Free Location Based Advertising Teleconference – Thursday May 7

May 1, 2009 · Posted in Conferences · View Comments 

I’ve been chatting with the folks at 1020 Placecast over the past couple of days, and they’ve alerted me to a teleconference they’ll be hosting next week that could be worth listening in on, particularly if you’re in the advertising industry and want to stay on top of some of the latest and greatest happening in the field. A panel including folks from 1020 Placecast, NearbyNow,
CatalystSF and Sterling Market Intelligence will be talking about location based media, current examples of its use and why and how advertisers may want to start using the technology to their advantage. The conference is free and open to the public by calling 1-712-429-0689 and using conference accesss code 610749.

Could be worth checking out… and if you think you’ll want to ask questions, be sure to have your Twitter account up and handy, as question for the event will be handled via Greg Sterling, via his Twitter, @gsterling.

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The Mobile Search Opportunity, Turning PageRank into PlaceRank

October 15, 2008 · Posted in Commentary · View Comments 

So I see that Google search market share is up to nearly 2/3 of all searches according to the latest stats, and has been trending in that upward slope for quite a while now. So you may be wondering, what happens when they start to run out of room at say 70, 80, 90 or 100% of search share… how do they keep it going?

Well, one solution is to grow the whole pie by growing the gross number of searches conducted. So how do you do that? For starters you make it super easy and convenient to run a search query, like search on a mobile phone (Google Mobile) while you’re out and about and while at your desk through a browser toolbars that is always there, ready and waiting (Google Toolbar). Second you try to get more and more of the world’s information into the index to make it findable, for example by scanning book or making it easy for any Joe Schmo to create new information say like in a blog on Blogger (acquired 2003).

In fact, the worldwide web has grown like wildfire over the past decade with the Google index growing from 26 million pages in 1998 to 1 billion pages in 2000 and an estimated 1 trillion today. So needless to say there is a lot of information out there to be found, and Google’s success has been built on developing the best mousetrap to help folks sift through those 1 trillion pages and find the information they’re looking for, largely relying on that popularity contest dressed up as a math equation called PageRank to help us uncover the needles among those 1 trillion straws of hay.  


If there is any commonality between those 1 trillion pages of information that Google currently helps us navigate through it’s that they all 1. sit on a publicly available webserver usually on a server farm somewhere 2. are not time or place dependent and 3. the popularity rank or pagerank is determined in large part through votes (links) placed by a global democracy of users.

But now let’s turn to the other side of the mobile opportunity, which is not just to create more occasions for folks to run standard search queries against those same 1 trillion pages, but instead to give us completely new categories of stuff to search for and find, via a new internetworking of people, places and things and the relationships between them for Google to index and rank to help us navigate our way through.

The current web is just a single step up from being a network of digitized dead trees, but the world’s information has never been limited to what could be written, hyperlinked and stored. The real future mobile opportunity is to organize and tame the internetworking of atoms (information attached to people, places and things) in the here and now, with mobile location awareness as a key cornerstone in its foundation… taking knowable but disparate information and bringing them together to help connect people to new and important information relative to their current time and place.

Where I am, and information on the places, items and people around me. Take for example these things that we don’t even consider doing a Google search for

- The hot happening bar of the moment… ie a crowded bar or a bar with a friend in it (Google doesn’t know where people are at any given time or place, just that a bar exists)

- When my train will be here (Google doesn’t know where trains are just printed schedules)

- The nearest available doctor for my husband who is having chest pains (Google doesn’t know 
where ambulances or doctors are, just company listings)

- Where do most people go eat after watching a Yankee’s game (Google doesn’t keep track of foot traffic flowing out of the stadium every night, just message boards and news articles)

- I just had a great meal at Ralphs restaurant, I wonder where else people who go to Ralphs like to eat (Google only analyzes links between web pages, not between geographic spaces)

- I want to buy that special edition Barbie doll for my daughter, I wonder where I can stop on the way home to pick it up (Google doesn’t index available brick and mortar store inventory)

- That guy over there looks familiar, who is he? (Google doesn’t index people, just profile pages)

All of the above is knowable information, but just not yet available in a usable form… and a ubiquitous layer of location awareness data laid over the network is a key missing ingredient. 
Once that layer comes into existence, the focus on links that has makes Google search the best search mousetrap today, will give it a big heads up in the mobile search opportunity of tomorrow as web masters talking about their websites PageRank will be replaced with store managers, agonize on how to get their brick and mortar store PlaceRank up.

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