On When vs. Where

Thanks to Harold Ship, I came across a post by Bill Lee entitled "Investing in 2013: It's about time not location".  Lee claims that while there have been much traction around location based solutions,  the location by itself has less value that the time of occurrence of past or future events.  In the figure above, it might be more interesting WHEN Achilles is going to bypass the tortoise than where it is going to happen.  Saying that a traffic congestion is going to occur at a certain location might be meaningless without prediction about the timing of the traffic congestion.   It is more valuable to know when the delayed aircraft is going to land than just to know where it is now, it is more valuable to know when the technician is expected to arrive than just to know where he is now.  I don't really care where the guy who delivers my pizza is now, but I definitely want to know when he is going to arrive.   Lee claims that in the USA alone businesses lose $90 Billion annually due to people running late, whether it is the employee, or the technician for whom the employee waits at home.   The claim is that time-based services is a good topic for 2013 investors to pursue, whether location is involved (spatiotemporal capabilities) or not.   As the timing of these time-based services is associated with current or predicted events,  event processing is a key for such services.  I'll write more on time-based services later.