Sonic Notify: Taking Hyper Local Technology To New Levels of Local-ness
So I got the question the other day that was one of those deceptively simple questions: “So what do you think are the most interesting and exciting location based businesses you’ve seen out there recently?” And immediately a couple dozen companies popped into my mind, and I immediately started hedging, well there are a lot of them, which are interesting and exciting all for different reasons.
I happen to be particularly interested in the area of local and location based search and data, but since I had already talked a lot about companies dealing with data like PlaceIQ, Retailigence, Locu and HyperPublic, I instead ended up talking about an offering called Sonic Notify which was created by a NYC digital “ideas agency” called DenseBrain.
To grossly simplify it, Read more
Matchbook: Save, Tag & Share Locations
So it’s been ages since I’ve posted something here… not that there is not a lot of interesting stuff going on these days in the world of LBS… really quite the opposite… there is so much going on that it’s difficult to find the time to think and write about any of it. It seems that every day someone comes up with a new and unique way to take location and improve on or re-invent a capability that they hope consumers will flock to.
Last week someone told me about a new one called Matchbook
, that launched a couple of months back that probably went under the radar of most people, heck there are now 425k apps in the Apple App store, so how you do get ON the radar of anyone these days is another issue altogether!
The reason Matchbook stood out for me is because it is solving what seems to be such an obvious problem, and is something I had thought many times needed to be built… but was always stumped by how you actually get people to use and re use it and how’d you’d make any money from having built it. But I am really glad these guys built it and I hope to become a regular user.
So here is what Matchbook is all about: Simply put, it allows you to store and tag places you find out about so you can remember them later, or more easily share “your” places with friends. That’s really it, sweet and simple.
For example, let’s say you walk by a shoe boutique Read more
Qualcomm AllJoyn: Retail In-Store Service Portal
Last month at the NYC LBS apps developer meet up, we had a presentation from a company called Lokast which had an interesting app that created an-ad hoc hyper local peer to peer social network. What the hell is THAT you might ask? Well essentially if you are in a room and fire up the app, and other folks in the same room do the same, well you can see them. You, as well as they, can share stuff like who they are, what they’re up to and can also share things like media files and contacts, etc.
A quick search on Google and I noticed that they had a partnerships with Qualcomm, as an early user of an open source project called AllJoyn, which seems to power some of the wifi and Bluetooth side of the technology behind Lokast. What the hell does Alljoyn do, well I can’t tell you in any great detail for sure, since I opted not to spend 2 hours reading through all the documentation and SDKs, but per their FAQs it’s “peer-to-peer technology that enables ad hoc, proximity-based, device-to-device communication without the use of an intermediary server… that will enhance the user experience by simplifying how devices interact with one another.” Read more
People, Places and Now With Retailigence, Things
So in the virtual world, what you may like to search for could be pretty damn near anything under the sun from the mating habits of the African tree frog, to “Google stalking” someone… anyone from an ex-girlfriend to a new potential employee.
And most people seem happy enough that the plumbing behind Google does a pretty good job of spinning all the relevant information from everywhere on the web around like a centrifuge, drawing the good stuff that we want to the top where we can easily get to it.
But the Google centrifuge can only work its magic on the stuff that is present in the tube. And while there is a huge amount and diversity of information out there on the web to be spun, what tends to get put out there Read more
Hot Potato: for Events and Social Couch Potatos
Well unless you’ve been living under a rock, you have no doubt noticed all the buzz about Foursquare and Gowalla coming out of SXSW and Where 2.0 this year. It seems that location based mobile social networking and check-ins were all the rage there this year. There have been no shortage of followers with folks from Yelp and Facebook expected to join in on the check-in mania.
Another up and comer in this area, with a new twist, that is beginning to get some press is a company called Hot Potato. Here is where they fit in:
What they do: They create an online social network around the dimensions of “here” and “happening now”. Facebook has people at its center of gravity and Yelp has places (mostly businesses) as theirs. Folks like Foursquare and Gowalla have seen the value of connecting the two with gameplay around the places where people go.
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
Plethora of Google Location Related Announcements
Google already has an estimated million and a half advertisers, which certainly seems like a hell of a lot to most everybody else, but is it really? What is the total opportunity?
Just to keep this simple, let’s say that there are 15 million brick and mortar retailers in the U.S. (rough estimate) and that Google has 1.5 million advertisers currently as customers. Even if all the existing Google advertisers were brick and mortar advertisers and in the U.S. only they’d still only have 10% penetration of available advertisers. Now in reality over half of Google’s revenue is international and you can bet that a huge chunk of those advertisers are pure e-tailer with no physical store in sight.
There is only so much searching happening on the web and only a small percent of advertisers engaging with Google to try to reach those searchers, so if you’re Google what do you do to speed things along? Well you try to provide more stuff to search for, make it super easy to search for it, and try to engage the 90%+ of advertisers that don’t current engage with you.
