GigWalk, Centzy and Locu: Meeting Demand for Better HyperLocal Data
This week there is a LBS Apps developer meetup happening here in NYC that will be focusing on working with POI and venue data… an area that has always been of particular interest for me dating back five or six years ago driving along Central Park South with my Garmin Nuvi and noticing all the garage and auto repair places that Garmin said were there but that didn’t reality exist. I am still not sure if it was just a GIS nerds’ idea of a joke, or was the state of data really just that bad. Well fast forward to today and some respects we’ve made a lot of progress, and in other ways we’re still at square one. Read more
Local and Hyperlocal Search, Not Really Google’s to Lose?
You hear so much about location based apps and social networking tied back to location, but significantly less so about location based search. Everyone seems to just assume that its going to be Google, or maybe Bing stepping up to own the location based search opportunity. But I think there is a nice opportunity for a start up to step in… because as with most every company that has seen some success in doing things a certain way, it seems quite difficult for them to re think the way their business should operate to address a new market… generally preferring to shove the new thing into the way they’ve always done the old thing. And I think that’s going to happen again with local search.
One of the pieces of news that was making the rounds over the past week, at least in my little corner of the twitter-sphere was news that Watson a computer system baked up by the fun folks at IBM beat the pants off two of the all time best players on the popular trivia show Jeopardy. Like its predecessor Deeper Blue in 1997 who beat the pants off of the then world’s best human chess champion… Watson was designed from the ground up to perform a specific task, and to do it quite well thanks to modern capabilities around processing power, data storage and hundreds of simultaneous algorithms tasked with interpreting the natural human language.
But reading a bit more of the press about the event, something caught my eye, a reference to the fact that Watson doesn’t even use the Internet. Read more
Mobile Location Data and the Advertising Targeting Opportunity
So I’ve been getting a re-education recently on the latest and greatest in digital ad networks and targeting. Things like behavioral targeting and re-targeting have been around with us for ages, even before the Doubleclick & Abacus Direct controversies of the dot com boom years over a decade ago. But for whatever reason, the whole hyper targeting and re targeting seems to have been placed back on the front burner of the industry, thanks in large part to the availability of inventory via advertising exchanges and the success that ad networks have seen in recent years… both of which have attracted a new category of entrants, including advertisers and agencies alike, back to the space.
So to those not in that industry here is the best I can do in summarizing what’s going on here.
The amount of display ad inventory available online is absolutely massive… far more than the supply of advertising dollars chasing it… so the price someone is willing to pay to serve any old advertisement to a random Internet user is pretty negligible. Meanwhile, the internet advertising industry long ago went down the path of selling itself as a data intensive, highly measurable and result oriented medium… and for better or worse is generally stuck with that description.
So… the name of the game nowadays is to not just serve anyone on the Internet any old ad and call it a day, but to serve a very specific group of people, sometimes a very specific ad, and measure what happened afterwards to see if it ‘worked’ in terms of driving clicks or purchases… rinsing and repeating until one gets the desired result or gives up and tries for a new result instead. The more highly correlated a given piece of information is with some desired activity like a click or purchase, the more valuable it is. Read more
MoLo, Happyface and the Local Business
I must admit that after about a year I am beginning to run out of steam as a Foursquare user… it felt like the damn thing was down most of last week whenever I was looking to check in somewhere and I’ve also begun to use both Gowalla and MyTown more regularly, so the sheer amount of checking in and the fact that I don’t go to that many new and interesting places is beginning to take its toll. Read more
The Hyperlocal Content Opportunity
So I noticed a few month back where Nokia had acquired MetaCarta and I just finally had a chance to try to have a look and figure out what that was all about. After 10 minutes of digging, I am walking away with the conclusion that they basically have a way to search through natural language documents (ie a bunch of words) discover and recognize location oriented references (“hey guys I am in Newton”) and then apply a geo-tag to them to provide a new dimension and layer in which to organize and discover new information and patterns.
