A practical helper close by — the 'Around Me' service
Posted: 10 Sep 2012 04:00 PM PDT
If you look at the world these days, you see that quite a lot of things have become convenient and easy in ways that would have been unimaginable in the past. Things that as a child I vaguely dreamed about — "some day we'll be able to chat with each other face to face, all the more happily, won't we?" — have long since become everyday services. On top of that, with the spread of the internet, we can order things from home, and I used to think the world had already become incredibly convenient. But now, if you are walking around with just a smartphone, there is really almost nothing you cannot do. Among all of this, one of the things that feels most convenient of all is the kind of service that lets you grasp at a glance, with ease, information that in the past had to be collected or searched for one person at a time — information that felt either bothersome or hard to pin down. For example, even if you get lost in a strange city you are visiting for the very first time, as long as you pull up a map app and set a destination, even someone with a bad sense of direction can find the place without much trouble. And when meeting a friend, you no longer have to wear out your shoes hunting around for a restaurant that offers a discount service. Like this, services that let you obtain information more easily about the place you are in and the area around you make our lives a little more abundant. These services that offer immediate, practical help right in the user's vicinity are collectively called 'Around Me' services.
Information that is close yet far — accessing it with 'Around Me' services
The 'Around Me' service is a service that helps the user access a certain kind of information quickly and easily. The specific information being provided is mostly services based on physical proximity via location. But it does not refer only to targets physically close to the user. The 'Around Me' service, going beyond the online/offline divide, broadly covers services that deliver useful, real-time information that can help the user — quickly and organically — right by their side. Most representatively, on top of location based services using mobile communication or GPS, ways of getting information you want through your close personal network on social media like Facebook can also be seen as a kind of 'Around Me' service.
'Car-pool' is the word for drivers heading to the same destination or in the same direction riding together in one vehicle to cut down on commuting costs. With gas prices soaring, car-pooling has become a very reasonable alternative for people who feel the burden of operating a car. On top of that, as recent worries about safety have increased, more and more people are looking for a safer, more trustworthy means of transport than taxis — and this has also been a factor in car-pooling's rise. But finding a car-pool vehicle that best fits you, or gathering passengers, is not as easy as you might think.
flinc is the world's first Social-based Car-pooling network to appear as a ray of light in this situation. The service connects drivers and would-be riders in real time via desktop, smartphone, and navigation. Also, flinc is more than a simple car-pooling service — no matter where the driver is heading, the ideal car-pool candidates in the driver's vicinity are automatically proposed to the driver. Furthermore, through flinc's trustworthy social network, you can car-pool with friends every day over short or long distances, or with kindred spirits who share your way of thinking. With this advance information, you can decide in advance who will ride with you, and checking a passenger's profile lets you see whether you share acquaintances or belong to the same group. After checking the candidate's information, simply pressing a button lets you confirm when and where you will pick that passenger up. Once you hop in your car and link your navigation with the flinc service, the navigation system will guide you to the waiting passenger's location and then to your destination. Any new proposal connected with flinc that comes in along the way is instantly reflected in your navigation and a new route is offered.
flinc is also very useful from the side of the rider, not just the driver. It automatically finds the driver that best matches the route you want to take and proposes a car-pool. All you have to do is decide which driver to pick. That is, even from the rider's side wanting a ride rather than as a driver, you can send car-pool proposals to several drivers, and if one of them accepts, that person becomes the one who will take you to your destination right away. In this process, you can also see ratings from other flinc users, to tell which drivers are trustworthy and well-reviewed. Through this service, on the driver's side, a small effort — pressing the flinc usage button — greatly reduces transportation costs and eases the economic burden, and with the integrated application software's functions, it simply pairs driver and rider without any phone calls or text messages.
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Whether in human relationships or in anything else, not all relationships are equal. You may have truly close friends next to you, but there are also people with whom you have relationships only online, and some who are influenced by you and put it into practice. In other words, we do not need to interact equally with everyone in our relationships all the time; to firm up our networks of personal exchange, we need to audit our own network. Beyond just maintaining healthy relationships, through such an audit, you can also discover, as a bonus, the people best suited to be a useful helper for you.
Knodes is building a powerful social dataset that will be useful to users. Using Knodes' service, things do not stop at just clicking 'Like' or checking in on Facebook — actual conversations happen. Before a conversation truly takes off, Knodes maps a person's social network data onto a map, creating a map made of the users' worlds. Who is closely associated with which topic, and how close are you to each person within your own network, how tightly are you actually connected — Knodes' map makes it easy to see all of that at a glance. For example, imagine you want to go to Chicago over the weekend and would like some tips on that. In that case, you can use Knodes Search to find the person best suited to give you real help.
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A service like this lets you grasp the concrete content of the personal networks that are always there around you but are hard to see, and compared with searching for information on the internet, it helps you meet more concrete, living information. Knodes' service can be called a representative example of an 'Around Me' service based on social networks.
The Swarmly service, which lets you search in real time for the most famous and most bustling places, will offer new opportunities. First of all, the Swarmly service is a big help for a person to easily figure out which 'Hot Place' is rising within a local community. The easiest way to know where people around you are gathering right now to have a good time is to use Swarmly.
Through the real-time Swarm Map offered by Swarmly, being able to see where the most trendy people are gathering is a great help not only to individuals, but also to companies that want to market. Before going out on foot directly or doing detailed data research, real-time information served by Swarmly about pubs, clubs, restaurants, and so on, that are the hot trend within a local community becomes a strong aid in grasping real-time trends. In addition, it helps a lot in running guerrilla events within the region or in building longer-term marketing strategies.
A magnifying glass that carefully looks around you (Around)
— the 'Around Me' service
The 'Around Me' services — which offer the freshest information around you, information that is truly alive and breathing — have the greatest advantage of providing the user with the information most needed. Information that comes to me right now, at this very place, as real value, is like finding an oasis in the desert — it carries the value of a sudden breath of fresh air. Living inside a busy modern society, calling each person one by one or visiting each individual to gather information demands enormous time and material cost. From now on, for smarter information, for 'Real Time Information' that each individual truly wants, let us bring Around Me services into our lives.
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