Facebook Places: 36 Hrs Later
Well its been 36 hours more or less since Facebook announced their new Places features, and a solid day in which I’ve been able to get it working on my iPhone. So I wanted to post a quick follow up.
- first of all if you don’t already read The Next Web and their coverage of location, you really should… they did a lot of posts on Facebook Places, full of great insights. I thought the one titled “Why I deleted foursquare for good” was particularly good. That and pretty much all of Greg Sterling’s Screenwerks blog are great sources of info Read more
ShopKick & Causeworld, So far Hype > Reality
So I heard about this new company Shopkick a few months ago… I went to check it out and ended up at Causeworld, which seems to have been one of the first Shopkick mobile apps. I am not an avid shopper nor a save-the-world kinda person, or at least not one that is going to try to save the world by scanning boxes of Pampers on my phone, so I kinda moved on. But it seems that ShopKick has raised $15 million from guys including Greylock and Kleiner Perkins and now launched its own namesake application Shopkick, and is getting some press with headlines like “Did Shopkick just change the check in game?” and “ShopKick teams with Best Buy to End Fake Retail Check Ins.” So I decided that I needed to go back and have a closer look. 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.
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
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.
LBS Apple Style: Location Aware, Digital Meets Physical, Affiliate Marketing
The folks at The Register have a detailed piece on an Apple patent that was filed last week covering a broad range of “approaches” for the “display of location specific information” at “pre-determined locations”. The wording “pre determined location” in particular jumped out at me… mostly because these patents usually bend over backwards to be as broad and over reaching as possible, so the inclusion of wording to specifically limit its application seems noteworthy. That and the many reference to ‘establishment specific’ applications paints a picture of a retail store oriented product.
So what kinda “establishment specific” “location specific information” are we talking about here, well from what I can decipher it would seem to include:
- general display panels (aka ads, “welcome to Best Buy, America’s favorite electronics store”)
- ads tied to a specific store ( “This Best Buy store is offering 20% off any albums purchased before noon today)
- ads tied to physical and online store items (“Jimmy Buffet’s new album is out… buy it here, or download it directly to your iPhone for the same price.”)
- ads tied to enhanced online experiences for physical world purchases and items (“don’t take our word for it, visit our online forums to find out what others think of this digital camera”)
- ads tied to public audio broadcast in the store (“like that tune you just heard, it was Viva la Vida by Coldplay buy it here — this is what the album cover looks like — or download it now to your iPhone)
Some of these individual elements we’ve seen before like Shazam which can listen to what music is playing and identify the artist and make it available for download. But what makes it interesting is, looking at it in its entirety with “establishments” and location at the center, it just looks an awful lot like a mobile/location aware version of a good old fashioned web affiliate program ala Commission Junction or Linkshare. You know they ones where links from one site like dogparkusa.com drives sales to another like PetSmart.com… and the referring site dogparkusa.com gets paid a bounty by PetSmart for bringing them a new customer.
It’s the same thing but just throwing in mobile location ‘targeting’… ie an iPhone user from this geographic spot (which happens to be sitting on top of a Best Buy or Starbucks) gets served a relevant contextual ad which converts to a sale on iTunes… and therefore Best Buy or Starbucks gets paid a bounty for having brought Apple a new customer and transaction.
Not unlike what I suspect we will see develop in reverse in search where a mobile digital search results in a physical visit or purchase with the digital search provider receiving compensation for driving that event, all made possible by location awareness of course.
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.”
