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Metaplaces September 2009 (13 Presentations):

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Where2.0 2009  (3 Presentations)

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Opus Research/Internet2Go Webcast – November 2009With Full Audio at http://www.brighttalk.com/webcasts/7215/play

Pelago @ Where2.0 May 2009 (Video)

Location Based Social Networking – Where2.0 May 2009 (Video)

CrunchUp: GeoStreams Panel Nov 20, 2009

http://en.oreilly.com/where2009/public/schedule/proceedings

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“Garmin Mobile XT is easy-to-use and affordable, with no monthly charges,” said Charles Morse, Garmin’s director of mobile and PND marketing. “It’s a one-time investment that gives customers full-featured GPS navigation on their smartphone whenever and wherever they need it, including areas outside of wireless network coverage.”

Garmin Mobile XT is preloaded on a microSD card (with miniSD and standard SD card converter) that includes Garmin navigation software for the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico, or Europe. Once the card is inserted into a compatible smartphone with embedded GPS, the Garmin Mobile XT application will launch automatically. Customers are then greeted with Garmin’s intuitive “Where to?” and “View map” welcome screen. With a few screen or button taps, customers can easily route to a specific street address or choose from millions of points of interest — such as restaurants, hotels, ATMs, and gas stations. In addition to turn-by-turn, voice prompted directions, users will also see their exact position on a detailed moving map. If a turn is missed along the way, a new route will be recalculated automatically.

Thanks to Garmin’s vast product line and ability to leverage technology from the other GPS markets Garmin serves, Garmin Mobile XT builds in unique features such as support for travel guides, topo maps and custom points of interest, as well as advanced features such as route planning with saved routes, custom avoidances and visible trip logs. Garmin Mobile XT users also have the benefit of routing to the location of a contact in their phone’s address book or to a calendar appointment (on supported platforms).

Garmin Mobile XT also includes PeerPoints(TM), a powerful feature enabling users to send their position to any other phone as well as view and navigate to the location of other Garmin Mobile XT users. PeerPoints is the perfect way to keep track of friends and family and navigate to them with the touch of a button.

In addition to navigation, Garmin Mobile XT includes free access to Garmin Online(TM) so that customers have useful, constantly-updating information at their fingertips like real-time traffic, fuel prices, hotel prices and weather forecasts. The real-time traffic service from traffic.com identifies accidents, road construction or other incidents affecting traffic, and routes users around the congestion. The fuel price feature displays the filling station’s name, fuel price, type of fuel, and distance to the station (U.S. only). Garmin Mobile XT users can also help customers find hotel information, ratings and discounts from hotels.com. Real-time weather information provided by Custom Weather lets users see weather forecasts at their current location or anywhere in the world. Garmin Online is accessed through the phone’s wireless data service.

Garmin Mobile XT is available now for a suggested retail price of $99 in the U.S. Garmin Mobile XT products purchased in the U.S. include maps of all North America. In Europe, Garmin Mobile XT includes map data for 30 countries, a feature that makes it a valuable software to GPS-enabled mobile phones UK. Map data is provided by NAVTEQ(TM) — a world leader in premium-quality mapping.

Visit the Garmin Mobile Buyer’s Guide, http://www.garmin.com/mobile, for more information or to purchase Garmin Mobile XT.

I think it is tough to read too much into these types of surveys, when you’re dealing with new technology and the general computing public because as Henry Ford said “ If you asked people what they wanted they would say ‘faster horses’”.

Nonetheless, here are some of the highlight that I could distill from the results: 

- The big finding seems to be that once receiving a text alert from a merchant, 33% of respondents felt that they would be more likely to visit the physical store and 28% felt more likely to purchase the product promoted in the store. 

- As you might expect young people are most receptive to receiving opt in location triggered messaging.  Heck 1 in 3 teenagers sends over 100 text messages a day, so you can imagine how the occasional one thrown in there from Abercrombie and Fitch wouldn’t necessarily be a unwanted interruption from gossiping about Molly’s new haircut.  The study also found that 35-44 year olds are increasingly (6pts) more receptive than they were to the idea roughly a year ago.

