Now in the olden days when you just bought a printed foldable map this didn’t really matter much, but nowadays in the modern inter networked world of digital maps and folks creating a dizzying array of new services helping connect people with locations, it matters more.  Now within a single stand alone application like say a TomTom navigation device there is probably not much thought put into what you name a place, but in the web2.0 world where interoperability and information sharing reign, everyone needs to know what location everyone else is talking about when someone is talking about the business at 4151 North Central Expressway.

So rather than just getting everyone to try to agree on a standard, which could take years and years and would probably be a lot like herding cats, Placecast has announced today that it has developed a technological solution to the whole problem and they’re opening it up for free use.

The product is called the Placecast Match API…. and it’s described as “a Rosetta Stone for location data”. For those that need a refresh on their ancient Egpytian artifacts, this basically just means that they will provide a way to translate between the different “languages” that different services use to describe locations for the purposes of enabling interoperability between those services.

There is a great article on Tech Crunch that demonstrates how this problem manifested itself in the hot area of mobile social networking and the battle of the check-ins where folks may want to check in somewhere on a number of different services without having to fire up each service independently and do it manually. Given the viral and social nature of services like Foursquare and Gowalla, I guess it’s not surprising that this is where we’d first see the need for better interoperability between services.

One area where this is particularly interesting is around the area of location based advertising. One of the things that needs to happen to help ramp up growth in this area is more scale in order to make hyper local and location oriented advertising finally get on the radar screen of folks that control advertising dollars. It’s not that there are not a lot of consumers using these types of services today, there are… but usage is spread around among a lot of player.  Consumers may look up directions via Google Maps, Yahoo Maps or Mapquest, others may rely on their Garmin or TomTom devices, while urbanites without cars may just be checking in with FourSquare, Goawalla or Loopt or using one of a hundreds of local discovery services like UrbanSpoon, Yelp, Where, Geodellic, etc.

The amount of traffic to any one hyper local area on any one of these systems is likely not significant enough to create a media buy, but centrally tether them all together with a common reference point and pretty soon you have what begins to look like the beginnings of a network… a point of interest advertising network. 

Putting banners in apps and on wap pages is one approach to the location based advertising opportunity, but there certainly seems to be just as much opportunity if not more around “listings ads” connecting mobile users with the businesses they’re looking for from mobile search and discovery services and then capturing, sharing and aggregating the related check ins at scale across the ecosystem.

I am not saying that this is the Placecast end game, but something like the Match API and other similar offerings by competitors certainly seem like it could help spawn competitors to what folks like CitySearch are doing with CityGrid around the creation of ad networks tied to places.

What will be interesting  is to see how publisher view participating in such a system and the more thorough socialization of content from their system… when the depth, richness and accuracy of that content may be a significant source of unique competitive advantage.

Their platform and API support seemed to rival that of their 800lb gorilla competitors and being a small company, we figured we may get better individual support from someone like Placebase. And although I would have loved to have supported the little guy, ultimately we didn’t end up using them… there were a few factors involved, but price was one of them. But nonetheless their offering was impressive.

As a stand alone business trying to go after a mass market they were at a distinct disadvantage competing head to head with the likes of Google and Microsoft, and they seemed to be concentrating on more personal level of support for more sophisticated/complex users needs who wanted to take advantage of the platforms flexibility around layering a variety of geographically related data on top of a map… I got the feeling that they did a lot of government related work and were more likely to have a client needing to show the 100 year flood plain rather than the latest mobile social networking application.

I’ve seen a couple articles criticize Placebase for the inferior quality of the underlying map data… an argument which misses the point of the company. The company is trying to be a platform for others to create create a great map based experience… and from what I’ve seen the company’s PushPin solution is significantly more robust in its ability to handle a wide variety of underlying data and integrate it into the map experience. The Placebase business is not about having the best underlying data, its about the best way to present and manipuate underlying data as well as the tools to help create a great consumer experience. To criticize them for the quality of the underlying data would be like criticizing Facebook for only having profiles of ugly people.

To me, Apple’s interest in aquiring this company makes all the sense in the world. Apple was already a leader in opening location up to the masses with the way it made location front and center in the iPhone, but it doesn’t make sense to play that role as a leader in acquiring location and then just handing off the consumer experience for each location oriented interaction over to Google.

Location based services and location based advertising will only continue to grow in importance and the map displaying experience is just too important for Apple to continue to outsource.

I recall similar arguments about both Garmin and Navteq for a quite a while, about all the competitors that plan to enter Garmin’s PND market or how super high resolution photography would tank Navteq’s old fashioned map making business. Meanwhile shares of both companies have continued to see tremendous success despite these challenges which indeed have materialized, yet been slow to hamper either Garmin or Navteq’s growth. They succeeded because 1. The did one thing, and only one thing and did it well and 2. the overall market was growing so fast that any bumps created by competitors were smoothed over by the torrid overall growth.

