Harris Interactive & Placecast: Location Based Marketing Survey
Harris Interactive recently conducted a survey on behalf of Placecast digging into consumers’ preference and receptivity towards location based marketing and specifically receiving location triggered messages from businesses.
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. 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
Twitter and CitySearch: Local Business Tweets
I saw in MediaPost this morning that CitySearch was going to begin integrating Twitter streams into their business listing profiles, which is a fantastic idea.
Back in April of this year Local Search News did a great piece on the local business opportunity for Twitter and it seems that this is the first big announcement I’ve seen yet in that direction.
What does the integration of Twitter on CitySearch include? Well business will be able to include an existing Twitter account, or create a new business specific account, through their CitySearch profile set up. Once set up: Read more
A closer look at Milo.com
Well I was a little saddened to see that NearbyNow, a company that I had looked at in some detail last spring seems to have ceased operations of their web shopping portal, and now like many others seem to be going the route of providing a platform for others, mostly magazines, to develop their own retail shopping iPhone applications. Be sure to check out the Practical E -commerce Q&A for a quick run down of what happened with Nearby Now.
But don’t fear, where one company is exiting, there is always another entering. And the latest hot entrant in the area of local product search seems to be a company called milo.com. The company just announced that it had raised $4 million in a substantially over subscribed round which included some big name VC firms and private investors.
So what is all the fuss about? Well, in case you weren’t aware e-commerce was so late 90’s… Read more
Flook: A Browser for the Real World
You may have wondered what the founders of Symbian were up to these days, well it seems that they’re developing iPhone applications. Roger Nolan and Jane Sales formed development shop Ambient Industries and the first product to be released is named flook… as they describe it “the worlds first serendipitous discovery engine”.
While not easy to categorize at first glance, Flook is part browser, part twitter, part FourSquare all rolled into one from people who “hate maps and pins on small phones”. Read more
Public Earth Launches
So about three years ago I came across a description of a soon to be service called Public Earth that was to become the defacto source of data related to geographic spaces. And as of yesterday it seems as though that site at publicearth.com is now live and ready for use… positioning itself as “the wiki for places”.
It initially “only” contains a database of 5 million places across 400 categories… interestingly, by comparison the nearly decade old Wikipedia just reached the 3 million (english) article milestone in August 2009. But even so, as you start to do some initial searches on Public Earth you quickly realize that even at 5 million records strong, there is still a lot not there.
It seems that 5 million places is just an initial seeding to get things kicked off. The hope seems to be that the general public takes it from here and starts to fill in the rest. Read more
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…
AdTech – Location Based Mobile Services
Mobile Marketer has a nice recap of a panel at AdTech NY this week where folks from uLocate, Useful Networks, Placecast and others discussed location awareness and marketing in the same breath… but couldn’t utter the word Iphone or Google under penalty beer consumption.
KPMG On LBS Advertising
“The greatest marketing opportunity for mobile is location-based advertising, according to 48 percent of respondent to the KPMG survey.” – Feb 5, 2009 Survey
All Location Aware, All The Time
I noticed the big Inside The GPS Revolution issue of Wired the other day, but just got around to reading some of it… definitely worth checking out this great article on one authors experience living life with full location exposure, all day, every day. The author loaded every location aware iPhone application he could find (and a few Gphone apps as well) and spent a few weeks being the uber location application user. The article is a nice summary of many of the major location aware capabilities and players out there, and also provides some interesting insights into the less talked about social and behavioral implication of the technology. Well worth the read.