- The survey also miraculously uncovers that fact that men like, and are most interested in receiving alerts on, electronics and sporting goods, ditto for women with beauty and apparel. So if a girl walks by a Home Depot, and is opted in, please don’t send her the power drill ad… you know they have a whole home furnishing section in there too!  Not sure what the point was here, but just know your customer and keep it useful and relevant seems to be the takeaway.

- It seems that nowadays when you’re talking with joe public about the subject of location based marketing, you’re less likely to get the response of “OMG! they’re tracking me, that’s creepy”… ok so you’ll probably still get that a lot, but the survey found that 37% of people thought receiving location messages ‘could be useful’ and 29% thought “it could be interesting”.  Meanwhile, 27% of respondents flat out said “I don’t like the idea of marketing messages being sent to me based on where I am.” And no, Smith and Wesson shouldn’t be allowed to target ads to that last group with texts saying “BWA-HA-HA, I KNOW WHERE YOU ARE!” even if they opt-in.

- Since this was a shopping survey, much of the focus and interest was on receiving promotions and offers. Those related to Groceries (68%),  Restaurant Chains (64%)  entertainment/movie (58%) and Fast Food (50%) topped the list of categories of interest shown by all consumers (did they survey these guys right before lunch!).  And presumably because of the economy many folks are doing more looking for coupons and promotions these days, particularly young ladies and their desire for grocery coupons (85%!).

-  The survey also shows that 14% of respondents say it’s extremely or very important to be able to search for a retail location using their smartphone.

It’s good to get some real formal research regarding consumers’ perceptions around this market.  Check out all the slides from the presentation below.

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.

Despite claims of hundreds of thousands if not millions of users across these apps, the vast majority of my friends aren’t using it so it can get a little boring.

Recently I’ve found myself playing more and more with MyTown, last night as I waited for my wife outside Mermaid Inn, a neighborhood restaurant, I had time to check in on all three, but ended up spending 15 minutes collecting rent and upgrading a bunch of business I own on MyTown… frankly I am not sure how much longer I’ll be doing that either but it’s not a bad way to pass 15-20 minutes. And I did take advantage of the special offer that was running on Foursqaare for a free side dish at Mermaid Inn, the restaurant we were headed to anyway… a little surprise free side order of onion rings popping up in your day is never a bad thing. So maybe I’ll stick with it all a bit longer.

On a random technical side note, I did notice that the MyTown geo location feature is noticable more off than folks like Gowalla and Foursquare. Standing on Amsterdam avenue in front of three restaurants Mermaid Inn, B Cafe and Rancho Cafe I noticed that B Cafe was MIA while the other two were right there near the top of the list on MyTown with their little green indicator lights on. After a search I found the restaurant B Cafe, and they had the correct street address, yet still MyTown thought I was nowhere near the place… and it’s not the first time I’ve had to use search to find nearby places on MyTown… definitely some kinks to get worked out there.

I’ve found myself recently thinking alot about all these folks from places like Gowalla, Foursquare, myTown, Loopt.. not to mention the bigger guys like Patch, Google, and Yelp trying to sell in digital advertising to local retailers and some of the challenges they must face. 

On Greg Sterling’s blog Screenwerk he posted a video from a company called WebVisible that speaks directly to this challenge, where many local retailers talk about the various ways they think customer find their businesses (walk-ins and yellow pages types stuff) and then consumers talk about how they really find businesses in this modern age (“the Google” and the Internet). Check out the video below… the bit near the end about one flower shop setting up a page on HappyFace (er Facebook?) is kinda telling. Good luck to the FourSquare sales guys calling on that lady!

You may have wondered what the founders of Symbian were up to these days, well it seems that they’re developing iPhone applications. Roger Nolan and Jane Sales formed development shop Ambient Industries and the first product to be released is named flook… as they describe it “the worlds first serendipitous discovery engine”.

While not easy to categorize at first glance, Flook is part browser, part twitter, part FourSquare all rolled into one from people who “hate maps and pins on small phones”.

Flook is current available for free but only on the iPhone. The foundation of the service is the ability to create and view nearby “cards” tethered to a geographic place. The cards are presented in the Flook “broswer window” in the form of a “stream” of nearby cards that you flick through one by one.

