GigWalk, Centzy and Locu: Meeting Demand for Better HyperLocal Data
This week there is a LBS Apps developer meetup happening here in NYC that will be focusing on working with POI and venue data… an area that has always been of particular interest for me dating back five or six years ago driving along Central Park South with my Garmin Nuvi and noticing all the garage and auto repair places that Garmin said were there but that didn’t reality exist. I am still not sure if it was just a GIS nerds’ idea of a joke, or was the state of data really just that bad. Well fast forward to today and some respects we’ve made a lot of progress, and in other ways we’re still at square one. Read more
Euclid Elements: Google Analytics for Retail Stores
So the folks that brought us Google Analytics, have stepped in to the ‘location based’ world to offer a similar type of analytics to brick and mortar retailers.
The company Euclid Elements uses a bunch of wi-fi receiver devices plugged into the wall inside the retail store which in turn hangs out and listen for wi-fi pings from customer phones looking to make a connection. No connection ever takes place, but data about “signal strength, ping frequency, and proximity to other sensors” are all captured from customers’ wi-fi enabled devices.
All the pinging can cover a wide area reaching out and around the retail store itself and the company expects that a typical store may have between 40-70% of customers walking around with wi-fi enabled devices.
So what is there for a retailer to learn for this data? Well plenty according to the company. Read more
Sonic Notify: Taking Hyper Local Technology To New Levels of Local-ness
So I got the question the other day that was one of those deceptively simple questions: “So what do you think are the most interesting and exciting location based businesses you’ve seen out there recently?” And immediately a couple dozen companies popped into my mind, and I immediately started hedging, well there are a lot of them, which are interesting and exciting all for different reasons.
I happen to be particularly interested in the area of local and location based search and data, but since I had already talked a lot about companies dealing with data like PlaceIQ, Retailigence, Locu and HyperPublic, I instead ended up talking about an offering called Sonic Notify which was created by a NYC digital “ideas agency” called DenseBrain.
To grossly simplify it, Read more
Matchbook: Save, Tag & Share Locations
So it’s been ages since I’ve posted something here… not that there is not a lot of interesting stuff going on these days in the world of LBS… really quite the opposite… there is so much going on that it’s difficult to find the time to think and write about any of it. It seems that every day someone comes up with a new and unique way to take location and improve on or re-invent a capability that they hope consumers will flock to.
Last week someone told me about a new one called Matchbook
, that launched a couple of months back that probably went under the radar of most people, heck there are now 425k apps in the Apple App store, so how you do get ON the radar of anyone these days is another issue altogether!
The reason Matchbook stood out for me is because it is solving what seems to be such an obvious problem, and is something I had thought many times needed to be built… but was always stumped by how you actually get people to use and re use it and how’d you’d make any money from having built it. But I am really glad these guys built it and I hope to become a regular user.
So here is what Matchbook is all about: Simply put, it allows you to store and tag places you find out about so you can remember them later, or more easily share “your” places with friends. That’s really it, sweet and simple.
For example, let’s say you walk by a shoe boutique Read more
Local Digital and Location Aware Advertising Ecosystem
Click image at right to enlarge
Waa-Waa… I want my own ad ecosystem chart, too!
If you’re in the digital display advertising world, you’ve no doubt referenced that awesome (and awesomely complex) LUMA partners chart of the display ad ecosystem. And you may not be aware, but Marc Theerman over at AdMeld did an equally awesome one for mobile display advertising, “paying homage” to the Luma Partners chart.
Well to rip off a good idea even further, I hacked one together for the local and location based advertising ecosystem… (damn I hope I don’t have to pay them royalties!).
Accurate? Yeah its ok, although some folks on the chart do many different things in different categories, so sometimes I just picked the bucket that I thought fit them best.
Complete? No way! It’s a big ecosystem, and a small chart. Many different players aren’t represented here… this is just a sampling… I tried to take some of the names that I know best and put them in the big major categories.
Missing something important? Well maybe. My background is generally around all things ‘location based’, so I scoured reliable sources like Borrell, BIA Kelsey and Greg Sterling’s incredible blog for much of the rest… and think I have most of the big stuff covered. But absolutely, please shoot me a note if I screwed something up big time or you have other suggestions: ben@locationawhere.com .