It seems that the folk that have found this most useful so far are governments and energy companies. According to the Metacarta site, there are millions of government documents of which over 70% contain significant geographic references. Read more
I knew it! The state of POI data does suck!
So I can still recall driving around Manhattan with my brand new Garmin device circa 2005 just playing with all the cool features and seeing what I could see… it certainly didn’t work perfect… particularly living in midtown where all those tall buildings make getting a GPS fix difficult, and where it could very easily show you a block or two off on either side, making things even a bit more confusing… something to do with signals bouncing off buildings I think.
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… Read more
CTIA Best Practices for LBS
This week it seems that CTIA issued its latest version of Best Practices Guidelines for LBS. While the guidelines are pretty short and straightforward, here is a summary anyway.
There are two basic underlying practices as part of the guidelines:
1. Users must receive notice about how location information will be used, protected and shared… although the form of notice is not dictated
2. LBS providers must show that users gave consent to divulge location before initiating the location based service and users must have the right to revoke consent at anytime… although the way in which consent is recorded or retracted is not dictated
Some other details of interest, and what one may potentially read between the lines: Read more
A deeper look at the real PlaceRank and local search opportunity
A thought to get this started: The way Google analyzes links online is really just a mass analysis of human opinions. The analysis of links offline, using mass amount of mobile device location data is the mass analysis of human actions. What people say and what they do can be entirely different things.
So anyone that’s been around the online advertising world will be familiar with the famous Google Page Rank algorithm. While maybe no one other than Larry and Sergey truly knows how it works, there are literally small armies of SEM and SEO experts that wake up in the middle of the night in a sweat wondering if they left out an important keyword, or whether they need to pay for links to get a boost for their clients. It’s a fascinating micro economy that has developed almost exclusively around servicing customers and their interaction with Internet search providers, particularly Google and its $20B in annual revenue.
I haven’t bought search in well over a decade, before Google existed, and am by no means an expert in search, let alone local search, but if you’re looking for more information I’d suggest starting out by reading SEOmoz or Greg Sterlings Skreenwerk blog or reaching out to a local search SEO specialist like David Mihm or Mike Blumenthal who are frequent speakers on those circuits and regularly share some invaluable experiences on their blogs at Mihmorandum and Blumentahals.
But to greatly over simplify, fundamentally there are two main components in play for Google on the web, and how well they translate into a true mobile location aware search is fuzzy at best. So for the current Google web search here are two key factors being looked at:
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Presence at Place of Sale (PAPOS) The New Click Rate?
So if you’ve followed the news in the mobile social networking world recently, first we had people like Yelp introduce “check in” and word that Facebook has the feature on its way, then Foursquare struck a number of big media deals which has kept the mobile location aware world on the front pages of the trade press with thoughts about new ad models focused on cost per check in.
Well after giving it a bit more thought, I’ve come to the conclusion that the industry needs a more broad “presence at place of sale” (PAPOS?) metric that could capture all the events where a person actually walks into a brick and mortar retailer and that action is recorded by any available means.
The PAPOS could then be looped back into the marketing ecosystem serving as the click or conversion rate for all advertising, both on and offline, targeted at driving brick and mortar foot traffic. Read more
PageRank to PlaceRank Is More Than Changing a Few Letters Around
There was a great article yesterday by Chris Silvery, who works for search engine marketing firm Key Relevance and is a regular contributor to the Local’s Only Section of Search Engine Land. The article highlights some of the ways that location oriented search within Google behaves, and frankly how it very often doesn’t behave the way it ‘should’.
Per John Hanke, VP of Google Earth, Maps, and Local from a recent TechCrunch article : ”PlaceRank is like PageRank for places, it tries to figure out how prominent a place is based on factors such as references on the Web, reviews, photos, how many people know about it, how long its been around.”
By the way I think it’s notable that the thing being “figured out” here is “prominence”.
Now I understand that you’ve got to start somewhere, but Read more
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