In a way the cards represent the new geographic web page and Flook is the browser, bringing beautiful and simple cards/pages of interesting new things from the world around them including a picture, description and map, as well as comments from the Flook community. Cards can be either created by users or by the Flook staff… and generally are descriptive of a place that someone found interesting, but can also include upcoming events scheduled to take place at a certain place.

A recent stream for me in NYC included a number of cards created by users for local bars and restaurants, others highlighting interesting architecture including over a dozen photos of various parts of the new Highline elevated park in Chelsea… I also got a card promoting SMX East the search engine marketing conference held recently at the Jacob Javits Center.  I also took a stab at creating a few myself, on a trip to the Children’s Museum of Manhattan with my kids.

If you find a card that you like, you can find who created that card and follow them to see what other cards they may create that you may also like ala Twitter, and like Foursquare, Flook has developed a gaming mechanism to encourage folks to create cards and reward those power users who create a lot of interesting cards.

Down the road it looks as though the company has API’s planned to allow developers to integrate cards into their own sites or maybe create games around creating and collecting cards. Quite conceivably, Flook could be a platform for city guides to quickly and easily publish up virtual mobile location  aware tour guides or for event companies to create fun scavenger hunts or bar crawls.

As the service just officially launched a few days ago, its a bit difficult to picture what Flook will become when it grows up. There is an emphasis in the service on the serendipitous way in which places are ‘discovered’ by merely flipping through nearby cards… which can be viewed as either very cool or a bit disorganized depending on how you expect to want to use the service… if you’re a type A personality,  this service may not be for you.   There is technology behind the scenes which is supposed to learn from all the flipping and looking at cards to determine what you may like and not like, and what you may be interested in seeing next… which should prevent it from just becoming a massive dumping ground for random thought as we’ve seen with applications like Nearby from Platial.

Overall, like Foursquare it’s a refreshingly different way to leverage the power of location and social networks, and good to see folks going in a slightly new direction with this sort of thing.

A company called HelloMetro was busy trying to build up city oriented sites to compete with Citysearch… although it sounds like they’re still a long way off for the moment in terms of size.

The biggest booths seemed reserved for folks trying to create local business directories for consumers like Local.com and Localpages.com and also ReachLocal.com which is trying to create a platform for buying and selling local ads across the existing and search, directory and display ecosystem.

In the current age of search and with all the innovations that the existing search engines are doing to infer local intent (Google 10-pack), the idea of going back and creating a local directory seems so old school, but there they are.

Here is a drill down on what I picked up about Local.com

There are a couple of different components to their business:

Part 1 Local.com the consumer portal.
So not surprisingly people aren’t consulting the Yellow Pages as much anymore to find a businesses in their town… and in the ideal world of the folks at local.com, you’d now simply go to local.com to find your neighborhood plumber or window washer. And if that were to happen en masse local.com would be getting a nice chunk of the current $12-13 billion or so spent in yellow pages advertising every year.
It makes sense, except that folks are generally turning to traditional search engines like Google and Bing as the first place they go looking for local business information… and those search giants have most notable stepped up their local search game in the past year instead.

Local.com triple dips with every search query (see presentation at end of post)  first presenting Yahoo result followed by Superpages and finally their own internally sold business listings. And it’s important to note that over half of those search queries aren’t happening organically… Local.com spent $19 million in ads on other search engines in order to bring in $39 million in gross revenue (before rev shares/commissions). So lets say for example that they can buy the term “San Diego Florists” for $1 per click on Google but can then turn around and earn 75 cents from the Yahoo listing on Local.com and another 50 cents from the Superpages listing and an additional 25 cents from a Local.com direct deal with San Diego area florists… that’s not a bad scheme… $1 going out and $1.50 coming in.

Part 2. The Local.com Syndication Network.
The local syndication network is essentially the same offering as on local.com but instead provided as a white labeled solution to local media companies like newspapers and radio stations. So the local newspaper in Little Rock can offer the local search capability on their site and also presumably leverage their ad sales connection in the local community and profit from bringing in new clients.
Local has some patents in this area and has struck a few licensing deals related to helping improve local search… but the revenue from this is quite small so far.

