Location based automation ...

I have been playing around with some location based automation in IFTTT recently. I am sure some of you who follow some of my different feeds may have noticed. In itself, there is nothing new to report. But in my fevered and somewhat technical mind, there seems to me to be the potential for many organisations to capitalise on 'presence' awareness.

The tool available via IFTTT, currently works on iPhone; ironically I don't see any android resources, but I am sure that if I did a search I would find similar.

However, getting back on topic. I work in a culture that has a dispersed team. Often you want to know if someone is 'around for a chat'. That informal and quite essential process where coffee, ideas and opportunities evolve.

Options include the internal Lync chat, but relies on them being available at their desk to respond (not often the case on campus). Getting off rear and looking for them, phoning, leaving voice mail. To still discover that they are not in.

So, it is email (again) or the whim of an idea for a conversation disappears.

Yet, if there was a tool that told me when my preferred colleagues are near, now that would be interesting.

So, world that I blog into, is there one, am I mad for wanting this, or could we use the tools out there to make ourselves such a tool. 

Comments

  1. Nuno Guarda13 January 2014 at 18:00

    Foursquare has a feature that allows notifications to be send when a friend check in at the same place.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Teraknor13 January 2014 at 18:16

      Must admit i have avoided foursquare, not really wanting to be mayor of anything virtual ... does it all automatic 'checking in'?

      Delete
    2. Nuno Guarda13 January 2014 at 19:51

      I believe it doesn't directly, but I suppose there are apps that can do it. Regarding the mayorships, I believe they are focusing less than before on that :-)

      An alternative could be Google Location service (https://support.google.com/plus/answer/2998354?hl=en-GB). You can decide who to share with.

      Delete
    3. Teraknor13 January 2014 at 20:02

      looking at IFTTT I can push 'location' updates to a spreadsheet, in principle, I could tweet, facebook, parse the information into a tool. Cisco like the OU has a distributed workforce which could at times benefit from staff knowing when others are 'near'.

      Delete
    4. Teraknor13 January 2014 at 20:04

      As an additional thought, somewhere like the OU, the chances of everyone having the same device/platform is remote and even less likely that we will be issued devices to support the idea

      Delete
    5. Nuno Guarda13 January 2014 at 21:20

      I fully agree with you. Maybe that feature could be integrated on Cisco Jabber that already has a few "presence" features.

      I found an app called "Find My Friends" that is platform independents, or saying it differently, work across all major mobile platforms. The Location service from Google seems to work attached to Google+, so it should be available in various platforms too.

      Delete
  2. Unknown13 January 2014 at 18:29

    lync ( been using this on a droid, ), yammer, lotus notes "Sametime", cisco Jabber, they are all good ("Good"another good one), been using them all, but none of them tell me where they are unless I state, or if they are close by, you need to incoperate a GPS device with each system, ( you be would be made !)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

If airlines offer in-flight Wi-Fi, they should invest in an extra black box for security ...

Image
Yijun Yu , The Open University and Andrew Smith , The Open University In-flight Wi-Fi is one of the most sought-after facilities for air travellers these days, now that laptops and smartphones are so common and so much of our working and personal life revolves around online services. But a US Government Accountability Office report has suggested that many in-flight wireless networks could expose the plane to being hacked or remotely controlled . In fact it’s of such a concern to US authorities that when a well-known computer security expert made an admittedly ill-thought-out joke about doing so on Twitter, he was promptly arrested, his computers confiscated, and subsequently banned from the airline . And all he was suggesting was to make the oxygen masks drop down. So it would appear that the stuff of Hollywood may jump from fiction to fact: Liam Neeson and Julianne Moore starred in the 2014 film Non-Stop , where a passenger hacking the aircraft’s internal wirel...
Read more

Wikipedia editors never walk alone: Hillsborough changes can be traced ... from @ConversationUK

Image
By Andrew Smith , The Open University According to the Liverpool Echo , UK government computers have been used to make offensive comments on the Wikipedia page detailing the 1989 Hillsbourgh Disaster over a number of years. The newspaper reports that revisions to the page have been made from computers using the government’s secure intranet since 2009. They include insults to Liverpool fans and a comment suggesting that fans were responsible for the football ground disaster, in which 96 people died. This case highlights the continual issue of trolling and cybervandalism on Wikipedia. It also shows how journalism is using good, technical forensic tools at the disposal of every cybercitizen. Cybercitizens can be good or bad So many of us use Wikipedia on a daily basis that it is one of the most visited websites in the world. Yet not that many of us really understand how it works. Wikipedia is based on the principle that the community can create, edit and refine pages covering...
Read more

Highlights and lowlights of 2014, a golden year for cybercrime from @ConversationUK

Image
Looking back, 2014 was not a good year for keeping things safe under digital lock and key. If a score was being kept, it might seem that the cybercriminals are in the lead, despite the valiant efforts – and own goals – from the cybersecurity profession worldwide. Cast your mind back to March , everyone was panicking about the HeartBleed bug. Based on an error in code upon which the majority of the world’s secure servers relied, experts had plenty of time to fix the issue. Sadly there was an array of conflicting information about changing passwords, leading to widespread confusion. While most IT administrators made sure this was managed in a professional manner, it created a stir that seemed to set the tone for the year. In May , online auction giant Ebay admitted to having been compromised. The site said its systems, with personal details of tens of millions of users, may have had been vulnerable for months. Everyone was advised, indeed forced, to change their password. In the...
Read more