With the advancement of technology, human history has been shifting from traditional industry to an economy based on information computerisation. There are a lot of new technology inventions with the addition use of contextual computing, these do change we humans’ life and bring us to a new era – The Digital Age.
Figure 1. Marketing in the Information Age
With the new computing style – Contextual Computing, the situational and environmental information about people, places and things are used to anticipate immediate needs and proactively enrich usable content, functions and experiences. (Ref. from lecture notes) Different applications are having their own unique usage:
For example iBeacon Technology, it can help to track with a high accuracy when compared to traditional location detection ones that includes Wi-Fi positioning and GPS. It applies the radio signals to detect nearby devices and can obtain information such as users’ interest in different products or reminding users with different important information. This can save up a lot of processes in collecting information through face-to-face methods and at the same time users can noted their activities by the simple application (including things purchased or items bought which can remind users on the status of each items especially food and drinks). This simple application surely brings infinite benefits to human.
In this new era, contextual computing will be dominant pattern in technology world and there are still a lot of room for improvements .I believe more and more new applications using contextual computing will be developed in a short while and it will surely lead a better world.
Ref: Figure 1 – http://www.powerretail.com.au/pureplay/marketing-in-the-information-age/
TSE PIK KEI (Betty)'s blogspot 
Yes, contextual computing are improved and it will let our life more convenient and effective. In the past few year, we are glad to have GPS to help us go to our location correctly and quickly, but quickly, we have iBeacon to find the more accurate location in small room, and this technology are improved and join our life in the near future! It seems our life quality will be improved fast with the help of contextual computing.
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Well, I do agree contextual computing will be dominant in future. However, I think that there are still a long way to go. There is two major obstacles.One is privacy problem. Users are required to sacrifice their personal data like GPS location in exchange for the services. Then the user may ask that, is this worth to trade with the services that make our life more convenient? It is hard to say.
Another reason is that is the environment, users ready to adopt such a new change. For example, Amazon GO is convenient to human-life as the users just take the products from Amazon GO and do need need to check-out as the application does. But do the users really think like that? They may prefer the traditional way of check-out as they do not want to use digital money (i.e. credit card).
In my opinions, for a world to make a great change like adopting contextual computing in everywhere, a great leader is required, like Steve Jobs. Without him, I think our life today will be totally different from now. We may be still using Pocket-PC instead of smartphone.
I really hope that a great leader will soon come out and change the world again. What do you think?
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Contextual computing does aids improving our life, such as the iBeacon technology mentioned in your post. iBeacon technology can do a more precise and accurate location positioning than Wifi and GPS. Besides giving benefit to the commercial world (such as providing product or sales information to the pass-by people with the specific mobile application installed in their phone), it can also be applied to the education field, especially for helping the students with special education needs.
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I believe contextual computing can do more than iBeacon. Also the scope is larger than marketing. As the election is close by, a lot of surveys about people’s viewpoint have been done. However, if we wisely use the contextual computing, it would be a good way to collect opinions of people in the future.
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It’s obvious that lots of systems and applications decided to adopt contextual computing for providing better service, for instance Netflix and Amazon utilize user’s information about hobbies and preference to recommend products, Facebook further analyse users’ social network and “liked information” and propose relevant information or advertisements. Personalization brings a better user experience without doubt.
However, some critics concern security problem of contextual computing. Extracted information of a user may involve sensitive information. If these information are being stolen and used by law-breakers it would bring serious consequences.
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Thank you for your sharing. I think you have made a point that contextual computing will be the new trend in technology. However, there are plenty of improvements can be made before it becomes the dominant pattern.
Contextual computing required real-time data, and also users’ data like their preferences and different behaviors. One of the main concern of contextual computing is the privacy of users. It is difficult to protect the privacy of users while their data is used for computation. Users may not want to expose their information. For example, I always turn off the GPS function in my smartphone. I don’t want GPS locating my whereabout every second. I think that if there is a leak of the GPS information, it is possible to find out my life pattern, or where I live, study or hang out just by analyzing the information. I feel insecure about GPS. I only turn it on when I need to use it. Contextual computing benefits our life in so many ways. It would be more assuring if the privacy of users can be protected with various measures.
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Those are what I think too. Contextual computing, also called context-aware computing, is the use of software and hardware to automatically collect and analyze data about a device’s surroundings in order to present relevant, actionable information to the end user.
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