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.
Don’t mind me, I am just here to take out the leader of the neo Soviet Liberation Front. And I’ll take a Tall Skim Latte while I am at it
Since my kids hijack my computer every night, I am usually stuck with finding something on my iPhone to pass as entertainment. I was surfing around to see if Area Code had come out with a new mobile LBS game recently. If you’re not familiar with them Area Code was an early developer of some popular LBS games such as Plundr, Sharkrunner, Crossroads and Pac Manhattan. I didn’t see anything new which was LBS related from them, but they did build a cool tetris meets soduko game for the iphone called Drop 7, which is fun and addicting and an easy way to burn through 30 minutes of downtime.
I finally came across a game for iPhone called Agency Wars by SGN which was announced recently at this years SXSW. The game is more of a text heavy strategy, role playing game… low on the action graphics but slick nonetheless… where you can play the role of a secret agent, acquiring assets and carrying out your missions against bad guys and other agents. The game takes on a new dimension by introducing a social and location aware element to completing the missions.
Many missions can only be completed with the help of another player, or “contact” in espionage lingo, and the link into Facebook via Facebook Connect helps you make “contacts” out of those already in your social network.
Other missions use the phones location determining abilities, to only allow you to complete missions if you haul yout butt out of the house or office to a specifc place in the real world and fire up the game there. It also uses the phone’s location awareness to find nearby ‘contacts’ that can help you complete missions. Luckily for me, it seems designed for the lazy agents as well, with many missions conveniently located within just a few blocks of where I am. So after dropping the kids off at school the other morning I decided to follow my instructions and swing by a local cafe in southern Moscow (in this case the location of the cafe was the Empire State Building) and take out the leader of the neo Soviet Liberation Front. Luckily there is a Starbucks there as well, so I could kill two birds with one stone… and it gave me somthing to do while I waited in line too!
In fact the guys from SGN could probably do a three way partnership with Starbucks and the folks at Neoreader to drive gamers from store to store buying coffee and scanning codes off of coffee cups in a self perpetuating coffee, espionage, virtual world, game nirvana guaranteed to keep the unemployed tech geeks as busy and wired as ever.
Geo Twittering
Ok, when the founder of Twitter is headed over to The Colbert Report as a follow up to being on The Daily Show, you know that Twitter hype is now officially reaching bubble territory… kinda like we all should have seen coming a year ago when cable television was jam packed with reality programming like Flip This House, Million Dollar Listing, The Real Deal, and TLC airing
not one, not two but three reality shows about house flipping. Can the twitter channel be far off? All twits all the time?
Google Search results for “Twitter”: 299 Million results
Google Search results for “Pizza”: 144 million results
I do find Twitter pretty valuable, I’ve identified a bunch of people, mostly business people around the LBS field, that I generally either know, or would like to know and follow them to benefit from the stuff they discover and post tweets about. It’s great for getting a feel for what’s going on when I can’t be somewhere I’d like, for example at this years CTIA in Vegas. I fully
expect to be able to follow any of the major announcements as they happen at CTIA via Twitter, while having my butt fully planted here in NYC.
Also, you can read a hell of a lot into those little tweets, like “yeah I totally was thinking the same thing as that guy” or “those guys from company X are indeed all douchebags.” or “so thats what the developer of that hot new LBS app is really doing with his leisure time at 3am”.
So I of course was quite interested in seeing what the location aware proposition could add to something like Twitter.
I recently came across Twinkle, by Tapulous, which was touting the benefits of their location awareness twitter application for iPhone, I figured I’d give it a whirl. I use Tweetie as my core twitter application and it to also has a location aware feature, but since Twinkle really markets “leveraging the power of Geolocation” I thought it would be worth checking out.
First and foremost, Twinkle seems to be shooting for more of a combination of social networking and Twitter app all in one, so the idea is not only to allow folks to broadcast out their 140 characters of update/anecdote/wisdom and to geolocate the location of the user, but to expand on the idea by allowing you to add folks as friends and to initiate chats with those nearby… kinda
like Twitter meets Limbo or Loopt Mix.
I have tried the location feature out on both Twinkle and Tweetie and despite setting the same geographic radius I get a lot more tweets in my area from Tweetie then I do from Twinkle, which makes me think that Twinkle is only showing me Tweets from other Twinkle users, and not the full number of location aware Twitter users, which is a huge problem since I’d be missing out on 99% of the tweets happening around me.
Suprisingly neither of the two systems seems to allow me to combine the two features by seeing 1. only the tweets of those that I already follow and 2. when they’re within say a mile or two radius of me… now that may actually be useful if I for example saw that someone was sending updates about some cool stuff they were seeing at a digital media conference they were attending, and unbeknown to me that digital media conference was happening just on the other side of town. It’s possible that this does indeed exist but those that I follow on Twitter just aren’t enabling the location awareness aspect when they post their tweets.
I can see this being an interesting feature if you could get the geographic radius down to a tighter area like those in the same restaurant, or bar, or building or stadium where everyone is sharing a common experience. It would be a hell of a lot more relevant to me than just random people within a mile radius, which in NYC can cover a good half million people with next to nothing in common.
I also noticed a new service BeLocal coming out in the U.K. which has a different spin on the whole location aware Twittering. They have you follow @belocal on twitter and then send them your postal code via a direct message, where you will then be pushed out local daily tweets with news directly relevant to your location, presumably from area media outlets and businesses.
