We’re certainly not there yet, but some potentially interesting implication for where this could go in the future.

Summary is:
- GPS and location awareness in mobile devices is growing like a weed across a variety of devices – e911, 3G data, PNDs all contributing to bringing this to mass market
- location awareness anywhere and everywhere (ie not just where GPS works) is a key to consumer success
- all the big players are investing big NOW (Google, Nokia, Yahoo, Microsoft, Garmin, TomTom)
- web world was just warm up for mobile in terms of size and opportunity, and location awareness is key driver
- relevance (targeting) and time appropriateness is a key benefit and driver of the advertsing opportunity
- ad targeting is important key driver of revenue for existing web players (Google makes $12+ per average monthly unique, while MySpace makes $1.32)
- behavioral targeting, ROI metrics and search all get one step better with mobile location awareness
- privacy is a huge issue, but web cookies also once seen in a similar light

Take all the simplicity and randomness of posting stuff you have or want to Craigslistand add some only-for-mobile features like filters based on proximity, 140 character limits on descriptions, and quick chat to check availability or coordinate for meeting up… and that’s pretty much Anttenna.

From my short experience with the app there is still a fair amount of work to be done to make the service a heck of a lot more user friendly…  like the somewhat unfriendly “Supply Chain” and “Demand Chain” terminology used to describe whether it something I have or something I want. The main page of listings defaults to stuff available nearby, and the list is full of the randomness you might expect with things ranging from a downright spamish offer for $200 rebate on blinds or a queens air conditioner installation company offering… and just a ton of nearby real estate listings with super short descriptions of apartments available for rent.

There is of course a way to filter just what you’re looking for by a variety of factors such as location and category by using the you guessed it ‘filter’ button. Categories include a long list ranging from straightforward things like books and furniture to less straightforward thingslike “items for rent”, “real time dating” and ‘rouse-around” (whatever the heck that may be).  But I think they’ll need to design the discovery process a bit better so it doesn’t take seven clicks to drill down into a category.

In theory the application makes perfect sense… connect the nearby people who want stuff with the nearby people that have stuff, keeping it simple for the mobile device experience yet keeping the power of filters, and added tools such as maps and communications to help improve the process.

Now comes the tricky part of how you take something that makes all the sense in the world in theory and get people to get the app, and post the availabilities of their rouse arounds en mass. 

Many of the things happening in the LBS space right now have a foundation in something that was successful on the web, with a mobile and location aware reinvention of a proven formula. That seems to be the case here with Anttenna as the mobile LBS equivalent of Craigslist, and we’ve seen it before particularly with efforts to re invent the social networking experience in a similar light via players like Loopt and Brightkite and many others. Ultimately I wonder how successful these can ever be.  As new and exciting as mobile location aware services on smart phones are, the total number of folks available to use the services is well below that of the web when services like Craigslist began to flourish online, which gives many of the web leaders in their space ample time to play catch up.

Google Search results for “Twitter”: 299 Million results
Google Search results for “Pizza”: 144 million results

I do find Twitter pretty valuable, I’ve identified a bunch of people, mostly business people around the LBS field, that I generally either know, or would like to know and follow them to benefit from the stuff they discover and post tweets about. It’s great for getting a feel for what’s going on when I can’t be somewhere I’d like, for example at this years CTIA in Vegas. I fully
expect to be able to follow any of the major announcements as they happen at CTIA via Twitter, while having my butt fully planted here in NYC.

Also, you can read a hell of a lot into those little tweets, like “yeah I totally was thinking the same thing as that guy” or “those guys from company X are indeed all douchebags.” or “so thats what the developer of that hot new LBS app is really doing with his leisure time at 3am”.

So I of course was quite interested in seeing what the location aware proposition could add to something like Twitter.

I recently came across Twinkle, by Tapulous, which was touting the benefits of their location awareness twitter application for iPhone, I figured I’d give it a whirl. I use Tweetie as my core twitter application and it to also has a location aware feature, but since Twinkle really markets “leveraging the power of Geolocation” I thought it would be worth checking out.

