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.

But the technology on display from this group of start ups was pretty impressive, there were a number of companies focused on video and many tools for helping small publishers & bloggers with their trade. But there were also a surprising number of location oriented companies… some of the highlights:

Centrl – a mobile social networking app, that has one of the most slick user interfaces I’ve seen and is super simple to use. It seems Centrl is trying to integrate some of the best features from other mobile social networking apps while also making the barrier to entry as low as humanly possible… you don’t even need a Centrl account you can just sign in using one of your favorite existing social networks like via Facebook Connect. Centrl includes some nice rich content layers like Yelp and Wikipedia, plugs into twitter, has gameplay elements ala FourSquare, and deal finding features which seems to be where Centrl’s revenue may one day come in.

Xtify – Xtify is brought to us by Andrew Weinreich, the same guy that runs Meetmoi (another LBS company in the showcase). Xtify seems to be trying to simplify the process of allowing application developers to easily integrate location into their web products with all the nice bells and whistles and controls already baked in. Location is taken from a mobile device, by whatever means it can, stored by Xtify with things like timestamp/accuracy associated and then later used by an accompanying web applications for delivering location oriented content… that sort of thing. Presumably Andrew went through the painful process of trying to figure out how best to work with location data across myriad devices while building MeetMoi and decided to take his experience and learning and productize it for others in Xtify. It seemed to me to be an awful lot like the Yahoo fireeagle product, although according to their rep they are more ‘end-to-end’… maybe something to dig deeper into in a future post.

Plott.me – Plott.me is focusing on creating a platform for the development and distribution of location aware tour guides for the iPhone and web. While the product wasn’t available to play with first hand, it struck me as being quite similar to something being done by a U.K. company Node Explorer. The idea is essentially to allow individuals or another company, ideally those already with location oriented content to easily upload and organize video, audio and text that will be triggered when the phone is located in relevant geographic locations. The content and application would then be offered for sale or rental, ideal for tourist destinations, presumably with both the content provider and Plott getting a share of the application revenue.

Padmapper and Streeteasy were two service focused on the real estate market. Both trying to make heavy use of maps and more powerful yet easy to use filtering features to make it easier to connect you to your next apartment or home. I didn’t have a chance to chat with the Streeteasy folks, but Padmapper seems to be primarily scraping the Craigslist real estate sections (no APIs) and then using a giant map as the interface… real estate IS all about location afterall. You can then easily filter the listings by all the typical aspects like features and price. On the downside they throw out all the listings that can’t be resolved down to a street address… which in NYC at least is probably a lot, so it can’t readily serve as a substitute to going directly to Craigslist. But I loved the maps orientation and they added some cool features like “filter by commute time” based on your place of work. Definitely worth playing with if you’re in the market for a new pad.

Wait, I know… maybe a retro 90′s book brand instead! If Knight Rider wasn’t your thing then why not the lovable, easy to understand for Dummies branded PNDs for those with an eversion to all things technical. Yes, seriously there is a for Dummies line of personal navigation device… evidently it goes for as low as $89.99 at your local CVS.

Watching the developments in the PND market these days feels an awful lot like watching the waning episodes of Happy Days where fresh out ideas, desperate for sale and wanting to milk a trend for all its worth, while doing as little new innovative work as possible, we’re seeing folks resort to placing cheap, easy and desperate bets to delay the inevitable.

Can the GM Kitt 2010 concept car be too far off?

So does this mean we’re reaching the end for PNDs in general, or is there another explaination? I am sure many of you have seen this before but there is a company called Gartner which is a technology research and advisory firm which looks at stuff like this. A while back Gartner came out with this idea of the Hype Cycle to explain how new technologies gain and grow adoption through a number of cycles… most notably that there is an early period of frenzy and excess public enthusiasm which ultimately hits a wall, followed by a period of disillusionment before the technology revitalizes itself, often in a more useful and widespread way.

In terms of GPS and location awareness technology, I suspect that we are passing from the irrational exuberance stage around navigation and into the retrenchment phase where the next more powerful incarnation is currently being formulated.

While many companies at this point are becoming dissolusioned with the future prospects for navigation devices, there is a new breed of companies (and some new innovative products from old companies like Garmin) that are busy layering in search and social networking capabilities to take-up where the “navigation only” systems left off, as they realize that there are more broad benefits from location awareness then knowing where you are, where you want to go and how to navigate there.

The world always just seems to zig, when everyone is calling for it to zag.

On a related note, I noticed the news out of the New York auto show where Ford unveiled its Transit Connect service (which already includes some gimmicky RFID features) and GM its new internet and wi fi offering which will bring internet connectivity to their latest vehicle lines… so maybe we will have connected PNDs afterall, just with your Caddie providing the Internet connection rather than device makers like Garmin.

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.

The teleconference is free and open to the public and the panel will take live questions from listeners, but you must register first so leave a little extra time.  It’s scheduled for 12:30 EST/9:30 PST so certainly worthwhile to listen in for a bit as you sit at your desk and enjoy lunch in New York or breakfast in the Bay Area.

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.

After playing with the geo location features on my mobile twitter client Tweetie and also playing with the location oriented Twinkle application by Tapulous, which all use various types of technology to determine your location and the filter out tweets from folks outside a certain radius… going back to the old school way of registering yourself on a good old fashioned website
with your twitter name and your city or zip code just felt well, very old school…

So I had to dig around and find out why such an old school thing like a local twitter registration site would even exist, let alone seem to be proliferating.

From the best I can tell, there seem to be two potential drivers… one is that I was suprised to learn that nearly 2/3 of twitter users are using the service directly through the web or via a desktop application. Maybe it’s because of how I was introduced to Twitter, but I always thought it more as a mobile thing… you know with the 140 character limit thing and all… well evidently it’s not. So that alone explains alot, most people don’t have the technological approach to a geo-filter available and they just want to find local people to twitter with… fair enough.

But the other cool aspect of a list of local twitter users is for accomplishing the opposite of what the location aware technology does for ya… location aware tech allows you to see those immediately around you and their tweets, but the old fashioned registration site in theory could let you drop in on virtual tweeps and their tweets in a specific area somewhere else.

Now the inner Colbert in me may joke that focusing in and reading the tweet stream of the general public in Shanghai if you live in New York, seems pretty damn useless, and in many cases it probably is. But in some cases it could be valuable, for example if you’re heading to a new city and are looking for recommendations on where to get a good steak, who better than to ask than the local twittersphere in the city where you’re headed. Or if you want to keep tabs on what the buzz is in your old college town, you can drop in on the local tweet stream there… in theory having a local group to zoom in on could have huge possibilities in allowing journalists to zoom in to follow the local action related to a breaking news event in a particular area.

On a related note there is a great article on Local Search News about how Twitter should register and create accounts for local businesses to help better identify them in the twittersphere. Not so we can follow the local Italian restaurant to read a constant stream of tweets about how good their last batch of lasagna is, but to allow for a common currency for referring to specific places and establishments as twitter nation so often does. It makes a lot of sense to me.