Navteq.com: Consumer Map Portal or Showcase Site?

I saw the screaming headline from TechRadar this week that Navteq had launched a beta site at navteq.com ‘as a clear rival to Google Maps’ and the All Points Blog folks going along with the corporate line that it seems to be more of a showcase site. Since Navteq had acquired Mapsolute/Map24 over a year and a half ago, this development wasn’t totally out of left field, but it’s interesting to think about what is potentially going on here.

Navteq positions the new service simply as a “showcase” for their products and services, which makes a lot of sense, specifically highlighting that it will contain the most fresh data available. As they layer on new and interesting data and capabilities into the database, a directly accessable web front end seems like a great sales tool to be able to actually demonstrate some of these things in action immediately.

For example… lets say Navteq Direct Access just sold in McDonalds and corporate bigwigs want to be able to SEE the result of the deal now? Great have em go on over to navteq.com and search for “McDonalds” to see what they got. The inability to ‘look’ at a database as well as the lagtime in how long it takes some of their clients to pick up and distribute the new data must have been a challenge.

But on the flip side, this tool appears to now have pretty much taken over as the purpose of the main navteq.com website, with the previous content shuffled off to corporate.navteq.com. That and the fact that they did of course buy into a consumer map portal with Map24 has to make you wonder.

I also found it interesting that they seem quite interested in asking for feedback on and presumably improving the features and capabilities of the online map application. And much of the veribiage like “Let Navteq find it for you.” could be perceived as consumer oriented.

My guess is that they’re trying to delicately put their big toe in the water… or maybe their whole foot at this point, since Map24 could have been considered the big toe… to start to play in the consumer map portal market. But today in the here and now there is more money to be made from selling data to other map portals versus running your own as the uber map portal.
But potentially Navteq sees the day when this will no longer be the case and is preparing for that day?

A Second Look at NearbyNow

I am not normally much of a shopper… at all… in fact besides food and Christmas time, I probably purchase some thing from a retail store once a month at most. But for some reason I have a whopping three things I need to buy right now, a bike helmet for my five year old son who is way overdue to replace his baby froggie helmet that has lost its outer shell and now is missing its strap clasp; a new battery for my laptop which lasts a whopping 14 minutes on its existing battery when removed from the wall socket; and a protective case for my iPhone which gets dropped constantly thanks to 3 and 5 year old kids trying to fine tune their on iBowl-ing skills when I arrive home each night.

After hearing the wonders of NearbyNow on last weeks Placecast Location Based Advertsing Teleconference, I figured I’d give it another spin. For those not familiar with NearbyNow they promise the ability to find the products you’re looking for in a retail store near you, from their website:

NearbyNow was founded to simplify shopping for today’s consumers who browse online but buy in stores. By allowing shoppers to find products, brands, or sales locally, and to scan the inventory at any given shopping center, we provide a convenient shopping experience for the consumer and an effective marketing tool for merchants looking to motivate local customers.

The last time I used NearbyNow was a year ago, when I found myself time afer time back at an e-commerce web site rather than a real nearby store for the items I was looking for, so I wasn’t overly optimistic that things had improved but I gave it a try anyway…

I started with the bike helmet for my son… on Friday he took a nasty spill on his scooter on the way home from a special dad’s trip to ickdonalds and he got a bad scrape on his face… luckily he was wearing his beat-up old frog helmet which generally did its job. However, I got nasty looks from the moms in the park all weekend, so I’ve decided that he simply can’t have a big ol’ scrape on his face AND a helmet with the outer plastic shell missing and the strap jury rigged together, or I may just have one of the moms call CPS on me.

So I went into NearbyNow in search of a cool kid bike/scooter helmet. I did find a virtual picture and price on a helmet that fit the bill, but when I went to check on its availability at first I was told that the store wasn’t open right now and that the store would open at 9a… the problem is that it was already 11:25a local NYC time… so it seems that NearbyNow isn’t adjusting store hours for the location of the user relative to the store, only relative to California… wait I thought NYC was the center of the universe, evidently in tech land the Bay Area would be the center.

The second problem is that the store in question has been closed for probably close to a year now, maybe two… but thankfully I received an email from NearbyNow apologizing for not being able to validate the items availability because the store is “extremely busy” (busy being closed for a year that is)! So just for fun, I decided to call the closed store with the number that NearbyNow had provide and got what I believed to be a pre recorded message in Spanish, without anything that I could tell having to do with sporting goods.

Next stop Amazon, I picked up a cool Ben 10 helmet that will be here on Thursday, I think I can convince him to stay off the scooter until then.