Those arguments of the intense competition in PNDs is what led me to follow SIRF in the first place… logic being: heck if I know who will win the PND race, but they’ll all need top of the line GPS chips to have a go at it.

Keeping their technology at a premium price seems like the right approach for SIRF in the face of oncoming competition. What’s the alternative? Drop price on even the latest and greatest models to keep market share up?

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.

However I still hold out a glimmer of hope that LBS will come to my first generation iPhone – with companies like Skyhook Wireless taking an alternative approach to offering location-based services through Wi-Fi. Skyhook has gone to great strides to map out the location of public and private Wi-Fi networks across the United States and enables websites to offer location-aware services through its technology and database. Back in May, Skyhook announced support of its technology in Mac OS X. Since the iPhone runs a version of Mac OS X and contains built-in Wi-FI, could we see Skyhook-powered Wi-Fi location-based services running on the iPhone in the future?? I hope so…

But what resonated with me most, was chuckling at the business listings that were purported to be surrounding me as I drove down fifth avenue on to Central Park South… home to some of the toniest hotels and shops like The Plaza and Pierre Hotels. According to my Nuvi right next door to those hotels was supposed to be a place called AAA Als Towing and then a few blocks later an auto repair place… yeah right, how many auto repair and tow places do you know paying more than a few grand per square foot for such prime real estate…  it was apparently the early days of POI spam, or at least a really bad dataset.

You’ve probably seen articles about the locksmith map spam problem on places like Google Maps, but its much more than that… the industry as a whole suffers from just really poor information related to documenting places… for too many years the map and navigation device makers were seemingly so focused on getting folks from point a to point b and documenting the roadways they’d use to get there, that they forgot about all the places in between point a and point b where you may want to stop and gas up or grab a bite to eat. 

But nowadays things have changed and folks are giving away the capability to navigate from point a to point b and looking for ways to make money from getting you interested in making stops along the way.

As I mentioned a few months back a company called Placecast is trying to help bring together the disjointed state of POI data, to help move the industry forward, by introducing a product called the MatchAPI.  What the MatchAPI does is allow developers to send in a reference to a geographic location through the API and receive in return any other references in the system that are a close match. The reason something like this is necessary is because there seems to be so many different proprietary datasets around without any centralized and unified source of reference to help connect them. Let’s start with a simple two dataset example where a company has a list of movie theatres from one source like Navteq (where they get all their POI data) and then wants to go to a different vendor like Fandango to get movie times and reviews for the movies happening in those theatres.  So if there are a few thousand movie theatres in the U.S. you can see how the task of matching up the Navteq list of theatres with the Fandango list of theatres could be pretty labor intensive… that’s one area where the Match API can come into ease some of this pain.  Now if you wanted to do something similar with say the 1 million or so restaurants from that same Navteq POI set in the U.S. and linking in all the Yelp reviews tied to those restaurants… well you can only imagine the amount of pain that the MatchAPI is alleviating.

But where things can really start to take off is when various systems that rely on “place” can more simply and seamlessly integrate and “speak” with one another on the fly, creating a much larger opportunity for all the players involved when the network effect begins to kick in. 

Right now there are hundreds if not thousands of location based services all largely operating independently with their own systems, definition of places and customers.   When the ability to share information between these services becomes more seamless, not only will the value to users increase dramatically, but folks like advertisers can begin to view this industry as a cohesive ecosystem, and one that has some meaningful  scale and reach which will expedite this becoming a viable new medium for them.

Right now even the most successful Location Based Services in the U.S. just have a few million active monthly users, which won’t put them on the radar screens of many big national advertisers.  In a way it’s all similar to the way that DoubleClick first helped cobble together a bunch of small websites into an online ad network and create a highly simplified way for advertisers to buy a large volume of eyeballs over 15 years ago. Right now if McDonalds wanted to throw in a two week promotion of their Shrek Glasses in the business listings for their 31,000 stores across all the map platforms, navigation devices, and LBS iPhone apps… well they probably couldn’t do it without a small army of buyers, designers and integrators.  This is the pain that the MatchAPI could eventually help go away.

Just today Placecast came out with news that after 60 days of having launched the MatchAPI platform, they’re finding that error rates in the data they’re seeing runs anywhere from 8% to 40% depending on whether it ‘professional’ data or ‘user generated’… finally a somewhat quantitative representation of all those towing and auto repair shops I noticed along Central Park South.   

For the nascent LBS industry there is no way that this becomes a big and viable opportunity for marketers if 8% to 40% of the time you either send someone to the wrong place, send them to a place that doesn’t exist or is closed, or give them the wrong phone number,  etc. … so fortunately there are folks hacking away at trying to help solve some of these problems, so we can move along to some of the bigger and more interesting innovations that are possible.

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.