Digital traces and tourism

Yesterday in Sierre, I gave a talk about the use and implications of digital traces for tourism services. Slides are on Slideshare.

The point of the talk was the following: we’re seeing the advent of location-based services and augmented reality applications. But those are only the “interface” aspect of a broader phenomena: the aggregation and use of digital data to create new sorts of services. Indeed digital objects used by people such as mobile phones and cameras leave a large amount of traces: the phone can be geolocated through cell-phone antennas or GPS and digital cameras take pictures that people can upload on web sharing platforms such as Flickr. All of this enable new application that allow to count tourists or provide them with new sorts of services. Based on existing experiments, the presentation addressed how the tourism industry can benefit from these digital traces to obtain new representations of tourists activities and to build up new services based on them.

Thanks Roland Schegg for the invitation.