Overview of Whereness - Ubiquitous Positioning - page 20

2.1.2 Disruptive Technology
Unexpected competition can come from business players outside existing
industries either exploiting technology that is new or finding new ways to apply
it. If the new value propositions are much stronger, then existing businesses can
fail rapidly. The term “disruptive technology” was explored by Clayton
Christensen in his seminal book, The Innovator's Dilemma [2].
Whereness may become a disruptive technology affecting existing niche
players adversely. For example, companies offering small-scale vehicle tracking
services may find their offering eclipsed by much more universal services from
very large organizations. A wider set of applications would be offered covering
entertainment, gaming, e-commerce and business-focused logistics applications;
the economics of scale would apply.
The biggest current disruption is the impact of Web 2.0 and the ubiquity of
services such as Google Maps and Google Earth, which now touch the general
public in ways that other geographical systems have failed to do. New mobile
devices such as the Apple iPhone are another potential disrupter. The availability
of both potential disrupters within the same device is an exciting development that
may change the face of both the mobile telephony and mapping businesses,
together with other areas dependent on them.
2.1.3 Openness and Web 2.0
A recent trend in ICT has been a move away from the traditional closed or
proprietary approach to products, content, and services to a situation where there
is considerable openness. Openness can take several forms: first, having an
entirely licensefree approach to standards, for example, the LINUX operating
system and the Internet standards from W3C, 1 and second, creating a standard via
an industry group, where anyone may join in but that involves paying a fee to join,
for example, the mobile telephone standards. Whereness already includes aspects
of both camps, but perhaps the most interesting trend is the third aspect of
openness that concerns the opening of normally closed commercial systems via
interfaces that anyone can use as a component part of a bigger system.
For example, although Google Earth is a proprietary system, it does have an
open interface available through an application programming interface, or API.
The API allows third parties to use underlying services but in novel ways that can
create new applications. In fact it is possible to mashup several underlying
systems via different APIs so that, for example, photographs hosted on a service
such as Flickr can be combined with the maps from Google. This ability to share
and combine (or mashup) is the defining aspect of Web 2.0 [3] and is of
fundamental importance to Whereness (see Chapter 8).
1 W3C is the standards body that standardizes Web technology.