Location, Location

Phones depend on locatability. Adam Fisher reports in the NYT that Google’s next step is to make everything locatble:

“All of our stuff will know where it is and that awareness will imbue the real world with some of the power of the virtual. Your house keys will tell you that theyre still on your desk at work. Your tools will remind you that they were lent to a friend. And your car will be able to drive itself on an errand to retrieve both your keys and your tools.”

The maps necessary to make this work will be essential to “everything that moves”: “Tomorrows map . . . will be so fundamental to their operation that the map will, in effect, be their operating system. A map is to location-awareness as Windows is to a P.C. And as the history of Microsoft makes clear, a company that controls the operating system controls just about everything. So the competition to make the best maps, the thinking goes, is more than a struggle over who dominates the trillion-dollar smartphone market; its a contest over the future itself.”

Good news for the forgetful, but good news with an Orwellian aftertaste.