When pundits say that “location” adds another layer on top of other information, it’s quite true. It specifically adds the “where” or the “here” component. Sounds confusing? ok lets look at an example.

Imagine I tweet using my iPhone – “Harbour Bridge and Opera House look amazing tonight”… To a tourist visiting Sydney for the first time, this information could be of interest. Wouldn’t it be even more useful if the system also let the reader know that I was in the Royal Botanic Gardens when I sent the tweet? Hoorah… so the tourist now knows of a recommended spot to scout the two icons from. This is just one of the use cases and perhaps one of the simpler ones.

There are other implementations and uses as well from finding an atm or other essential services near my current location, finding a job or real estate around this area to using a mapping product to figure out the shortest path from point A to B etc. Most of these come into play when a certain application or service is requested through a mobile device wich uses it’s inbuilt GPS chip to send out it’s current location.

I hope you get an idea of how essential and useful location information can be. More on this in a later post…

Using this blog I’ll try to voice my opinion about recruitment and technology as it pertains to this industry.