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
Kelsey: Interactive Local Media 09
The Kelsey Group held their annual Interactive Local Media conference last week in Los Angeles, focused on the role of digital marketing in driving offline and local commerce. I didn’t make it, but there was ample Twitter and blog coverage. I posted many of the presentations from the event in the presentations section and many are worth a closer look. Reading through all the coverage there seem to be a few overarching themes:
- From the macro point of view, everything points to a significant opportunity here, high mobile phone penetration, more powerful and sophisticated devices, better mobile internet connections and experience, and the consumers strong predisposition to act offline and locally, etc
- many companies are swarming to create solutions ranging from digital out of home, to online local SEO, local display ad networks and online reputation management.
- The highly fragmented nature of the SMB market is challenging to sell into, and sales feet on the street seem to be a pre-requisite. It seems that SMBs won’t just find their own way to your online services and begin participating, you need a sales guy in the store at some point to get the ball rolling.
- as with a lot of things in this world, making offerings targeted to this market simple and easy to understand will go a long way. Many small business don’t even have a website and have never heard of Facebook or Twitter, so keep it simple!
Here are some of the top stats culled from the Twitter Streams (#ILM09) and various Internet coverage of the event. Read more
Placecast Teleconference Tomorrow: Mobile Technology and Retail
Placecast is holding another free webinar tomorrow titled Innovations in Retail: Using Mobile Technology to Drive Foot Traffic and Sales. I listened in on their earlier teleconference in May of this year and found it quite valuable. The conference is looking to bring together agencies and retailers to talk about some of the initiatives they have taken on in this space, what options are available, and why brand marketers should explore location based advertising. The panel includes a mix of folks including marketing agency Barkley, consumer products company The North Face, Primary Impact Research and of course Placecast itself.
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.
Local Search Summit – Summary
Last week in San Jose was the inaugural Local Search Summit. David Mihm has a great recap of the event over on Local Search News, with some great details and insights and tidbits on all the leading players in the space right now including Google, Bing, Yelp, Localeze, Facebook and Twitter. Definitely worth a read…
Metaplaces: Sense Networks
I thought one of the most interesting and informative speakers at Metaplaces was Tony Jebara from Sense Networks. While I have posted about Sense Networks in the past, Tony did a great thorough, and mechanical walk through of his company that provided some interesting new insights.
He describes the company as an analytics company, like Nielsen, with a particular focus on segmentation analysis, and importantly one that doesn’t deliver anything directly back to a single end user, but rather allows its business customers to have a better understanding of aggregate customer behaviors.
Sense Networks pulls together call data and location data from 10 million devices, and slices and dices the data in a variety of different ways to provide, what it hopes, is a useful analysis for companies. The subscriber location and call usage data is almost all consumer opt-in, gathered directly from wireless subscribers, and is limited just to lat, long, time and call details.
But Sense Networks uses this information, Read more
Metaplaces: Random Thoughts Day One
Some other random take-away’s from day one at Metaplaces. They stuck out to me as particularly interesting or thought provoking, even if some are not particularly new:
- On advertising front, search and action oriented is getting more traction than display, and it’s hard to cover costs with just low cpm banner and network inventory
- From the carriers perspective, location look-ups are expensive and taxing, almost the same overhead as setting up a full call
- None of this stuff really takes off in a mass market way until we figure out ubiquitous always on location
- The fragmented nature of mobile/carriers is still quite an issue when it comes to trying to get any one thing to scale and for getting advertisers to take notice
- There are a lot of cool and interesting LBS things being built with only the faintest idea of how they’ll one day make money. Reluctantly, advertising seems to the revenue source of choice… but often knowledge of the industry is very limited and attitudes borderline hostile. If you’re a vegetarian, animal rights activist, it’s going to be very hard to make a career as a butcher.
Metaplaces: Mobile Social Networks or as they would say in California, Mobile Social Graphs
So there was a whole session yesterday focusing on the location based social networks and essentially how the hell they’re going to make any money. I am not sure why folks expect that this has been figured out on the mobile side of things when the 800lb gorilla’s in the web world is still just figuring things out there, but alas. On a related note, it’s worth checking out the breakdown of how Facebook currently makes money today from an interesting post from SAI.
While there were few direct answers here, the read between the lines answer seemed to be that “we’re not sure but we’re experimenting with a bunch of different things”… premium services add-on’s seemed to be a popular option. But it was also clear that regular old banner ads just didn’t seem to be cutting it, bringing in maybe just a handful of dimes per thousand… which when combined with a respectable, but not overwhelming, audience of a few hundred thousand users, wouldn’t amount to much. One of the speakers did throw out that with some of the geo targeting qualifiers, they saw CPMs jump into the few dollars range. Overall it sounded like some of the core economics around the costs of location dips and maps made it challenging to make it work on the pure low network advertising cpm’s model, so CPMs needed to make it into the dollars to make it work.
I was particularly impressed by Rob Lawson’s presentation on behalf of BrightKite which earlier this year merged with Limbo. In the world of digital advertising, it wasn’t necessarily that what they were doing was amazingly original, but you got the feeling that they understand the advertising world and they seemed to be doing the basic blocking and tackling to move ahead… first they combined two strong companies to get enough audience to make it worthwhile for advertisers to notice, then they hired five dedicated sales guys who either already got it or were trained to understand the space and what makes it unique.
The moderator of the panel Claudio Schapsis keeps a running tab on all the new location based social networks popping up, and its getting to be quite long these days. Not surprising some of these guys are coming to the realization that it will become tougher and tougher to compete and grow as a stand alone consumer destination, and are instead switching gears to help bring the goodness of location awareness to people who already have large existing networks.
MetaPlaces 2009: Location is like Paint
I am currently out at the MetaPlaces conference happening in San Jose where the focus is on how to make some money from all this cool location awareness stuff… or as they put it “how to keep the industry sustainable”.
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…
Things didn’t really work out as planned there I guess.
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…
MetaPlaces 2009
So its been a while since I posted anything here. After a summer hiatus, you can expect to see more frequent, albeit potential more brief tidbits on happenings around the LBS world.
I have been wanting for a few years to go to the Where 2.0 conference, but have yet to make it, but next week I am looking forward to heading out to San Jose to the MetaPlaces conference which should be a good one… held all day Tuesday and Wednesday of next week.
It’s certainly worth checking out the complete agenda, but the focus seems to be more on the business and monetization of all those cool things that are being done with location these days. For some folks its cool to see all the whiz bang creativity that goes along with a slick hipster mobile location aware social networking application, but what seems a lot more challenging and thus more interesting is how the heck folks are going to turn those into real revenue generating businesses…
Besides the standard sessions on the privacy issues and market overview type stuff, there are more than a few sessions which will focus on making money… Jon Spinney leading a session on how to make the map pay, and Loopt will share how it is monetizing its service… and on day two more than a few sessions on location based advertising including local search.
I am really looking forward to hearing the discussions and meeting a bunch of like minded folks, if you’re planning to attend drop me a line.
NY Tech StartUp Showcase: Lots of Location
So I had the pleasure of going by to check out the NY Tech MeetUp StartUp showcase held yesterday at the Fashion Institute of Technology. The hike down West 27th street was an eye opener… ever wondered where those guys who sell the knock off Lewwy Viton or the Burkin bags in midtown get their goods… well there is a pretty good chance it’s from this lovely stretch of Manhattan. And the Fashion Institute of Technology? Well not much fashionable or technical about it as far as I could tell… reminded me more of PS 212… not that there is anything wrong with that.
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.
