Pelago shows the way
With Kleiner Perkins announcing their first iPhone fund company, the world takes one step closer to a vision many have had since the first time portable GPS’s came available – sharing your location and what you think about it with others. Congrats to Pelago. Their app looks great.
What makes this exciting to me is the notion of wrapping user created content around the output of a specific sensor – in this case a location sensor (GPS). It’s a very powerful model. Interestingly enough, Flickr grew by creating a community around another sensor type – the camera or image sensor. I would argue you can build a community around just about any sensor – smog levels, speed trap detection, temp/baro pressure, RFID scans, etc. In fact, the combination of these is where things get most interesting – witness geo-tagged photos.
The limitation has always been the hardware. Notice how Pelago came into existence. The hardware came first. For the founders to achieve their vision they needed to wait. This is never fun for an entrepreneur. But they had no choice. We’d like to imagine a world where the software/service and hardware platform can be developed together, in tandem, with an economic model that makes sense. In essence, this is exactly what Apple does and the results speak for themselves.
Part of our mission is to collapse the separation between software and hardware design. You should be able to design both simultaneously. At the end of the day, users want applications. The best product experiences are when the software and hardware become invisible, something the iPhone does brilliantly. The keyboard, mouse, and screen was the first frontier. The mobile phone created a second. With BUG, we hope to inspire the creation of countless others.
