With the new Google feature, Google Latitude, a user can see where his friends are, contact them with SMS, IM (Gtalk), or a phone call and check on their location. Only a deep trust relationship between a user and his service provider can enable this location capability.

Another forward looking and, in my opinion, wise strategy of Google has been to propose Latitude non integrated with the Gmail contact list but as a separated and independent service, with a specific location enabled buddy list. The user has total control of his privacy and he can share, set, or hide his location and even turn off Google Latitude from the privacy menu. User can also hide his location or share only a city-level location. User can set different privacy policy for every single friend.

Google pays much attention to his users’ awareness on trust and privacy information, because the real value is in his community: can a Telco Operator mimic this approach?

Yesterday I gave a talk at the Milan Science Museum on the morphing of cell phones and services into a complex ecosystem in the next decade. The occasion was the presentation of results of a European Project, http://www.angel-ist.eu/news.php , on the theme Light and Well-being.

What surprised me were the talks given by architects, by Philips and by bTicino that emphasised a new world based on ecosystem. Everything is connected, no one can play the game alone. bTicino said that they used to look at their competitors, sometimes they partnered with them to work out standards. Now they have to look to other constituencies to understand what to do and if what they are doing will be in synch with the overall evolution.

The value is shifting from the single object, service, to the context. In turns, this context is the result of the ecosystem evolution.

Light has been marked as a way to create ambients within an ambient, but that cannot be done in isolation, independently of what is inside and what will be inside that ambient. A television with an aura created by a lightning around its frame needs to interact with the lights in that ambient and change accordingly. As it is changing, it changes the ambient and this one will react. The presence of a specific person leads to a specific lightning. It was even mentioned that (medical) doctors may have a saying on the lightning since blue light lowers blood pressure…