Anttenna: Mobile Location Aware Craigslist
So it looks like some ex Microsoft Advertising guys are in the process of launching a location aware, real time, classified ads type of application by the name of Anttenna… think of it as a mobile location aware Craigslist. It doesn’t seem to be fully up and functioning here in NYC yet, but you can still get it and play with it to get the gist… or maybe it’s already fully up and running wherever you live.
Take all the simplicity and randomness of posting stuff you have or want to Craigslistand add some only-for-mobile features like filters based on proximity, 140 character limits on descriptions, and quick chat to check availability or coordinate for meeting up… and that’s pretty much Anttenna.
From my short experience with the app there is still a fair amount of work to be done Read more
Would the further localization of Groupon still work?
Ok, so its been a while since posting around here, there has been a lot going on in the LBS world, way too much to effectively catch up on here in a single post. I’ve been meaning to write about the whole background location coming on iPhone, Metacarta, Cityvoter, MyTown and Anttenna, and Socialight‘s new DIY LBS platform all of which seem pretty damn interesting and worthy of a closer look, but this whole time management thing keeps getting in the way.
So I’ll just dive back in with one of the ones that I have been wanting to investigate further, just because it seems to come up the most and I’ve been negligent in checking them out… it’s Groupon and what I’ve heard more than a few times about them growing into a big player in the future of location based marketing.
So I finally spent two minutes signing up for Groupon Read more
Placecast Match API
Ask a geo nerd, or Angelina Jolie, about where they are and they may geekily come back with the Latitude and Longitude of the location, but for the rest of us it’s a more imprecise description… “uh at the Mickey D’s next to the Exxon”. To McDonalds corporate that may be store #1245, to on campus students it may be the ‘ickdonalds by the dorms’ to area residents it may be the McDonalds by the university and to Google Maps it may be the business at 4151 North Central Expressway. All the same friggin place.
Now in the olden days when you just bought a printed foldable map this didn’t really matter much, but nowadays in the modern inter networked world of digital maps and folks creating a dizzying array of new services helping connect people with locations, it matters more. Now within a single stand alone application like say a TomTom navigation device there is probably not much thought put into what you name a place, but in the web2.0 world where interoperability and information sharing reign, everyone needs to know what location everyone else is talking about when someone is talking about the business at 4151 North Central Expressway.
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
ReserveX: Location Based Marketing and Selling More Tickets
I’ve always been interested in the theories and practices behind pricing and yield management… I am not much of a shopper, but when I do go shopping I frequently find myself wondering why things cost what they do, and the seemingly randomness to how sellers sometimes price things.
Forget about having me book an airline ticket, I’ll spend a week on Expedia with all those awesome options to work with… well what if I try these days, in to these airports within a 50 miles radius, with these times… now I wonder what will happen if I can try to arbitrage either two one ways, or throw in that trip to Denver next month trying to cross book that return with this departure using the same flight numbers… what fun!
So you can only imagine my excitement when I heard about what a company ReserveX was looking to do tying together location based marketing with yield management designed for tickets sellers. Read more
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.
FTC on Behavioral Targeting Regulation and Location Data
I just read through (ok so I really just skimmed and searched) a couple of FTC documents, one regarding potential regulation of the online behavioral targeting industry issued yesterday and one about the mobile marketing industry, specifically a session related to Location Based Services from May 2008.
I am a little familiar with such things having worked for a leading cable network targeting kids and the various marketing to kids self regulation policies and the Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act (aka COPPA).
Kudos to our government for 1. being proactive in addressing such things and 2. opting to take the wait and see self-regulation route first before imposing some heavy handed and unnecessarily restrictive policies that would stop innovation dead in its tracks.
A quick Control F (search) on the newly released FTC Self Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising reveals that the commenters to the commission recommend putting
“precise geographic location” data in a “sensitive” information category that “deserves some form of heightened protection” which would put it in the same category as “information about children and adolescents, medical information, financial information and account numbers, Social Security numbers, sexual orientation information, government-issued identifiers”
The location awareness issues here are somewhat familiar from the years of online behavioral targeting (transparency, consumer control, express consent, how long to hold data), but more complex for mobile location awareness which includes issues related to location accuracy, real time data vs delayed data, device owner versus user rights, and the more muddled stack of understanding who controls and sees what on a mobile device (carrier, device, platform, application, business operator?).
