A Chat with Rahul Sonnad, CEO of Geodelic

Sherpa is, really, a practical form of “augmented reality”

 I recently had a chance to interview Rahul Sonnad, CEO and Founder of Geodelic, Inc. and came away with a much better understanding of Sherpa and the Geodelic Network. This is the result.

Augmented Reality

“Augmented Reality” is a somewhat new buzzword floating around the Internet these days but it’s something you’ve already used and if Geodelic, Inc. has it’s way their Sherpa Application will be your daily, mobile portal to it.

Sherpa is more than a location-aware, searchless-search engine (say that six times fast) in realtiy it’s a portal to a practical augmented reality.

Wikipedia.com defines augmented reality as, “the combination of real-world and computer-generated data, where computer graphics objects are blended into real footage, in real time.” Or, in other words, ever notice that yellow line demarcating the “down” in an NFL televised game, or the blue streak left behind a puck in a televised NHL game? Well, both are basic, real world, examples of augmented reality. We’re talking about using computers to add information visually to a display that is looking out onto the world.

In the most classic sense of the term think of a viewfinder of some-sorts that is location aware and as you pan around info tags pop up telling you various bits of info, like this building is a historic site, that building there is for sale, etc all in realtime and on the fly.

Check the vid for an example:

The problem with this vision of augmented reality is that it’s extremely local and focused only augmenting the reality within eyesight of the user. Meaning, you’ll only get information on what you and the camera can see. What if there is a really good coffee house behind that historic building? If you can’t see it through the viewfinder, you don’t know about it. This is where Sherpa becomes a “practical” version of augmented reality.

Sonnad will tell you that Sherpa and the Geodelic network is a form of augmented reality, but he prefers the term “Global Mobile Web.”

“[Sherpa/Geodelic] is the most accessible metaphor for augmented reality,” Sonnad said. “The core of this idea, though, is its network. If there’s no information to go behind it, it just won’t scale.”

The Framework

There’s been a lot of coverage of Sherpa in the media since July 8, 2009 when T-Mobile announced the myTouch 3G and it’s “T-Mobile exclusive” app. Sherpa has been most widely described as a searchless-search engine that learns your likes and dislikes and sorts the results accordingly. While this is certainly part of the story of Sherpa it’s far from the whole story.

The real guts of the app is actually the Geodelic Network from which Sherpa draws its information.

According to the Geodelic website, “Serving the App is a network of location partners and theme partners. Our publishing system allows businesses to build ‘Onsites’ that promote their brands and services via mobile devices. Location targeted marketing is triggered by vicinity and relevance.”

Once you get where you’re going, however, is where the potential of Sherpa really begins to take shape, “We’ve partnered with Yelp and licensed with Citysearch to help provide content,” Sonnad said. “But the key here is to get a system in place where businesses can publish information [formatted for Sherpa]. We don’t want to be a content provider.” Meaning once you are where you want to be Sherpa will, eventually, be able to switch to a localised portal to information relevant to that location. More on this a little later in the article.

However, the basic structure of the app/network relationship is this: The Geodelic Network is an aggregate source of all kinds of information on locations and businesses. The information is pulled from public sources, licensed sources and from businesses themselves by way of self-publishing.

 The Sherpa App is then the end user’s point of access to this network and filters and displays this information based on the location of the device and the learned user’s likes and dislikes.

The Sherpa App

Sherpa is aware of your location, when it’s running, and constantly updates a list of stores, restaurants and a whole gaggle of other amenities as you move from place to place. You have the ability to view these results in a carousel form, a list form or a map form and filter the results via categories. While this in and of itself is interesting there are other apps out there that already do this type of search and display, think Aloqa.

What makes Sherpa different is the Geodelic Network.

When you boot up Sherpa it starts pulling your location from the GPS. Once it figures out where you are it starts displaying everything around you weighting the results between relevance and distance and then filtering those results based on your likes and dislikes.

This is part of the “learning process” talked about so much and there is actually more to the process than previously noted. In actuality there are two learning processes going on simultaneously. First there is a system wide learning process, as certain locations are “thumbed up” by users it will start to rise to the top of searches. Say you’ve never needed a locksmith and you search for one, because you’ve never liked or disliked one Sherpa will pull the most popular and closest locksmith to you and display it first. Overriding this and or working in conjunction with this is the personal learning curve where your individual copy of Sherpa filters the system by your likes and dislikes. Again, say you used a certain lock smith more than the system’s “popular” locksmith, Sherpa will display your favorite instead of the system favorite.

“It should take anywhere between five and 20 sessions for the app to start really filtering results based on what’s it’s learned,” Sonnad said. “But it may not be that obvious as the personal and aggregate customization is pretty transparent.”

