MoBlogging: When ‘Perfect Knowledge’ Is Networked

Driving along the freeway, near perfect conditions, and the speedometer reads 120km/h in a 100km/h zone. An oncoming car flashes his headlights and your immediate reaction is to reduce speed and continue cruising slightly under the 100km/h limit, knowing there are police ahead monitoring the traffic.

It’s a common scenario of how shared information between ‘consumers’ leads to a better outcome for some. Other drivers in the same vicinity, who don’t have that knowledge, wont be so lucky.

Some drivers who are particularly paranoid about being booked (and don’t want to slow down!) will most likely surf the available radio stations to get a traffic report in the vain hope there is news about a potential radar trap on their way home from work.

In this case, knowledge about a situation hinges on the economies of search, which in this case proves to be very inefficient.

Now bring in the ability for an individual or organisation to push information to a network of like-minded people, all of whom would benefit from having near-instantaneous knowledge about an event or situation at a time when they can most profit from that knowledge.

Further, even knowing your network of like-minded individuals are increasingly active at a certain time (an in a certain place) only escalates your own awareness that you are likely to profit, and are therefore more engaged in the network’s activity, ie, the information broadcasted by members. The visualisation of a consumer network through mobile location-based services (LBS) would do just that.

The ability of a customer entering a shopping mall, or even visiting the town’s commercial centre, to maximise the value from their shopping dollar is ultimately constrained in this regard by a deficit in knowledge - not knowing the pricing of all competing products or not knowing where all the sales events are located.

A mobile channel which pushes this information out to registered users not just once a day but potentially every time a retailer decides to offer a discount to shoppers in the immediate vicinity for the next hour (a micro-sale model, for example), is now challenging the three key issues which can optimise the value acheived by consumers and retailers in a physical retailing space - perfect knowledge about their surroundings, the efficiency of search and intra-day price adjustments to take advantage of the crowd’s spend-profile.

What Google did for search, mobile will do for retail. It’s as simple as that.