While I would agree with the company that this is not purely a search arbitrage company, there is a fair amount of organic traffic coming directly to the site and its network… but you can’t help but wonder what will happen as folks like Google continue to improve on their ability to deliver local oriented search result… will a stand alone local business finder still be necessary? Is this company just providing a stop gap solution to solve a temporary problem caused by the shortcomings of the major search engines to effectively handle local oriented searches?
One very telling stat in my mind is that the company currently makes just 27 cents per unique visitor, this is compared to $4-5 in ad revenue for a good quality vertical content site, and the double digits figures that someone like Google makes. In theory the highly targeted local searcher with a strong pre disposition for actually going on to make a purchase should command a huge premium… and the fact that its not is a little worrisome.

There is a huge future in connecting the local customer to local businesses using various types of technology, it will be interesting to see where local.com can take it from where they are today.

Maybe in 2009 it would be Algorithms.

I was reading up on some of the latest industry press and I came across the announcement from a company called GloPos from last week which announced their new software only technology which will allow any cell phone with a data connection to gain location awareness with an accuracy of 1-40 meters.

So it seems these days that if it emits a signal, someone has tried to create a new novel way to triangulate position from it… but GloPos seems to be sticking with making improvements to the old fashioned cell tower triangulation method.

Using the location of cell towers to determine location is nothing new, but what is new here is a few things:

- GloPos claims to acheive accuracy of 1-40 meters, when other cell tower triangulation methods are much more coarse at accuracies of 100-1,000 meters. The GloPos secret? “Self-learning algorithms”.

- very little additional battery usage compared to wi-fi and GPS positioning systems which can allow for always on, behind the scenes location … something that has thus far been elusive but is potetially important if new LBS services are going to materialize

The company seems to be eyeing the opportunity in bringing location to over a billion ‘legacy’ handsets while also becoming an enabler of interesting new applications like mobile social networking and location based advertising which often fall short of their potential because the battery demands of existing technologies don’t allow for always on location.

The one thing not mentioned in the press release is the 100kb of data per locate that needs to be transmmitted to servers to get the position fix, nor the time it takes to get a fix.

See slides below for some GloPos business backgrounder slides and nice article from Gigaom for additional information.

The idea of broadcasting out ones location is certainly nothing new and a number of folks have had offerings in this area for a while. For example you can let your social network know where you are on a variety of services like Loopt, Loki, Limbo or Google’s Latitude… evidently if you start such a service, it’s required that you give it a name beginning with the letter ‘L’.

If you’re a corporate type, you can make your employees use a mobile resource management system like Air-Trak to track via a phone or GPS Buddy to track via a personal navigation device. Meanwhile, Sprint has had its Friends and Family Locator and Verizon its Chaperone product for a number of years now.

But, the latest push seems to be more free, downloadable, off-deck services targeted to the mass market via Android and iPhone. With Android currently having the clear advantage for “tracking” applications by allowing applications to run in the background, spitting out GPS fixes without the phone user having to actively do anything for each location fix.

At first glance it seems that Glympse has done a good job of trying to understand how the general public will want to share location with others. with the core components being that people will want an easy improptu way to share their location… with as few steps as possible and without the recipient needing anything more than the ability to receive an email or text. It also seems to expect that people will generally want to share their location for a specific purpose or event, so tracking sessions are able to be turned on for only limited periods of time for up to four hours, so maybe you can help coordinate meeting up with a friend, or allow friends and family to monitor your progress on a trip to see if it looks like you’ll be in home in time for dinner. If you’re indoors and out of GPS coverage, no worries Glympse uses cell ID and wi-fi positioning systems as back up when GPS is not available.

I am sure 4 hours of continual tracking could become an issue for battery life which probably has everything to do with Glympse putting a four hour limit on the length of time the service will transmit location per session.

The service is currently only available on Android on T Mobile for the G1 so I haven’t had a chance to play with it first hand, but its free and seems to make a lot more sense than some of the other attempts at similar services like PocketFinder which is trying to charge big money for a similar application on iPhone which can’t transmit location in the background while the phone is used for other things.

If you don’t have a G1 you can at least check out the video below!