In one of my more ambitious days I registered awhere.org for the purposes of addressing some of these issues for not just advertising but general LBS development… but I fell asleep shortly after starting.
SiRFs Year Long Wipeout Finally Ends
Today the company announced that it was “merging” with CSR, a UK company which specializes in developing Bluetooth chips, with more minor initiatives in GPS and wifi. Sirf was purchased in an all stock transaction valued at $136 million. Sirf had cash and cash equivalents of $115 million as of the end of year 2008, so not much value placed on the remaining assets there.
As a company with an amazing 80%+ market share just a few years ago, I thought for sure SiRF had a better and brighter future in front of themselves with a strong balance sheet and location awareness becoming more and more mainstream, going into phones, cameras, cars and everything else.
I think I’ll go back and spend some more time with this one to try to learn from my errors. I was a bit suprised that the company never seemed to move very aggresively in the hybrid location technologies beyond GPS, but I am not sure that would have made much of a difference in the end.
CSR seems to bring some specialtise in bringing together hybrid technologies and also has a lot of relatonships with major phone manufacturers that make it look like SiRF will be a great deal for them.
I guess the lesson learned is that apparently it’s not enough to develop a bunch of IP and patents and to focus on one market, and to do just one thing very well in the hyper competitive world of technology today.
Google Latitude
Seems that Google is throwing its hat into the ring with its own location aware social networking app and mobile friend finder called Latitude. The news is being well covered today including a great summary on O’Reilly Radar as well as one right there on the front page of AllthingsD.com today, Silicon Alley Insider and some particularly intersesting insidery point of view from the ex Googler and Dodgeball founder. All of those give some nice details about how it works, so I won’t bother going into much detail here, except to say that Latitude seems to work like other similar services including Loopt, Buddy Beacon, Brightkite, Limbo, etc. Where the application determines your location through one of a variety of ways and then lets you share it with friends, with a number of different controls to monitor with whom and to what detail (if at all) you share your location data.
One reason that it is noteworthy is of course because it’s Google doing it… and while literally dozens of small start ups have tried to build something similar and attract users from scratch with location awarness as a core benefit, Google seems to view location sharing/friend finder as another added feature to go along with Google Maps as sort of an extension to finding things on a map (hey why not find people too?) and GMail/GTalk, as an extended way to communicate with someone you know (hey, why not see them in person as well as emailing them?). I am still trying to wrap my head around that one a bit… should current location be as universally available and shared as ones phone number or street address (ie integration into an Outlook contact field) or is it better suited at this point as another facet of your life to be shared only with a more tight and existing social network?
It does seem odd that there wasn’t a specific tie into the social networking side of Google in Orkut, where Latitude would presumably be most right at home, although news on that may still be around the corner. I am sure we’ll see something before too long from folks like Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace as well.
I’ve see a couple of articles that seem to think that this announcement will mean the death of folks like Loopt and Limbo. I think this may be premature, heck in the short term they may even see a nice boost as overall consumer awareness is lifted and potentially attitudes are changed… hey Google’s mantra is ‘do no evil’, so if they’re letting people track each other, maybe that’s not so bad afterall?
Once LinkedIn or Facebook comes out with something similar, then, I think we’re getting closer to that come to Jesus moment for folks like Loopt, Limbo and Buddy Beacon, who may then be relegated to being a white label solution to power the location element of other existing communities/networks.
If Google is doing it in a big and mass way, and Mossberg’s squad over at the Wall Street Journal are reviewing it and putting it on the front page of allthingsD then I think it must be pretty close to going mainstream. I for one can’t wait to see a higher level of consumer consciousness and adoption, so we can begin to move along with all the other cool stuff that first requires getting this basic concept acceptance under our belts.
