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. 

- As you might expect young people are most receptive to receiving opt in location triggered messaging.  Heck 1 in 3 teenagers sends over 100 text messages a day, so you can imagine how the occasional one thrown in there from Abercrombie and Fitch wouldn’t necessarily be a unwanted interruption from gossiping about Molly’s new haircut.  The study also found that 35-44 year olds are increasingly (6pts) more receptive than they were to the idea roughly a year ago.

- The survey also miraculously uncovers that fact that men like, and are most interested in receiving alerts on, electronics and sporting goods, ditto for women with beauty and apparel. So if a girl walks by a Home Depot, and is opted in, please don’t send her the power drill ad… you know they have a whole home furnishing section in there too!  Not sure what the point was here, but just know your customer and keep it useful and relevant seems to be the takeaway.

- It seems that nowadays when you’re talking with joe public about the subject of location based marketing, you’re less likely to get the response of “OMG! they’re tracking me, that’s creepy”… ok so you’ll probably still get that a lot, but the survey found that 37% of people thought receiving location messages ‘could be useful’ and 29% thought “it could be interesting”.  Meanwhile, 27% of respondents flat out said “I don’t like the idea of marketing messages being sent to me based on where I am.” And no, Smith and Wesson shouldn’t be allowed to target ads to that last group with texts saying “BWA-HA-HA, I KNOW WHERE YOU ARE!” even if they opt-in.

- Since this was a shopping survey, much of the focus and interest was on receiving promotions and offers. Those related to Groceries (68%),  Restaurant Chains (64%)  entertainment/movie (58%) and Fast Food (50%) topped the list of categories of interest shown by all consumers (did they survey these guys right before lunch!).  And presumably because of the economy many folks are doing more looking for coupons and promotions these days, particularly young ladies and their desire for grocery coupons (85%!).

-  The survey also shows that 14% of respondents say it’s extremely or very important to be able to search for a retail location using their smartphone.

It’s good to get some real formal research regarding consumers’ perceptions around this market.  Check out all the slides from the presentation below.

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: • CTIA encourages the industry to develop “new technology to empower users to exercise control”… in other words lets not just bury some words in the terms & conditions somewhere to cover our butts, someone please come up with a cool system to give consumer controls over their location data that they’ll actually use… maybe a fireeagle-ish thing?

• A wireless carrier is a LBS provider when it directly provides users with a service, not when it provides location information to an application developer who then turns around and offers a location based service. In other words the guy directly offering the service is the one bearing the LBS provider responsibilities, not the originator of the location data, so lets provide protection (and remove some risk) to the carrier providing location data, thus encouraging it.

• When location information is not linked to a specific device or person, but only used in the form of aggregated or anonymous data, notice must still be given, but the consent requirement seems to go away… ie you still need to tell people what you’re up to, but since it’s not about any individual, getting individuals consent would be over-kill.

• LBS providers must inform users of how long location data will be retained and should only retain location data as long as business needs require and should afterwards be destroyed or converted to aggregate or anonymous data. This seems to be a tricky one, in many cases it would seem to be in the business best interest to retain as much information as it can for as long as it can… so I don’t see many folks being anxious to destroy this information if there may be a valuable business purpose down the road that they haven’t come up with yet.

 • “Consent may be implicit such as when users request a service that obviously relies on the location of their device”… ie all that stuff about consent doesn’t really apply if you’re running an app called “Whats nearby me now?” where it’s obvious that it needs to know your location to perform.

The whole things reminds me quite a bit of what the web community has done with regards to browser cookies and PII online, so there seems to be a lot of precedence here. As you might expect there is nothing revolutionary in the guidelines and it is more or less common sense and doesn’t disrupt much of the way the location based services I’ve seen operate already.

It may have been my imagination, but while reading it I felt as though the CTIA was really hoping that someone would develop an innovation that would allow users to actively manage their location sharing while realizing that in reality it’s likely to go the route of check boxes on multi page terms and conditions documents that no one reads.

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: 

• Consumer will see a stream of recent tweets related to the business posted with a one minute delay to the web…. sandwiched between the original editorial and consumer reviews on the business profile page.
• Consumers will have the option to look at the full listing of the last 100 tweets related to that businesses twitter name
• A new feature on its way will pull out common words from tweets for a particular business in order to synthesize the sentiment or common themes without users having to read through hundreds of tweets.
• The fresh ‘content’ also has the potential to boost the visibility of the CitySearch profile pages among search engines.