So lets look at some of the newly announced efforts made over the past few days, particularly around location and expanding beyond the virtual world to the physical one. Read more
Placecast Teleconference Post Mortem
I had a listen to the Placecast Location Based Advertising teleconference last week and Placecast has made the audio available on MP3 from their site, so you can now download it to hear the whole panel discussion… it’s worth downloading and listening to the next time you have an hour to kill while on the treadmill or on the ride home from work.
All the panelists were great and included the CEOs of NearbyNow and Placecast as well as agency and research firm representation. It was a good general backgrounder on the state of things in location based advertising and a couple of the comments by Derek Leedy from Mediasmith resonated in particular with regard to what was unique about the ability to use “location” as a criteria for delivering advertising. Derek made some observation about how the location element adds an important new element to what marketers can infer, based on ones physical surroundings, and how it allows advertisers to reach customers when they’re potentially more action oriented and in a different consideration mode than when they’re on the web… emphasizing the benefits of the real time nature and the added relevance it brings.
It reminded me in many ways of how online search advertising is different than online display advertsing… with search being more action oriented and a generally different frame of mind… and we all know how that worked out.
Scott Dunlop of NearbyNow also had some telling stats to quantify some of the lift they’ve seen from better location relevance and I was generally surprised to hear of some of the success they were seeing. The last time I used NearbyNow I found myself time afer time back at an e-commerce web site rather than a real nearby store… I decided to give NearbyNow another run, but I’ll save that for another post.
Mobile Search Will Beat and Steal Lunch Money From Mobile Display Advertising
A great blog post over at Local Search News about the mobile local opportunity. Definitely worth the full read, but key take aways for me was the expected shift in ad dollars on mobile to move away from the largely display oriented stuff we see today toward an explosion of mobile search revenue. The Kelsey Group shows display revenue at over 60% of total 2008 mobile ad revenue, but sinking to just under 10% by 2013, mostly as the result of massive search growth from a mere $39 million to a whopping $2.27B or around 70% of all mobile ad spending in just five years.
I dug around to get the latest and greatest, and it looks like in the good old fashioned web world search is about 45% of ad revenue today with premium display close to a 1/3. So Kelsey’s predictions for the mobile world certainly seem to magnify the trend we’ve seen so far on the web with search having an even bigger role and display, a decidedly smaller role. To some degree this makes a lot of sense, since the small footprint of the mobile handset doesn’t leave a lot of room for all that lovely creative ad work, the sight sound and motion and all, and search is simple, quick and to the point which is well suited to the phone.
An even more interesting part, was not just the AMOUNT of search revenue, but the TYPE of searches expected… citing data from Google that mobile searches are 2-3x more often to be local in nature than searches done via a desktop, The Kelsey Group calls for over 1/3 of mobile searches to be “local” in nature in five years, and for over half of that whopping $2.27B in search revenue to be generated from “local” search queries.
Kinda makes you wonder what kind of local stuff all those folks will be searching for on their phones and who will be the benficiaries of that cool $1B+ in local oriented search ad spending. 
More on location based twitter
There seem to be a lot of the sites popping up for twitterers to register themselves in a geographic area, I know there are many more, but the ones that have caught my eye include geofollow.com, twitterlocal.net, localtweeps.com
After playing with the geo location features on my mobile twitter client Tweetie and also playing with the location oriented Twinkle application by Tapulous, which all use various types of technology to determine your location and the filter out tweets from folks outside a certain radius… going back to the old school way of registering yourself on a good old fashioned website
with your twitter name and your city or zip code just felt well, very old school…
So I had to dig around and find out why such an old school thing like a local twitter registration site would even exist, let alone seem to be proliferating.
From the best I can tell, there seem to be two potential drivers… one is that I was suprised to learn that nearly 2/3 of twitter users are using the service directly through the web or via a desktop application. Maybe it’s because of how I was introduced to Twitter, but I always thought it more as a mobile thing… you know with the 140 character limit thing and all… well evidently it’s not. So that alone explains alot, most people don’t have the technological approach to a geo-filter available and they just want to find local people to twitter with… fair enough.
But the other cool aspect of a list of local twitter users is for accomplishing the opposite of what the location aware technology does for ya… location aware tech allows you to see those immediately around you and their tweets, but the old fashioned registration site in theory could let you drop in on virtual tweeps and their tweets in a specific area somewhere else.
Now the inner Colbert in me may joke that focusing in and reading the tweet stream of the general public in Shanghai if you live in New York, seems pretty damn useless, and in many cases it probably is. But in some cases it could be valuable, for example if you’re heading to a new city and are looking for recommendations on where to get a good steak, who better than to ask than the local twittersphere in the city where you’re headed. Or if you want to keep tabs on what the buzz is in your old college town, you can drop in on the local tweet stream there… in theory having a local group to zoom in on could have huge possibilities in allowing journalists to zoom in to follow the local action related to a breaking news event in a particular area.
On a related note there is a great article on Local Search News about how Twitter should register and create accounts for local businesses to help better identify them in the twittersphere. Not so we can follow the local Italian restaurant to read a constant stream of tweets about how good their last batch of lasagna is, but to allow for a common currency for referring to specific places and establishments as twitter nation so often does. It makes a lot of sense to me.
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