This all happens at the application level and mostly without actually typing in a keyword (although that option is available too). “By default we [Sherpa] give you results,” Sonnad said. “Unlike say an application like Google maps, where you search then have to sort through results, Sherpa just gives you the results.”

Sherpa Experiences

Eventually there will be three levels of the Sherpa experience.

The first, which is what’s rolling out at launch on the myTouch 3G, is the “General Experience.” This is the general listing of everything around you filtered and sorted as you move around.

 The second level is the “Customized Location based” experience, or what the website refers to as “Onsite.” “We want to be able to seamlessly transfer between location results and localised information,” Sonnad said.

What this means is once you reach a location that has published custom information on the Geodelic Network, Sherpa will load that custom information/experience for you. If you find yourself in an area where GPS or AGPS can’t find you, say inside a lobby, you will also be able to manually enter these experiences.

So, say Target has decided to publish a custom experience, when you walk into a Target Sherpa will then load Target’s experience for you. This means that now the relevant information displayed will be things like store specials, coupons, maybe the latest TV ad via streaming video. The possibilities are truly endless and really up to the business to organize.

According to the website, “Location partners such as theme parks, hotels or malls, provide a hyper-local experience to onsite users. The Geodelic network provides customized mapping and location triggered coupons. Not only are businesses able to directly communicate with customers, but users can now navigate through large establishments easily and can enjoy all the amenities, specials and points of interest the location has to offer.”

The third Sherpa experience is the “Themed Experience.” Again, according to the website, “Geodelic provides a powerful network to theme partners, leveraging their brand and content to extend their reach to 3G mobile consumers. We look to power a variety of content from working with celebrity magazines to map star homes to using national newspaper content to map and promote local concerts. Authors, movie studios, cable networks, travel guides can join our network as a means to translate their content and reach their audience via the Global Mobile Web.”

For example, Greenopiais a themed version of Sherpa available on the iPhone right now. This version of Sherpa “has ratings for more than 1,000 green stores, restaurants and services in the Los Angeles area, making it easier than ever to shop, eat, and live green. Just launch the app and automatically discover green-rated locations (and non-rated as well) in the greater Los Angeles area, with reviews, information, and helpful links,” according to the website.

“Eventually a user will be able to search themes from Sherpa and load them,” Sonnad said. Meaning the “stock” version of Sherpa shipping on the myTouch 3G will be able to load the Greenopia theme and then switch back at some point after launch.

“Location based experiences and themed experiences will be available sooner than later for Sherpa,” Sonnad said. “We’re launching with the general experience but, well before the end of the year and possibly within 90-days, we’ll release some major brandname experiences.”

Sonnad would not mention who those brands would be but did allude to airport and flight information being one of the first released.

The Future of Sherpa

The future of Sherpa holds plenty of potential.

“We certainly are thinking of Social Networking as a means to filter results,” Sonnad said. “Again we don’t want to be a content provider, but we certainly are looking at the ability to add comments and linking to sites like Facebook.”

Sonnad also said that the response from potential businesses has been overwhelmingly positive, “We’ve been pushing it for about six months and it’s not a hard sell. The bottleneck is the actual publishing. We’re going to work with the first few brands pretty hands-on. After we get a process worked out – we want the process to be as easy as the businesses just going to our site to post their information – adding brands should speed up. Once things are up and working I think if it takes 100 units to build your website it should only take about 30 units to reorganize that info for Sherpa.”

Platforms

Currently Geodelic only has plans to support the Android OS and the iPhoneOSX. As already noted, Greenopia is available now through iTunes or the Geodelic website. Sherpa will be available at launch of the myTouch 3g. The myTouch will be available in stores on August 5, 2009. ”Right now we just see the most growth on Android and iPhone,” Sonnad said.

“We don’t have any real plans to develop any other apps in the near future,” Sonnad said. “This project is so big that we could easily spend five years or more on it. It’s like a Google search size project.”

Wrap-up

So, there you have it, take all these pieces and put them together and you get a version of augmented reality that’s actually practical and useful. Instead of only knowing whats in your extremely immediate vicinity, Sherpa is an app that will constantly aggregate all the businesses around you and serve them up to you based on your own preferences. But, more than that, it will in the near future allow for things like custom information on a specific location. Or, let you load up a custom tour of a location. Or provide an entire custom theme for, well ,whatever. 

Granted a lot of these features will not be active with Sherpa’s launch but if they roll out like Sonnad outlines Sherpa could rapidly become the “it” thing in the mobile app world.

I’ll be getting my new myTouch 3G in the next few days and in addition to some hands-on reviews of the phone I’ll post my experiences with Sherpa in a running review over the course of several months.