For those out there that can’t tell their Orange Soda from their Hot Potatos, hopefully this at least gives you a place to start!
PlaceIQ: Contextualizing Location For Advertisers
I’ve been involved with a company PlaceIQ in one way or another for the better part of a year now and as their product formally launches along with the Where2.0 conference this year, it seemed like as good a time as any to do a little blurb on what it is they do and why I think its so interesting.
You’re currently not going to get much information from the website yet, other the fact that they “transform location into context”. So what does that mean exactly?
Well it may help to back up and think about how context comes into play in the world in general. Read more
Qualcomm AllJoyn: Retail In-Store Service Portal
Last month at the NYC LBS apps developer meet up, we had a presentation from a company called Lokast which had an interesting app that created an-ad hoc hyper local peer to peer social network. What the hell is THAT you might ask? Well essentially if you are in a room and fire up the app, and other folks in the same room do the same, well you can see them. You, as well as they, can share stuff like who they are, what they’re up to and can also share things like media files and contacts, etc.
A quick search on Google and I noticed that they had a partnerships with Qualcomm, as an early user of an open source project called AllJoyn, which seems to power some of the wifi and Bluetooth side of the technology behind Lokast. What the hell does Alljoyn do, well I can’t tell you in any great detail for sure, since I opted not to spend 2 hours reading through all the documentation and SDKs, but per their FAQs it’s “peer-to-peer technology that enables ad hoc, proximity-based, device-to-device communication without the use of an intermediary server… that will enhance the user experience by simplifying how devices interact with one another.” Read more
Local and Hyperlocal Search, Not Really Google’s to Lose?
You hear so much about location based apps and social networking tied back to location, but significantly less so about location based search. Everyone seems to just assume that its going to be Google, or maybe Bing stepping up to own the location based search opportunity. But I think there is a nice opportunity for a start up to step in… because as with most every company that has seen some success in doing things a certain way, it seems quite difficult for them to re think the way their business should operate to address a new market… generally preferring to shove the new thing into the way they’ve always done the old thing. And I think that’s going to happen again with local search.
One of the pieces of news that was making the rounds over the past week, at least in my little corner of the twitter-sphere was news that Watson a computer system baked up by the fun folks at IBM beat the pants off two of the all time best players on the popular trivia show Jeopardy. Like its predecessor Deeper Blue in 1997 who beat the pants off of the then world’s best human chess champion… Watson was designed from the ground up to perform a specific task, and to do it quite well thanks to modern capabilities around processing power, data storage and hundreds of simultaneous algorithms tasked with interpreting the natural human language.
But reading a bit more of the press about the event, something caught my eye, a reference to the fact that Watson doesn’t even use the Internet. Read more
People, Places and Now With Retailigence, Things
So in the virtual world, what you may like to search for could be pretty damn near anything under the sun from the mating habits of the African tree frog, to “Google stalking” someone… anyone from an ex-girlfriend to a new potential employee.
And most people seem happy enough that the plumbing behind Google does a pretty good job of spinning all the relevant information from everywhere on the web around like a centrifuge, drawing the good stuff that we want to the top where we can easily get to it.
But the Google centrifuge can only work its magic on the stuff that is present in the tube. And while there is a huge amount and diversity of information out there on the web to be spun, what tends to get put out there Read more
Foodspotting: There’s an app for that, Really?!
So I started this post well over two months ago, after learning about a new app called Foodspotting that presented here in New York at a meet-up group that’s quite popular, and regularly pulls in 700-800 people. I didn’t RSVP in time and the event was sold out and I didn’t have a chance to attend and see the demo in person so I tried to load it up and give it a trial run after the fact. Well that didn’t work out so well, something to do with the iPhone OS changeover or something, but alas a few months and a new release later its up and working for me.
When I first read the description of Foodspotting, my reaction was ‘really?! There is an app for that?’ I have occasionally seen folks sitting at a restaurant taking pictures of their food, but frankly I think it’s kinda weird… I like food and eat out regularly, and even consider myself a very minor league foodie… but I am sorry taking pictures of what I am eating just seems strange. Read more
