Location Aware Sticky Notes and the need for richer POI’s?

I recently stumbled onto a paper about Place It’s on the Microsoft Research website that makes for an interesting read. “Place Its” are the authors name given to the basic concept of a virtual sticky note that can be assigned to a certain geographic area, say your home or your local grocery store, to be triggered as a reminder when you next visit that area, typically via an application on a location aware cell phone. I can’t say that the paper arrives at any grand conclusions about the future of such applications, but it does provide a nice overview of the concept, as well as some real world usage insights based on their ten person study of the subject

Virtual sticky notes seem like a useful thing for someone to create and the idea seems to have received its fair share of attention over recent years, including recent initiatives like Siemens Digital Grafitti. I for one would love to just go about adding items to a grocery list on my cell phone throughout the week and then have it pop up with that list as an alert the next time I am in a supermarket as a helpful reminder. The usefulness would stretch into many applications like clients kids names set to trigger just as you’re arriving at the clients offices, or a reminder to buy a birthday card for your mother in law a week before her birthday the next time you’re near a card store, etc.

The problem with the current state of things is that I am not going to spend much time setting up the alert, people will only invest a very small effort into such reminders and certainly won’t go around marking each of the grocery stores or card stores that they may potentially ever want to shop at, in order to trigger the alerts. Which is where a private enterprise needs to step in.

As map and location based navigation becomes more and more widespread, and an increasingly important source of information for shopping for retail items in stores, the POI information contained within those systems will need to become much more robust and consistent. For example, currently Kroger’s is simply categorized under “Grocery”, but in the future additional store level specific metadata like "wine", "cards", "pharmacy" would be invaluable in making things like the virtual sticky note become a reality, not to mention increased sales of cards, wine and pharmaceuticals for the companies that invest in being properly represented in these systems.