Placebase is now Apple-based
A little over a year ago we were looking at changing our map providers and we went through the usual proposal process with a few folks including Google Maps and Microsoft. But we also looked pretty closely at a little company called Placebase and their map platform PushPin (which I believe was their one and only product). Well it turns out the Apple recently acquired the little company.
Their platform and API support seemed to rival that of their 800lb gorilla competitors and being a small company, we figured we may get better individual support from someone like Placebase. And although I would have loved to have supported the little guy, ultimately we didn’t end up using them… there were a few factors involved, but price was one of them. But nonetheless their offering was impressive. Read more
LBS Apple Style: Location Aware, Digital Meets Physical, Affiliate Marketing
The folks at The Register have a detailed piece on an Apple patent that was filed last week covering a broad range of “approaches” for the “display of location specific information” at “pre-determined locations”. The wording “pre determined location” in particular jumped out at me… mostly because these patents usually bend over backwards to be as broad and over reaching as possible, so the inclusion of wording to specifically limit its application seems noteworthy. That and the many reference to ‘establishment specific’ applications paints a picture of a retail store oriented product.
So what kinda “establishment specific” “location specific information” are we talking about here, well from what I can decipher it would seem to include:
- general display panels (aka ads, “welcome to Best Buy, America’s favorite electronics store”)
- ads tied to a specific store ( “This Best Buy store is offering 20% off any albums purchased before noon today)
- ads tied to physical and online store items (“Jimmy Buffet’s new album is out… buy it here, or download it directly to your iPhone for the same price.”)
- ads tied to enhanced online experiences for physical world purchases and items (“don’t take our word for it, visit our online forums to find out what others think of this digital camera”)
- ads tied to public audio broadcast in the store (“like that tune you just heard, it was Viva la Vida by Coldplay buy it here — this is what the album cover looks like — or download it now to your iPhone)
Some of these individual elements we’ve seen before like Shazam which can listen to what music is playing and identify the artist and make it available for download. But what makes it interesting is, looking at it in its entirety with “establishments” and location at the center, it just looks an awful lot like a mobile/location aware version of a good old fashioned web affiliate program ala Commission Junction or Linkshare. You know they ones where links from one site like dogparkusa.com drives sales to another like PetSmart.com… and the referring site dogparkusa.com gets paid a bounty by PetSmart for bringing them a new customer.
It’s the same thing but just throwing in mobile location ‘targeting’… ie an iPhone user from this geographic spot (which happens to be sitting on top of a Best Buy or Starbucks) gets served a relevant contextual ad which converts to a sale on iTunes… and therefore Best Buy or Starbucks gets paid a bounty for having brought Apple a new customer and transaction.
Not unlike what I suspect we will see develop in reverse in search where a mobile digital search results in a physical visit or purchase with the digital search provider receiving compensation for driving that event, all made possible by location awareness of course.
Wildlife reserve spotted inside Snow Leopard
A couple of articles recently going around about how some new location/mapping functionality is expected to be baked into the new Apple Mac OS X (aka Snow Leopard) including one this morning from AppleInsider.com. Essentially it looks like the core location capabilities from iPhone SDK will now become part of the core operating system for Mac PCs as well, which will likely use wi-fi to do the position determination (think Skyhook).
So what does this mean? Well hopefully more and more tools and applications you enjoy on your PC will now find it easier to integrate the location dimension. On one level it will be like a dynamic location cookie for browser based vertical “finding” application like Yelp, Fandango, and any other web service that could benefit from location awareness, which would be handy indeed. But given the fact that most PC users are probably teathered to one place where they hang out a lot like their home or office, any probably already have their zip code being cookied by these service already, the upside for that sort of stuff seems limited.
One of the cooler things that does come to mind would be integration into the calendar and scheduler like what Julian Bourne has developed with ProxPro. Not only would your calendar show meetings blocked off, but they could include buffer times to account for travel time and alerts to tell you when you need to leave for your next meeting given traffic conditions and travel distance. Or maybe you could have an email alerts sent to clients with automatic ETA embedded when you’re stuck in traffic to let them know where you are and your situation and that your running late, although that seems more like a mobile phone thing.
The iPhone Is Really a Trojan Horse For The Real Business Which Is…
So I woke up today and saw the latest rumor that Apple is working on its own search engine. I must say that I have not historically followed Apple too closely, but holy crap the coverage of that company on the web is insane… I think the number of Steve Jobs disciples must only be surpassed by Obama and Oprah… let’s just hope Jobs doesn’t decide to declare war on some small country, I think congress just might hear him out.
So here goes, this post is purely pandering to that unbridled demand for Apple related rumors and what ifs.
The news this am is thanks to TechCrunch, Is Apple Building A Search Engine? to summarize it goes something like this:
Yes Apple is building its own search engine because:
- they have a bunch of traffic so it would be a good idea
- Steve Jobs is not pleased with Google’s Android becoming competitive with his iPhones
- Google CEO is allegedly forced to cover his ears and go ‘nuh,nuh,nuh,nuh,nuh’ while awkwardly staring at the ceiling at Apple board meetings anytime someone says the word ‘mobile’
No Apple is not building its own search engine because:
- they surely would poached, or at least advertised for some, web search engineers by now if it were true… no poaching or hiring that anyone can tell so far.
So lets just say that Apple is working on its own search engine. Do you think it will be of the regular ol, plain vanilla, html scraping, evolutionarily challenged, web crawler variety? Hell No, if for no other reason than that’s not Steve Jobs style! I say it will be a revolutionary new mobile, location aware, search engine for connecting you with the people, information and stuff directly around you as you travel about in the real world.
Knuckle Dragger Search: Find FaceBook Friend Profile On The Web
Apple Search: Find Friend in Restaurant around the corner
Knuckle Dragger Search: Find eBay auction listing for hard to find toy
Apple Search: Find hard to find toy on shelf at store in next town over
Knuckle Dragger Search: Find official AP news stories about stuff happening 1k miles away
Apple Search: Find local, P2P, news related to the world directly surrounding you, wherever you are
Select factoids designed to support this rumor include:
- Apple is a leader in enabling location awareness in their phones: GPS, Wi Fi positioning, Google Maps, Core Location API functionality.
- Apple not allowing turn by turn navigation applications to be developed for iPhone, even though it’s the known killer LBS app
- Being in hardware business stinks long term, and selling music ain’t much better.
- there are only a few tens of billions of inhabited “places” on Earth and another 6-7 billion people on Earth… versus 1 trillion web pages on the web, so the size of the search job is much more contained and manageable… maybe those web search engineers aren’t really necessary
- It would be kinda cool, and Steve Jobs likes to do cool stuff
