We've been fortunate to have experienced one of the biggest technology
advancements of all time. It affects every facet of our lives. It has
changed how we communicate, how we learn, how we plan, how we play, and
how we buy things. Of course, it's the internet.
So why won't this impact navigation as well?
And quite obviously, it has. But up until now it has only scratched
the surface.
Where traditional navigation deals with the "how" of getting from one
place to another, social navigation deals with the what, why, and
especially, who. ActiveCaptain touches the beginning of this. While
it's important to know how to get to a particular anchorage or marina,
often, it's even more important to know what's there when you get
there. A guidebook can tell you if a marina has showers. ActiveCaptain
tells you whether they are clean. And often, that's a very important
consideration when planning and using your boat.
So let's take this further. Let's look at where the next step of this
is going with just a couple of example scenarios that you can expect
to experience in the near future:
1. Today when you're pulling into a marina and you're looking for
approach information, you're usually told something like, "Follow the
channel to our fuel dock; turn south into the fairway; take your second
opening to port; you're in slip 28, port-to, backing in." Of course,
we're busy arranging lines and piloting so we lose everything past,
"Follow the channel to our fuel dock."
In the future, the marina will know when you're 5 miles out. They'll be
alerted because you have a reservation. You'll receive a message, a
waypoint, and a diagram of their facility. It'll show you where your
slip is located and insert a waypoint for the actual slip position on
your charting system. It'll follow the message with a list of your
friends who are already there with their slip locations, and let you
know that they're having docktails at 5:30 on E dock; everyone is
bringing a snack to share.
2. Today, when you're about to enter a hazardous area, we all call the
boat ahead to find out the depths they're seeing. Who among us hasn't
made a VHF call to another boat for information help like this?
But why does this information sharing have to happen by chance?
In the future, as you're approaching the hazardous area, a list of
recent tracks will be presented to you. Some might have been from
boats who passed though an hour earlier. Some might be from a week
ago, and one might even be the live stream from the boat just ahead
of you. You'll have sorting and display capabilities with all depth
data normalized to tide as best as possible.
3. Today when you're looking at reviews in ActiveCaptain, it's easy to
become overwhelmed by the amount of information. There are markers now
with nearly 200 reviews. Many have more than 100. We know that on the
website, over 95% of review access only looks at the most recent 15
reviews.
What's needed is a way to have the large list of reviews work to
provide more meaning to you.
In the future, in addition to sorting the reviews by date, you'll be
able to sort the reviews by your relationships. The reviews from your
friends will have much more meaning to you than a set of reviews from
people who you're not as familiar with. And if none of your direct
friends have been there, sorting the reviews by members of a group you
belong to (perhaps the boat type you own) will speak to you more
personally about the things that matter most to you.
4. Today when you need some type of service, from mechanical, to
detailing, to canvas repair, you typically contact some of your friends
to find out where they've been happy. Or you make an open forum posting
and hope to get helpful information. Why not be able to see the
insurance brokers your friends are using? Or how about looking at your
boat owner's group to see the yards that get high reviews from the
members? These kinds of questions can change your destination plans as
much as the weather, and they're all based around the merging of social
networking into the planning and navigation process.
That's four of the social navigation features coming. We have many
additional scenarios helping to guide us with the capabilities and
basic technologies needed to implement them all. We're not the only
ones working on this but we're the only ones talking about it. Many of
these things are about to start rolling out and in 2015, we think
you'll start to wonder how you ever lived without them.
