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.
Sense Networks: No PBRs For You!
Last week there was a really good article in Business Week on Sense Networks, which I think is one of the more interesting companies out there in LBS.
I had posted about Sense Networks previously, but the Business Week article gives a nice long overview of some of the recent developments.
The article focuses a lot on the tribes and the study of the behaviors of those within the tribe for the purposes of mobile advertising delivery, which is very interesting indeed, but we may have quite a wait before that information could be put to use in a live, on demand ad call, particularly since there seems to be a lot of pushback to using such information on an individual user level, as opposed to in aggregated form.
The whole article made me think about drilling down on the places rather than the people and how old school some of the current marketing tools really are and how a refresh may be in order. Take for instance target marketing by zip code. First of all, if the U.S. covers over 9 million square kilometers, and includes 43k zip codes, that means on average a zip code covers 213 square kilometers. Sure there are some sweeping generalizations you can posibly make about everyone in that 213 square kilometer area, but they would be just that… sweeping generalizations.
I just had a look at a map of my hometown zip code in Gainesville, Florida which is home to the University of Florida and which in many ways is a pretty dichotomous place, where conservative deep south meets liberal college town, and just eyeballing the map I can think of at least four different ‘areas’ of residences which probably have little more than a love of Gator football and a Publix in common.
The zip code covers a good chunk of the city which includes areas of student oriented housing full of 18-21 year old undergrads, at least two good sized trailer parks, a very large upscale development full of mostly white collar families, and at least a few farms. Now I don’t know how many people fit into each of those four ‘types’, but I am sure there are marketers in New York buying that zip code thinking they’re getting college students, and well I guess they’d be probably about half right, but it’s certainly not the complete story.
Zip codes were designed to help the government get the mail out to you, and in todays information age they seem about as useful for marketing as the dewey decimal system is for organizing and helping you find the worlds information.
Maybe we’ll see a Sense Networks “Network of Reservations” to go with their “Tribes” which can reveal some details on the territory within those zip codes and clump similar reservations together for use by marketers on and offline alike.
No matter how many ads for the Albertson’s $9.99 case of PBR special my parents see, I don’t suspect that, even in this economy, they will become buyers anytime soon.
KPMG On LBS Advertising
“The greatest marketing opportunity for mobile is location-based advertising, according to 48 percent of respondent to the KPMG survey.” – Feb 5, 2009 Survey
City Sense: If U Like Wall Street, U May Also Like Rikers
I came across Sense Networks last summer when they arrived out of stealth mode and think they’re potentially doing some of the most interesting and exciting stuff in LBS… out of the 212 nonetheless (+40.7-74 didn’t seem as catchy)! take that left coasters!
What the heck do they do you may ask? Well rather than just pasting the long description from their about us page, here is the twitter inspired version: they collect, process and analyze (in real time) anonymous data on the whereabouts of a ton of location aware devices (phones, navigation devices and sensors) in order to uncover useful information related to patterns of historical location data.
Sounds cool huh?!
So, you know how when you go to Amazon to buy a book, and you get the’people who bought that book, also bought this book’? Well on one level Sense Networks is trying to do that for everyone as they traverse the streets that is their city or town… folks that go to the Statue of Liberty, might also like the Empire state Building (aka tourists), folks that go to the meat packing district on Friday nights, might also like Alor Cafe in Staten Island for brunch on Sunday (aka the bridge and tunnel crowd)… you get the idea.
Since I don’t live in SF and don’t know the area very well it’s hard to really tell exactly what the iPhone application can and can’t do at this point, it’s being positioned as a nightlife finder… so presumably if you’re looking to head out to a bar and want a better idea of where and when to go, a quick consulation of CitySense can let you know that Cantina on Sutter is hopping right now, but Lion Pub on Divisadero, well not so much… by the way Sense Networks folks, those Google and Yelp points of interest really need to be layered directly over the map, it would make a huge difference in helping users get their bearings!
But more than anything the CitySense nightlife finder application seems to be more about creating a tangible and visible showcase for the Sense Networks business and technology…but thinking about what’s happening behind the scenes and how it could be used in a variety of applications is where it indeed gets quite interesting.
Making Up Stuff About Yahoo Fire Eagle
So going back to Fire Eagle. By knowing people’s location information and matching that information with knowable information about the world around those people, the opportunity exists to target like never before. To date, targeting has been one dimensional from the point of view that it has been limited to indexing information from web pages and only reflects the view as seen from the time a user spends in front of a web browser.