Next I tried NearbyNow for a laptop battery… with equally dissapointing results. Evidently there is nowhere in Manhattan to walk into a store and buy at laptop battery over the counter, instead I was diverted to a variety on online e-tailers. It is possible I suppose that this is entirely accurate… I’ve seen a lot of odd specialty stores these days including a napping store (MetroNaps), peanut butter and jelly shop and shave shop, but have never seen a laptop battery store, so maybe that one was legit.

Finally I seemed to have a little more luck getting a case for my iphone. There was a thin looking one from Case Mate called Barely There and two Radio Shacks a couple of blocks away allegedly carried it. After receiving another ’sorry they’re not open yet’ and the “sorry we can’t check availability because the store is very busy” notice from NearbyNow I was beginning to wonder if the guy from NearbyNow whos jobs is to call the store on your behalf had found a MetroNaps store he liked and decided not to check out.

Rather that waiting for him to wake up from his nap and let me know if the item was in stock I ventured out to Radio Shack #1 to see what they had. En route I passed a number of other stores including a Staples and two or three mom and pop phone stores that likely had cases, but was determined to make it to Radio Shack. Well it turns out that Radio Shack #1 didn’t exist, in its place was a GameStop. But fortunately the second Radio Shack was a mere two blocks away buried in the second floor of a mall… and voila as advertised they had both the blue and orange Case Mate Barely There cases for sale at the price I had seen on NearbyNow. In fact it was helpful that I knew what I was looking for because for some reason the store had the Case Mate products on the other side of the store at boot level, not displayed with the other two dozen or so phone accessory items and I had to ask the sales clerk if they had any other cases before being directed to what I was looking for. In case you were wondering the store was completely empty, except for the two store clerks staring into the mall out of boredome, so that “store is very busy” message from NearbyNow is still a mystery.

Overall NearbyNow wasn’t a great experience, but it did come in handy and after some work I did find what I was looking for with one of my three items. I played around with a few other searches, for example for ‘paper’ within office products catgeory and was directed to Toys R Us and Sears 2-3 miles away, when there is a Staples directly across the street. So it seems that they have a limited number of retailers participating which makes it pretty hit and miss.

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.

Jewish Mothers Rejoice, Single Daughters Can Now Pinpoint Precise Location of Nearby Doctors on iPhone

LBS Apple Style: Location Aware, Digital Meets Physical, Affiliate Marketing

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.

Our job is to help acquire all the world’s content

I had seen this a couple of years ago, but noticed it again the other day while having a discussion about Google Latitude and its noteworthiness or lack thereof. I have obviously sided with the noteworthy crowd, not because Latitude represented particularly novel technology from Google, but rather because Google is the 800lb gorilla, and when they adopt and even promote something, it’s noteworthy because of the sheer volume of people they reach. That and information is like oxygen to the company so they need to continue to promote the creation of digital information.

From a Google Job Description in their Geo/Core Content Group.. I thought that the inclusion of “retail product inventories” was particularly interesting, particularly as it relates to where Google may be going with Latitude… bye bye searching for bits, hello searching for atoms? The relevant part:

“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information – our team’s job is to help acquire all the world’s content… The full breadth of content acquired by the team almost defies description; scope includes multiple forms of media in categories as diverse as: business addresses, event descriptions, restaurant reviews, retail product inventories, real estate listings, government data, and travel-related information.”

All Location Aware, All The Time

I noticed the big Inside The GPS Revolution issue of Wired the other day, but just got around to reading some of it… definitely worth checking out this great article on one authors experience living life with full location exposure, all day, every day. The author loaded every location aware iPhone application he could find (and a few Gphone apps as well) and spent a few weeks being the uber location application user. The article is a nice summary of many of the major location aware capabilities and players out there, and also provides some interesting insights into the less talked about social and behavioral implication of the technology. Well worth the read.

Navteq announces LocationPoint LBS Ad Platform

Loopt and other Location Aware iPhone Apps

After having read quite a bit about Loopt over the past year or so, I must say that I was pretty excited to see them offer a free iPhone application of their product. Free and iPhone being the critical components here… the hell if I was going to switch over to Boost mobile, and I am not so sure that I’d be willing to pay for Loopt, at least not yet.

As soon as Apple opened their app store I loaded every application I could find that looked like it might make cool use of location awareness, and I must say that after playing around with quite a few, Loopt certainly seems like the best so far… not including the Google powered maps application that comes standard.

But before I get too far along in my experiences with the various applications, I think that everyone that is currently making a living or hoping to make a living in the world of LBS, needs to drop whatever they’re doing and personally write a hundred thank you notes to Steve Jobs and all the staffers over at Apple that made location awareness such an important part of the iPhone (for the computer geeks among us, the thank you notes are that stack of little square pieces of paper that your grandmother gave you that you stuck in the bottom drawer of your dresser).

