, and I still cannot see any easy solution to this problem. If it were simply a case of which side of the argument carries more weight, I would have no hesitation in siding with the privacy brigade: selling data to advertisers in order to fund that “free” app does not justify the creation of a surveillance society.

But it’s just not that simple. That Fitbit is also trying to help you keep fit — the fact that it can identify you by accident doesn’t change that fact. Mobile operators’ datasets help keep their networks running. Location-based services don’t work without location. We even hope big data capabilities will help us fight diseases and socio-economics problems. And, most importantly, despite the fact that most people in the U.S. and European Union insist they want better data privacy, we see time and again that this desire doesn’t translate into action – people still give up their data without much consideration.

What we need is a new realpolitik for data privacy. We are not going to stop all this data collection, so we need to develop workable guidelines for protecting people. Those developing data-centric products also have to start thinking responsibly – and so do the privacy brigade. Neither camp will entirely get its way: there will be greater regulation of data privacy, one way or another, but the masses will also not be rising up against the data barons anytime soon.

There needs to be better regulation that works in practice – unlike Europe’s messy cookie law or the “right to be forgotten”. It may be that the restrictions will need to be on the use of data rather than its collection, as proposed in a recent World Economic Forum report. However, regulators tend not to be very proactive, particularly when the risks, while inevitable, remain mostly theoretical.

I suspect the really useful regulation will come some way down the line, as a reactive measure. I just shudder to think what event will necessitate it.

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Grafetee lets you set up a new embeddable, interactive map on the Grafetee website, for free and within a minute or two. This service was already available, but now bloggers and businesses can pay $20 a month for a premium version that includes a channel in the Grafetee mobile app (for Android and iOS), customizable graphics and tools for moderating user submissions. Enterprise and governmental users can also pay $200 a month to get a webpage under their own domain, along with premium support and API access to their content.

The Finnish police force was an early Grafetee user, having set up a map so citizens could, for example, notify the cops that a certain park should be patrolled on weekends due to troublesome teenagers hanging out there. Since then, others picked up on the idea, such as animal shelters wanting people to flag strays, and mobile operators looking to crowdsource coverage data. According to founder Juha Huttunen, someone even set up a Grafetee map for tracking toxic seaweed during the Finnish summer.

And yes, it can be used for offers too. “If you have a chain of cafes or whatever you can send your own offers to your customers,” Huttunen explained to me. “You would have a channel in the Grafetee app and, using the toolkit, the cafeteria would upload their offers. Anyone subscribing to the channel in the app would see those offers whenever they are close by.”

A couple of Finnish startups have already built their services using Grafetee, and they actually provide a pretty good insight into the range that’s on offer. One, kidd.io, is on the simple side, collecting and displaying the locations of child-friendly services around Helsinki. Hoods.fi, a location-based flea market and garage sale service, shows greater complexity.

There are other services in this space — AmigoCloud targets the enterprise and public administrations, Ushahidi’s Crowdmap (currently in closed beta) is for aid groups tracking crises, and Everplaces is all about community-sourced recommendations – but none that I’ve seen have quite the combination of simplicity and breadth that Grafetee offers.

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Up until fairly recently, Wi-Fi was about in-home PC connectivity. But a few factors – the popularity of smartphones, the advent of tablets, overburdened cellular networks, among others – have come together to make Wi-Fi ubiquitous and its use in public settings commonplace.

And the trend is only strengthening; In-Stat says that 800 million smartphones alone will ship in 2013 (and a few billion Wi-Fi equipped devices), and Cisco’s 2013 Global Mobile VNI report found that mobile offload will increase from 33 percent (429 petabytes/month) of mobile data traffic in 2012 to 46 percent (9.6 exabytes/month) in 2017.

In our exuberance to monetize the Wi-Fi industry, here are the three big ways where network operators or owners of service provider Wi-Fi deployments can mess it up (Note: the author’s employer, Cisco, makes and sells a variety of Wi-Fi equipment, but the content of this article applies equally to competing products as well).

Make it hard to access Wi-Fi

We have reached the point where we simply expect Wi-Fi to be readily available in airports, hotels and public places. And yet we all know the shock of discovering when the opposite is true. In most places, paying for Wi-Fi not only takes money out of consumers’ pockets, it’s also a hassle and a time suck. But keeping it free to consumers does not, in fact, destroy the business model. It creates others. The fact is people are enticed by free Wi-Fi.

Consider the tale of the cable MSO (I can’t name names yet) that added free Wi-Fi to its broadband package. The result: 15-18 percent churn reduction over 18 months. Now factor in what can happen with the addition of Wi-Fi network intelligence. Pairing free Wi-Fi with location-based analytics improves the business experience and opens up new revenue streams in crowded locations such as hotels and malls.

Say our friend Harry walks into IKEA. Call it a loyalty app, call it a mobile butler, call it a personal concierge – it gets awakened on his phone, by the intelligent network, and alerts him: “Want some free Wi-Fi, Harry, compliments of IKEA?” Harry agrees and is now on the IKEA Wi-Fi network, and chances are high that he’s looking for something IKEA can help him find or discover.

