Another look at Xtify
It had been a while since I had met with a company called Xtify, and in this industry it seems that things are changing so quickly that it really pays to check back in more often to be sure a company still does what you remember them doing the last time you met. It happened for me last year with Placecast, when they seemed to switch gears between their local ad network and local creative optimization technology, to increasingly focus on mobile location based shop alerts.
Last year when I met with Xtify, I roughly understood their business as one which took location data from a mobile device and published it up to the cloud where it could then be distributed to other web and mobile applications for use in providing location relevant services. With so much happening around the industry allowing devices to get their own location right there on the device I couldn’t wrap my ahead around the need for the service beyond some niche applications… and maybe I wasn’t alone, because the company is now pursuing a new and different tact.
Last week I was fortunate enough to attend the inaugural meet up here in the NYC area for LBS developers, where both Cloudmade and Xtify gave some great presentations. If you’re in the NYC area I highly recommend trying to attend, even if you’re not a developer… I am not a developer and I still got a lot out of it.
So I discovered during their presentation that Xtify, has turned to focus on the more broad area of messaging with a particular emphasis on a platform for managing geo-location triggered “push” messaging delivered into mobile devices without using SMS or email, “the first push notification service for Android” according to their site.
So what this all means is that if you’re developing a mobile application and want to send location relevant messages directly to the users of your application either in-app or via the Phones native operating system notification capabilities, the Xtify platform will implement and manage this for you. Application developers will basically integrate the Xtify SDK with the application which will then operate in the background handling responsibilities like getting a devices location and sending it back to web servers, checking the location versus various rules on what, if any, messages should be delivered, and then delivering and triggering the notification back at the device.
So let’s say you’re in charge of running the Zagat mobile application and you want to introduce a new capability where users of the application can receive special offers from restaurants when they’re either at the restaurant or nearby… Xtify could provide a turnkey way to integrate this messaging within the app and to notify Zagat app owners of the offer when they in a restaurant or nearby. Similarly an app like Sense Networks Cab Sense, which gives you insights into the best nearby street corners to hail a taxi cab, may be able to push out useful travel related information like a big U.N. General Assembly meeting happening today on the east side of Manhattan or the closure of the West Side Highway for a bike race on Sunday, the kind of stuff local taxi riders may want to know about.
These alerts can provide a lot of value to consumers, but also help the app developer stay top of mind in what is the increasingly competitive market for attention among the growing number of applications out there. There is of course also some significant potential for abuse here, where unscrupulous, or even just near sighted app developers could flood customers with unwanted messages clogging up their notifications in box.
Now the system seems designed to let some authoritative source like an app developer send out commercial or application oriented messages to ‘customers’ based on a number of rules, including location. But the founder behind Xtify, also started a location based dating app called MeetMoi which is where Xtify grew out of, and some of the potential related to rigging the system to allow anyone in a geographic area to push out a local area message seems pretty intriguing. Applications like Hot Potato are trying to create specific platforms for virtual mobile socializing around events (both virtual and physical worlds) and Anttenna is trying to similarly virtually connect buyers and sellers of goods that are nearby like Craigslist… so you might think that there is an opportunity to create a more generic local area messaging service similar to the direction Twitter is going with its geo initiatives. You can see a lot of scenarios where a drunk guy in a bar can message out that he needs a ride home to the west side of town, or a conference organizer can message out that after the event a sponsor is buying drinks at Bob’s bar next door, or a mom at a theme park that loses track of their kid can message out ‘oh crap, I can’t find my son Billy he has a green hat and red shirt, please bring him to the ferris wheel asap if you see him.’
The sort of stuff that happens by hyper local word of mouth now, could certainly use its mobile and digital equivalent, and something like Xtify may be able to help make it happen.
Check out the slides below for the full presentation from last week’s meetup.
Comments
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http://topsy.com/www.locationawhere.com/24/06/2010/companies/xtify?utm_source=pingback&utm_campaign=L2 Tweets that mention Xtify, local area messaging, Twitter Geo, Location Based Marketing, Anttenna, Hot Potato, Placecast — Topsy.com
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http://www.adexchanger.com/ad-exchange-news/brand-dollars/ Unilever Doubling Down On Digital; Right Media Open Starts July 19; WPP Group Seeing Ad Upswing
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http://www.adzcentral.com/technology/unilever-right-media-wpp-and-more Adz – Unilever, Right Media, WPP and More
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http://it-box.aawnews.com/product_detail.php/pid/12473-41/pa/Turnkey-Site---Dating-Service It Box @ All Around the World News
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