Bloomberg BMAP
I was looking through the list of folks who are attending this years Location Business Summitnext month (Sept 14-15) and noticed that Bloomberg has a speaker on the agenda from their energy and commodities group… not your usual West Coast Loopt/Brightkite/Whrll outfit. So I wanted to see what that was all about.
For those that didn’t make it to last years’ inaugural conference, then named Metaplaces, I highly recommend it. It’s the biggest concentration of like minded business folks that you’re likely to come across… and while last year had a lot of focus on monetizing the mobile social networks, this years agenda covers a lot of ground spanning the spectrum from augmented reality to well Bloomberg and containers of oil floating across the ocean. Read more
Facebook Places: 36 Hrs Later
Well its been 36 hours more or less since Facebook announced their new Places features, and a solid day in which I’ve been able to get it working on my iPhone. So I wanted to post a quick follow up.
- first of all if you don’t already read The Next Web and their coverage of location, you really should… they did a lot of posts on Facebook Places, full of great insights. I thought the one titled “Why I deleted foursquare for good” was particularly good. That and pretty much all of Greg Sterling’s Screenwerks blog are great sources of info Read more
Facebook Places
Ok, well it’s been just over a year since FourSquare launched at SXSW 2009, and within days afterwards I am sure naysayers were saying, yeah that’s great but just wait till Facebook launches the same thing, and they’ll be toast. Well yesterday was that day…yesterday Facebook announced Facebook Places.
I am sure the details of what IT is will be reported all over the web, so I won’t go into all those details here… but I watched the video of the conference announcing it and major kudos to ex Socialight’er Michael Sharon (product mgr for Places) for what seems to be a nice well thought through execution… someone like Michael obviously “gets it” more than anyone, and I think that the feature will be a huge hit.
As a pretty passive user of Facebook, the thing I enjoy about it the most is the ability to easily keep tabs on friends… Read more
ShopKick & Causeworld, So far Hype > Reality
So I heard about this new company Shopkick a few months ago… I went to check it out and ended up at Causeworld, which seems to have been one of the first Shopkick mobile apps. I am not an avid shopper nor a save-the-world kinda person, or at least not one that is going to try to save the world by scanning boxes of Pampers on my phone, so I kinda moved on. But it seems that ShopKick has raised $15 million from guys including Greylock and Kleiner Perkins and now launched its own namesake application Shopkick, and is getting some press with headlines like “Did Shopkick just change the check in game?” and “ShopKick teams with Best Buy to End Fake Retail Check Ins.” So I decided that I needed to go back and have a closer look. Read more
Another look at Xtify
It had been a while since I had met with a company called Xtify, and in this industry it seems that things are changing so quickly that it really pays to check back in more often to be sure a company still does what you remember them doing the last time you met. It happened for me last year with Placecast, when they seemed to switch gears between their local ad network and local creative optimization technology, to increasingly focus on mobile location based shop alerts.
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. 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
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
Paper G: PlaceLocal
So ReachLocal is now a public company for a whopping week now and I spent the last few hours last night reading through their prospectus. I had met them very briefly at an AdTech conference and had always been meaning to have a deeper look… I had always mentally put them in the same bucket as Local.com but it turns out they’re pretty different. While Local.comprimarily runs consumer destination local search sites, ReachLocal on the other hand is providing a service to local business owners, helping them dip a toe into digital marketing, first with search and now with an offering that includes display advertising.
I’ve grown to the believe that there is a huge opportunity in the area that ReachLocal is targeting… there is so much advertising money floating around in the local markets and until recently so little attention being paid to servicing brick and mortar retail folks who just have a few thousand dollars a month to spend on digital advertising.
While Google is now up to something like 1.5 million advertisers, and has done a great job of servicing the long tail of online oriented advertisers. It’s the long tail of offline advertisers, which is proving to be a bit tricky to convert to online, not just because they’re the long tail and there are tens of millions of them, but they don’t live and die by traffic to their website… heck many don’t even have websites and can be pretty ambivalent toward the whole thing!
One of the newest companies to pop up on my radar screen in this area is a company called Paper G recently started by some Yale and Harvard students. Read more
Anttenna: Mobile Location Aware Craigslist
So it looks like some ex Microsoft Advertising guys are in the process of launching a location aware, real time, classified ads type of application by the name of Anttenna… think of it as a mobile location aware Craigslist. It doesn’t seem to be fully up and functioning here in NYC yet, but you can still get it and play with it to get the gist… or maybe it’s already fully up and running wherever you live.
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 Read more