I suspect that there will be a lot more of these interesting, location aware tweeting capabilities in the months ahead, but we are certainly not there yet.
New Whrrl & SXSW
Oh how I wish I could have made it to SXSW this year… I think. I’ve been once before for the music part, but have never had the opportunity to experience the technology sessions. I did catch some video of the event online, specifically a bit from diggnation on the new iPhone 3.0 features. See the video above for yourself, but I for one found the level of excitement over the cut and paste feature, to well, be a little disturbing. C’mon folks it’s cut and paste! Felt more like Brad Pitt announced he was getting married to Madonna to a room full of 13 year olds!
Any entrepreneurs out there? Might I suggest starting a rehab progam targeted to those that have OD’d on all things digital… you know they could be forced to use a paper and pencil for a week, and only communicate via a landline phone and watch one of those old tv’s with only six channels and one turn knob to change channels.
What I would have liked to see at SXSW was the LBS advertising panel and to have learned a bit more about the re launch of Whrrl.
For those not familiar with Whrrl, version 1 was a very slick desktop and mobile map oriented application that was largely designed to allow groups of friends to share their experiences about places they have visited. The execution on the idea, was very well done, although the idea required a ton of people to use the application for it to really be valuable, and also was a silo
unto itself in a world where people were already sharing anything and everything with their friends via clear leaders in the social networking world like Facebook and MySpace. As it seems to have turned out, sharing just location oriented items among your social network, may not be a stand alone business at this stage in the game.
The new version of Whrrl, still has location as an important element, but location seems to have taken a back seat to the ability to pull together a number of elements to allow users to paint a more complete story to answer the question of “What are you doing?” The company’s new tagline “What’s your story?” seems designed to allow those that aren’t satisfied with just being able to inform their network of “What they’re doing”, to kick it up a notch and tell us alot more about what they’re doing, in the form of a complete story.
As I had mentioned in an earlier post about Loopt and Whrrl, the one key features I liked in Loopt, was the ease at which I could update Facebook with not only “What I am doing” but with the location element layered in as well. Well with the new version of Whrrl, they’ve now done that and one better by making it simple to push updates to both Facebook and Twitter, along with a link that brings people to the deeper multi dimensional story including location, photos, etc.
I gave it a shot this weekend, even though I am probably not the ideal candidate for Whrrl since I am a horrible storyteller and usually find other more fullfilling stuff to do than to take a bunch of pictures and give them interesting and informative captions throughout my typical day. And as far as I know there is no one else living vicariously through my life that would really care about all that detail anyway.
Like Whrrl version 1, they have got the slick presentation stuff down very well. Much of the navigation throughout the application was very logical and simple and the integration with Facebook Connect worked fine for me with absolutely no problems. I was generally able to update my location, add photos and text to Whrrl with ease (although I did notice that the new FourSquare did a better job of resolving location down to the buildings and businesses directly around me). I did find it aggrevating to put in notes for a post or, to serve as a caption for a picture (which by the way doesn’t accompany the picture very well), only to find that if I wanted to post those comments directly to Facebook that I had to retype them, which on a mobile phone can be very annoying.
I also noticed that people may not get the fact that there is more information off the url that accompanies your Facebook update. I had recently updated my status on Facebook that I was at a popular BBQ restaruant which is part of a chain in Florida… moments later a friend chimed in “which one?”, despite the fact that the full map detail was available one click away.
I think I understand the gap that Whrrl is trying to fill. You can only say so much in 115 characters, and if pictures can say 1,000 words, pictures plus maps should be able to tell an even richer story… which they do indeed. So Whrrl is the platform to plug into social networks for those that don’t want to be restricted by what they want to say.
One additional interesting feature they may want to add would be a graphical display of a timeline related to the story, to not only see “where” and hear about the “what” and “why”, but also to give a better grasp on the “when”.
Only time will tell if this new approach will take off, but it certainly seems to have a better shot than Whrrl version 1.0.
Jewish Mothers Rejoice, Single Daughters Can Now Pinpoint Precise Location of Nearby Doctors on iPhone
What iTriage is designed for is connecting sick people with both useful information related to thier malady, and the medical care facilities or doctors best equipped to help them. Think of it as a location aware WebMD meets Google Maps.
So it could work like this… lets say this afternoon you start to notice you have a sharp pain in you stomache during a business trip to New Orleans. It could have been that Lucky Dog you had at the airport, but somehow it feels different. You fire up iTriage and sort through 10 most common sources of stomache pain and their various descriptions and symptoms, and decide that it very well might be Appendicitis. After your self diagnosis you decide you need to do something now! The application lets you click through to either connect with a nurse or doctor advice line over the phone to quickly get a second professional opinion or immediately locate the nearest medical facility equipped to deal with your problem… in this case so you can proceed quickly to the closest hospital emergency room.
No doctors with GPS locators hanging off their belts yet, but it’s a step in the right direction to pull together many of the pieces needed to help someone through a medical emergency situation.
There is still some work to be done on the application which is too heavy with medical jargon and menus, and seems to have a split personality between being a critical emergency response tool and a more general health and medical guide for dealing with wide reaching problems such as alcohol and child abuse and cavities which are also covered.
Its listed at the $0.99 “we’re still figuring it all out” price, and it sounds like a lot of the shortfalls are already being worked on, which is good news. I now have it loaded up, but hope I never need to use it.