Ok so with that out of the way, there are a number of finder applications available for the iPhone and they’re all trying to do something slightly different: find friends, find places, find events, etc. From the initial batch that became available with the launch of the app store I tried Loopt, Yelp, Eventful, Whrrl, Where, EarthComber, Limbo and Nearby.

The only ones that I still use today are Loopt and Yelp.

You can tell from using the application that Loopt has been doing this for a while, and has learned the pain points for consumers and has done a great job of streamlining and simplifying the interface… there is a difference between complexity and power that I think Loopt gets… Loopt is not complex, but that doesn’t mean it’s not powerful.

First of all, getting a new Loopt account up and rolling was super easy, in fact it was so quick and painless that I’ve long since forgotten exactly what I had to do, I think it was just supplying my phone number and maybe a password… but I remember going from tapping on the icon to having a new account in well under a minute, and that’s all that matters.

Next it allows me to add friends either by typing in their phone number or going through and selecting friends from my iPhone contacts… again a very easy process.

The maps are provided by Microsoft Virtual Earth and are great quality and easy to navigate around through one finger panning and zooming, and they’ve partnered with Yelp to help beef up the POI listings and reviews.

Updating your friends on “What’s Up” is another simple 2 step process, just click on “What’s Up” and “Update” or feel free to add a blurb or photo (either from the camera or from your saved pictures) about what you’re up to.

But the coup de gras, is the link you can create with a Loopt Facebook widget. Once you’ve added the application to your Facebook account and linked it with your mobile application, all of your updates feed into your Facebook account and show up on your wall. This is important for me because at this stage in the game finding friends that can or want to get Loopt is not easy, so being confined just to Loopt with just my tech savvy friends would be a pretty lonely experience, but the Facebook updating utility allows me to connect with my larger group of Facebook friends, even if it is just for me to post “What’s Up”… in fact I now find myself providing updates through Loopt instead of directly via Facebook.

Now I am hoping that they come out with an embeddable widget where I can add my location and ‘What’s Up’ in places besides Facebook, like the Skyhook/Loki widget.

The Others

Ok so here is a quick rundown of my experiences with Yelp, Eventful, Whrrl and Where. I’ll save the others for another post, another day:

Yelp, is also another well done and slick application, although I think they still have some work to do in organizing the information. The default categories include categories that seem random to me… are that many people really looking for coffee & tea? Maybe so but not me. And when I search for restaurants around me, there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason behind the results provided, which I find frustrating… the top 10 results can be up to 20 blocks away, even when there are obviously ten restaurants closer… it seems to be taking into account quality/popularity in addition to proximity but the heck if I can figure out how to change the default setting. In reality I don’t typically get the results I want from proximity searches, although when I already know the name of the restaurant I do use the Yelp search function to get a better idea about the restaurant before committing to going.

I loaded up Eventful hoping to be able to quickly find nearby and last minute activities around the city to do with my kids, ala GoCityKids. In reality Eventful on the iPhone seems to really focus on the young hipster crowd looking for a band or show. I tried playing around with it anyway to see if I could find a upcoming and nearby college football game to go watch in the New York City area… a search for “college football’ returned some comedian’s routine under “Events” and a midtown bar that evidently was showing the BCS championship game back in January under “Venues”. I know NYC is a bad town for college football, but c’mon it can’t be THAT bad!

Whrrl and Where were non starters for me.

Where kept crashing for the first few weeks I gave it a try, I tried again more recently and it seems a little bit more stable now, but I still get error messages. Like Yelp the organization of Where seems to leave quite a bit to be desired… I am still not sure what to do with Quibblo Polls, SkyMap or HeyWhatsThat (no mountains in NYC, so I assume I don’t need that) and I’ve tried signing up for Buddy Beacon twice now with no luck. Zipcar and Starbucks locators are nice, but I don’t drink much Starbucks coffee or rent Zipcar vehicles, so don’t need those either. The application feels like one of those really slick $2 million dollar commercials for a financial services company that forgets to put the name of the bank in at the end… in other words it gets you all worked up and interested through the slick look and feel, but then forgets what the original purpose was in the first place…

Whrll gave me major password problems. I had a Whrrl account from online that didn’t seem to work on the iPhone application, so I couldn’t get into it for a while. When I did get in I remembered that none of my other friends use it and I didn’t really care what other top Whrrlrs thought about stuff in my neighborhood. So despite a nice slick application, I can’t figure out what to do with it and don’t want to hound and explain to my friend why they should get on it. So I am taking that one off.

Look out for another post on round two of the iPhone location aware apps coming soon.

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