Reuters and the Importance of "Where"

Ed Parsons posted a short report of the couple of days he spent at Reuters, as part of their excellent Innovation Programme. He mentions the increasing interest for Reuters to deliver location and consumer focused information but as with many things maybe it will take at least three or four attempts for location based services to reach the mainstream. The challenges to deliver appropriate LBS (e.g. data availability, privacy concerns, standards). However, Reuter’s interest show the intention to innovate in the long term in this space.

Relation to my thesis: In the past, location information where given by official or central entities. The bottom up generation of geolocated information raises not only the problem of lack of standards but also on the granularity (or generalization) and the subjectivity of the location attached to the information. Similar challenges faced by GeoCommons for example, that companies such as Urban Mapping try to tackle.