First and foremost, Twinkle seems to be shooting for more of a combination of social networking and Twitter app all in one, so the idea is not only to allow folks to broadcast out their 140 characters of update/anecdote/wisdom and to geolocate the location of the user, but to expand on the idea by allowing you to add folks as friends and to initiate chats with those nearby… kinda
like Twitter meets Limbo or Loopt Mix.

I have tried the location feature out on both Twinkle and Tweetie and despite setting the same geographic radius I get a lot more tweets in my area from Tweetie then I do from Twinkle, which makes me think that Twinkle is only showing me Tweets from other Twinkle users, and not the full number of location aware Twitter users, which is a huge problem since I’d be missing out on 99% of the tweets happening around me.

Suprisingly neither of the two systems seems to allow me to combine the two features by seeing 1. only the tweets of those that I already follow and 2. when they’re within say a mile or two radius of me… now that may actually be useful if I for example saw that someone was sending updates about some cool stuff they were seeing at a digital media conference they were attending, and unbeknown to me that digital media conference was happening just on the other side of town. It’s possible that this does indeed exist but those that I follow on Twitter just aren’t enabling the location awareness aspect when they post their tweets.

I can see this being an interesting feature if you could get the geographic radius down to a tighter area like those in the same restaurant, or bar, or building or stadium where everyone is sharing a common experience. It would be a hell of a lot more relevant to me than just random people within a mile radius, which in NYC can cover a good half million people with next to nothing in common.

I also noticed a new service BeLocal coming out in the U.K. which has a different spin on the whole location aware Twittering. They have you follow @belocal on twitter and then send them your postal code via a direct message, where you will then be pushed out local daily tweets with news directly relevant to your location, presumably from area media outlets and businesses.

I suspect that there will be a lot more of these interesting, location aware tweeting capabilities in the months ahead, but we are certainly not there yet.

As soon as Apple opened their app store I loaded every application I could find that looked like it might make cool use of location awareness, and I must say that after playing around with quite a few, Loopt certainly seems like the best so far… not including the Google powered maps application that comes standard.

But before I get too far along in my experiences with the various applications, I think that everyone that is currently making a living or hoping to make a living in the world of LBS, needs to drop whatever they’re doing and personally write a hundred thank you notes to Steve Jobs and all the staffers over at Apple that made location awareness such an important part of the iPhone (for the computer geeks among us, the thank you notes are that stack of little square pieces of paper that your grandmother gave you that you stuck in the bottom drawer of your dresser).

Ok so with that out of the way, there are a number of finder applications available for the iPhone and they’re all trying to do something slightly different: find friends, find places, find events, etc. From the initial batch that became available with the launch of the app store I tried Loopt, Yelp, Eventful, Whrrl, Where, EarthComber, Limbo and Nearby.

The only ones that I still use today are Loopt and Yelp.

You can tell from using the application that Loopt has been doing this for a while, and has learned the pain points for consumers and has done a great job of streamlining and simplifying the interface… there is a difference between complexity and power that I think Loopt gets… Loopt is not complex, but that doesn’t mean it’s not powerful.

First of all, getting a new Loopt account up and rolling was super easy, in fact it was so quick and painless that I’ve long since forgotten exactly what I had to do, I think it was just supplying my phone number and maybe a password… but I remember going from tapping on the icon to having a new account in well under a minute, and that’s all that matters.

Next it allows me to add friends either by typing in their phone number or going through and selecting friends from my iPhone contacts… again a very easy process.

The maps are provided by Microsoft Virtual Earth and are great quality and easy to navigate around through one finger panning and zooming, and they’ve partnered with Yelp to help beef up the POI listings and reviews.

Updating your friends on “What’s Up” is another simple 2 step process, just click on “What’s Up” and “Update” or feel free to add a blurb or photo (either from the camera or from your saved pictures) about what you’re up to.

But the coup de gras, is the link you can create with a Loopt Facebook widget. Once you’ve added the application to your Facebook account and linked it with your mobile application, all of your updates feed into your Facebook account and show up on your wall. This is important for me because at this stage in the game finding friends that can or want to get Loopt is not easy, so being confined just to Loopt with just my tech savvy friends would be a pretty lonely experience, but the Facebook updating utility allows me to connect with my larger group of Facebook friends, even if it is just for me to post “What’s Up”… in fact I now find myself providing updates through Loopt instead of directly via Facebook.