This seems like a great move for both sides. As a leader in its field CitySearch is always looking for new ways to offer more and more information and tools to its users, and Twitter provides a unique new real time supplement to the longer form reviews that currently help make CitySearch stand out.  Is a restaurant packed tonight, or did Madonna just show up? The existing web reviews system just wasn’t a good solution for that, but Twitter is.

For Twitter this is a significant move into the arena of potentially useful commercial applications of their technology with the leader in the online city guide market. 

It will be interesting to see how successful the filtering and parsing technology works… from my experience there are a few gem tweets in a stream, but often a huge number of largely useless tweets as well, if not downright spam, so helping filter through and letting the genuine and useful ones raise to the top may be key to its usefulness.

While there is no specific location technology at work here, everything about this deal speaks to creating place specific digital information, which is likely to be largely created by and for folks directly in the vicinity of the place. In fact, if there is an algorithm helping to control what tweets are shown, I would hope that they seriously consider factoring into the equation the physical proximity of where the tweet was created in order to give more weight to those actually at the location.

I think that this may take six months of fine tuning, but I think it has the potential to be a huge hit.

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… after years and years of hype e-commerce still only represents a tiny percent of total retail commerce  (5%), and you guessed it people are still frequently walking around on sidewalks and into stores and handing a sales clerk their credit cards and cash and walking out the door with a product resting happily in the bottom of a bag.

So the relatively new found focus seems to have shifted to how people pick the stores they visit and the products they purchase… and as you might expect looking around for information on the web is a big part of that decision making process.  

Research on the web, but buy offline in a nearby store.

So there have been a number of site that have popped up over the years to attempt this: Yokel, Slifter, NearbyNow, ShopLocal, Krillion and even Google’s own Froogle.  But none seem to have shown much success. But with the market for ‘research online, buy offline’ estimated to reach $1 trillion by 2011 its not surprising that folks will just keep on trying to crack the code. 

So why would anyone think that maybe Milo will succeed where the others have failed?  Well I’ll take a stab at it… looking around at some of the competitive offering there doesn’t seem to be anything special about the real time inventory availability aspect… many sites have that and in fact in some categories like sporting goods, the list of participating retailers is stronger with competitors.  And doing an identical litmus tests across sites with a search for a Playstation 3 in Manhattan’s zip code 10024, Milo gave me the equally crappy result that I should swim across the Hudson river to find this easy to find item in Paterson New Jersey, even though its available about 50 yards from my apartment across the street at the GameStop I can see out of my living room window.   Evidently they don’t have a deal with GameStop yet.

However, Milo seems to have gone more broad (and long tail) than the others with retailers like Target, Walgreens and Barnes and Noble, the latter of which alone may have as many as 100k book titles in stock at any given store… Milo claims to have nearly 1.5 million products available, and knowing how many SKUs are carried by folks like WalMart and Barnes and Noble, I don’t doubt it. 

I think the unique part of the Milo approach is on the inbound marketing side, acquiring customers… in other words SEO, SEO and more SEO. When people research items on the web, where do you think they go? Well to Google of course. So rather than fighting this by trying to create a competitive search destination site/tool that you’d only use when search for products locally, Milo takes the logical step which is to try like heck to be sure that their product pages come up high in the search results from product searches that include a local intent (like Garmin 10019). Very similar to what Local.com is trying to do with local business listings, although as far as I can tell without the SEM arbitrage part. 

In fact a search for site:milo.com on Google reveals that there are a whopping 319,000 pages on the site in their index!  Just for some perspective the Wall Street Journal online has 204k pages, and CNN.com 415k. Now a similar search for NearbyNow reveals that they have close to ½ million pages… but a quick glance reveals a major difference… NearbyNow pages are generally a lot of the same templates with just  new location (like Orlando, Fl) swapped in for each page.  Milo pages are unique, text and keyword heavy product specific pages…  and there are over 300k of them! So if all those pages are product pages then that’s 20% of their available product inventory having its own dedicated web page…  and if you believe the good old 80/20 rule applies here, presumably those 20% are the items responsible for 80% of the searches.

After doing a number of Google searches with product names and zip codes, I was pretty impressed with how frequently a Milo product pages came up in the listings.

• A product search with local intent: you often get milo listings (Search: Garmin 10024)
• A product search without local intent: no sign of milo listings (Search: Garmin)

So the company has obviously figured out a way to do local product SEO quite well… with all those unique product pages a clear differentiator… and perhaps some behind the scenes link juice with major e-tailers. The company seems to do a fair amount of web crawling, likely of their retail partner sites, which may also help them to systematize the process of quickly adding new products to their index by grabbing marketing elements that live outside of the inventory system.