Now doing the opposite – making Wi-Fi difficult to use, with registration and pay schemes – drains time, battery power and more importantly enthusiasm. Anecdotally, a mobile operator recently mentioned to us that even a simple “terms and conditions” pop-up on their network causes a 50 percent drop-off rate, with users abandoning the activity they were planning on engaging in based on inconvenience.  And to the contrary, at a recent professional football game, another operator offered an unadvertised version of Wi-Fi which then generated more than a terabyte of traffic – simply because it was free and easy-to-use.

Abuse the user’s trust

Trying to knowingly or unknowingly capture private data about people, via their gadgets, always backfires in the long run. How happy and willing would you be to regularly frequent a Wi-Fi network if you knew you were going to be bombarded with myriad privacy-invading apps? Not so much.

The popularity of Groupon and other discount sites, however, confirms that if consumers crave anything it’s deals. The challenge then is offering them without compromising security and violating privacy. To effectively balance these factors, let your customers drive your Wi-Fi service. Recognizing the difference between user information and device information is essential to establishing trust with the customer. Rather than mining personal user data, Wi-Fi and location-based services can be used to improve the user experience through their intelligence and by allowing the user to opt in only with the info they want.

Our friend Harry is now on a Las Vegas vacation and could use a little assistance finding his way around the Bellagio resorts. Wi-Fi can help Harry find the ATM machines when GPS can’t reach him indoors or offer him discounted tickets for a late-night show. By enhancing Harry’s experience through network intelligence – offering him information he wants and, crucially, none that he doesn’t – loyalty is built and trust remains intact. The less intrusive the experience, the safer the end-user feels which is critical for encouraging network usage.

Spamming them with unwanted advances

So now you’ve earned Harry’s trust, but that doesn’t mean Harry wants six different offers from you within the span of 10 minutes. That means not pushing your coupon pop-up to Harry until you see one of two things: 1) he appears to be idle, and/or 2) an opportunity to send something contextually relevant arises.

This creates instant value for loyalty and “mobile butler” apps. If you’re the CIO of an IKEA-sized venue, and you know that a quarter of a million people downloaded your loyalty app, you’re probably still ho-hum about the whole thing. Why? Because most people aren’t accustomed to opening the app of the store they’re entering.

However, what’s “intelligent” about intelligent Wi-Fi is that it can awaken the app, to trigger the “Hey Harry,  free Wi-Fi” offer. Next, help him find what he’s looking for. Again, Harry’s mobile butler: “What are you looking for, Harry?” Uh, a drafting table. “Drafting tables are on aisle 10 and there is a special today – 20 percent off.” Result: One sold drafting table. User-pulled, not vendor-pushed.

Or, consider a mobile app / intelligent network launch we did with AT&T and the Fernbank Museum of Natural History in Atlanta. When you enter, a green light flashes near the antenna icon on your phone. Selecting it returns nearby services – maps, restroom locations, guided tours and more. The café  can detect slowdowns in the mid-afternoon, based on dwell times and crowding (flow control is another proven use for intelligent Wi-Fi.) It auto-generates a trigger that pushes an offer to museum-goers – “Free hot cocoa in the cafe!” – to attract appetites, and thus sales.

Jared Headley is director, service provider mobility, for Cisco. 

Photo courtesy Richard Paul Kane/Shutterstock.com.

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We’ve already seen location-sharing app Glympse make it into its first connected platform, Ford’s Sync AppLink. Now BMW’s strategic investment arm i Ventures is partnering with family locator service Life360 to develop in-car technologies that would allow family members to locate one another and coordinate their activities. i Ventures is also making an undisclosed investment in the San Francisco startup.

While an app like Glympse allows you to selectively share your location with anyone for a set period of time, Life360 creates a permanent share between a close-knit group such as a nuclear family. That allows Life360 to build services on top of that presence data.

“Imagine you want to meet your wife at your kids’ soccer game,” said Chris Hulls, co-founder and CEO of Life360. “Right now you have to call her, get an address and then program it into your navigation system to get directions. That’s a lot of unnecessary friction.”

What Life360 proposes is an in-dash app that automatically keeps tabs on your family members’ activities. To find your wife, as in Hulls’ example, you merely have to tap on her portrait in the app, and her location is automatically fed into the car’s vehicle nav system.

BMW isn’t the only automaker that thinks Life360 shows promise in the connected car. One of the startup’s lead investors is Fontinalis Partners, a transportation technology fund founded by Bill Ford, the executive chairman of his namesake company. The company recently closed a Series A round of $3.5 million from Bessemer Venture Partners, 500 Startups, Kapor Capital, Venture51, Bullpen Capital, Social Leverage and EchoVC Partners.

As you might expect, Life360 as apps in the works for both Ford and BMW’s connected car platforms, but Hulls said its working with other automakers as well, including Mercedes, General Motors and Hyundai. While Hulls wouldn’t reveal which automaker’s platform would be the first to launch Life360’s app, he said the app would go live in a least one connected car system this year.

We’re already starting to location finding its way into more connected car apps and not just in the form of navigation software. Roximity and BeCouply are using presence data to push location-based deals and recommend nearby activities for the amorously inclined.

And while location-sharing isn’t a feature in most in-vehicle nav systems it’s starting to make it into many mobile mapping and navigation apps. Telenav recently announced an update to its iOS software that can share not only a user’s current location but also your intended destination, allowing friends to coordinate their activities on a map.

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