Now I am hoping that they come out with an embeddable widget where I can add my location and ‘What’s Up’ in places besides Facebook, like the Skyhook/Loki widget.

The Others

Ok so here is a quick rundown of my experiences with Yelp, Eventful, Whrrl and Where. I’ll save the others for another post, another day:

Yelp, is also another well done and slick application, although I think they still have some work to do in organizing the information. The default categories include categories that seem random to me… are that many people really looking for coffee & tea? Maybe so but not me. And when I search for restaurants around me, there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason behind the results provided, which I find frustrating… the top 10 results can be up to 20 blocks away, even when there are obviously ten restaurants closer… it seems to be taking into account quality/popularity in addition to proximity but the heck if I can figure out how to change the default setting. In reality I don’t typically get the results I want from proximity searches, although when I already know the name of the restaurant I do use the Yelp search function to get a better idea about the restaurant before committing to going.

I loaded up Eventful hoping to be able to quickly find nearby and last minute activities around the city to do with my kids, ala GoCityKids. In reality Eventful on the iPhone seems to really focus on the young hipster crowd looking for a band or show. I tried playing around with it anyway to see if I could find a upcoming and nearby college football game to go watch in the New York City area… a search for “college football’ returned some comedian’s routine under “Events” and a midtown bar that evidently was showing the BCS championship game back in January under “Venues”. I know NYC is a bad town for college football, but c’mon it can’t be THAT bad!

Whrrl and Where were non starters for me.

Where kept crashing for the first few weeks I gave it a try, I tried again more recently and it seems a little bit more stable now, but I still get error messages. Like Yelp the organization of Where seems to leave quite a bit to be desired… I am still not sure what to do with Quibblo Polls, SkyMap or HeyWhatsThat (no mountains in NYC, so I assume I don’t need that) and I’ve tried signing up for Buddy Beacon twice now with no luck. Zipcar and Starbucks locators are nice, but I don’t drink much Starbucks coffee or rent Zipcar vehicles, so don’t need those either. The application feels like one of those really slick $2 million dollar commercials for a financial services company that forgets to put the name of the bank in at the end… in other words it gets you all worked up and interested through the slick look and feel, but then forgets what the original purpose was in the first place…

Whrll gave me major password problems. I had a Whrrl account from online that didn’t seem to work on the iPhone application, so I couldn’t get into it for a while. When I did get in I remembered that none of my other friends use it and I didn’t really care what other top Whrrlrs thought about stuff in my neighborhood. So despite a nice slick application, I can’t figure out what to do with it and don’t want to hound and explain to my friend why they should get on it. So I am taking that one off.

Look out for another post on round two of the iPhone location aware apps coming soon.

Oddly enough, that phrase gave me a flashback to attending the first SiRF Location Ecosystem summit a few years ago where Kanwar Chadha was hoping that his would be the first and last location summit… where he was hoping that location awareness , via his GPS chips of course, would become so accepted and integrated into everything, that there would no longer be a need for a stand alone conference to talk about things specific to location awareness…

There always seems to be a bit of an overhanging question in this area which is the age old question of ‘is location a feature of another thing, or some thing unto itself?’ , and one of yesterday’s panelist had a great answer for: it’s both. The analogy that came to mind for me was paint. Paint is great. Everyone loves it and uses it in a variety of cool and different ways… from a Picasso painting to something to reflect the sunlight off your sundeck. The world is a much more practical , interesting and colorful place because of it. And while certainly there are the folks at Sherwin Williams that are very into everything about paint, the rest of us use it when we need it and otherwise don’t give it much thought.

I am not sure how long it took to get modern paint to the state where it, but I am sure there were a few thousand years of people tinkering with it all along the way.
 
I think it’s safe to say that there are more than a few years ahead for folks to continue to ruminate on all things location. As a number of panelist mentioned today, the tipping point here may very well be ubiquitous, always on location awareness… once that milestone is achieved the experimenting and ruminations will likely turn into a frenzy. For now it seems that folks are trying to attract people to their service because location makes it unique and interesting…