Certainly an interesting company to keep an eye on, and in particular  to see how they develop the revenue side of the business, now that they seem to have the marketing side well on its way.

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”.

Flook is current available for free but only on the iPhone. The foundation of the service is the ability to create and view nearby “cards” tethered to a geographic place. The cards are presented in the Flook “broswer window” in the form of a “stream” of nearby cards that you flick through one by one.

In a way the cards represent the new geographic web page and Flook is the browser, bringing beautiful and simple cards/pages of interesting new things from the world around them including a picture, description and map, as well as comments from the Flook community. Cards can be either created by users or by the Flook staff… and generally are descriptive of a place that someone found interesting, but can also include upcoming events scheduled to take place at a certain place.

A recent stream for me in NYC included a number of cards created by users for local bars and restaurants, others highlighting interesting architecture including over a dozen photos of various parts of the new Highline elevated park in Chelsea… I also got a card promoting SMX East the search engine marketing conference held recently at the Jacob Javits Center.  I also took a stab at creating a few myself, on a trip to the Children’s Museum of Manhattan with my kids.

If you find a card that you like, you can find who created that card and follow them to see what other cards they may create that you may also like ala Twitter, and like Foursquare, Flook has developed a gaming mechanism to encourage folks to create cards and reward those power users who create a lot of interesting cards.

Down the road it looks as though the company has API’s planned to allow developers to integrate cards into their own sites or maybe create games around creating and collecting cards. Quite conceivably, Flook could be a platform for city guides to quickly and easily publish up virtual mobile location  aware tour guides or for event companies to create fun scavenger hunts or bar crawls.

As the service just officially launched a few days ago, its a bit difficult to picture what Flook will become when it grows up. There is an emphasis in the service on the serendipitous way in which places are ‘discovered’ by merely flipping through nearby cards… which can be viewed as either very cool or a bit disorganized depending on how you expect to want to use the service… if you’re a type A personality,  this service may not be for you.   There is technology behind the scenes which is supposed to learn from all the flipping and looking at cards to determine what you may like and not like, and what you may be interested in seeing next… which should prevent it from just becoming a massive dumping ground for random thought as we’ve seen with applications like Nearby from Platial.

Overall, like Foursquare it’s a refreshingly different way to leverage the power of location and social networks, and good to see folks going in a slightly new direction with this sort of thing.

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.

I’ve only had a little bit of time to play with it but did some exploring in three different geographic areas I know fairly well just to see how it would do.   Here are the basic findings:

PROS

• The user interface is very simple and straigtforward…and its easy to navigate around and search for things, pan the map, etc.
• The map quality is great and is what you would expect from a modern web map experience… its ‘powered by Google’  so what did you expect?
• The tools and ability to create your own place on the map are very simple and straightforward to use.

Cons

• There is a lot of information missing. They pre populated the service with 5 million places worldwide, but even your typical bottom of the line person navigation device comes pre loaded with at least 2x as many points of interest for the United States alone.
• Many of the categorizations are screwy… exploring the “kid friendly” places around me here on the upper west side, I got a handful of places that made a lot of sense like the Hayden Planetarium, although inexplixably nothing on the massive Natural History Museum and kid mecca which the planetarium is attached to. But in that same category I also got totally random places like a poultry shop in New Jersey somehow categorized as a ‘Farm’ and a boat dealership.
• There is often not much information on a place even if the ‘listing’ does appear

Since the site just launched yesterday and it is a communal user generated content type site, the cons here are not unexpected.  As it grows much of the missing information will be filled in and the community will presumably help correct all the categorization issues  and help fill in all the colorful details.  Or will they?

Public earth has built a nice, very easy to use, highly functional site which certainly could be the foundation for a full blown and powerful wikipedia for places. The million dollar question now is will people come to it and use it and spend time editing it en masse?  Just because you built it, doesn’t mean people will come to it. 

For the typical consumer, the large portal web map platforms are probably a more reliable source for finding things around you, so from here it will be interesting to see what tactics Public Earth needs to use to ramp up the volume of places and really clean up their data. I suspect that like Wikipedia this chore will fall largely on a small group of power users who just enjoy doing it for the sake of doing it,  or maybe they can steal a page from Foursquare and use some sort of gaming element to make it fun for the rest of us to add new places and do the editing for them.

Only time will tell… but certainly something to keep an eye on.