Metaplaces: Sense Networks
I thought one of the most interesting and informative speakers at Metaplaces was Tony Jebara from Sense Networks. While I have posted about Sense Networks in the past, Tony did a great thorough, and mechanical walk through of his company that provided some interesting new insights.
He describes the company as an analytics company, like Nielsen, with a particular focus on segmentation analysis, and importantly one that doesn’t deliver anything directly back to a single end user, but rather allows its business customers to have a better understanding of aggregate customer behaviors.
Sense Networks pulls together call data and location data from 10 million devices, and slices and dices the data in a variety of different ways to provide, what it hopes, is a useful analysis for companies. The subscriber location and call usage data is almost all consumer opt-in, gathered directly from wireless subscribers, and is limited just to lat, long, time and call details.
But Sense Networks uses this information, Read more
Metaplaces: Random Thoughts Day One
Some other random take-away’s from day one at Metaplaces. They stuck out to me as particularly interesting or thought provoking, even if some are not particularly new:
- On advertising front, search and action oriented is getting more traction than display, and it’s hard to cover costs with just low cpm banner and network inventory
- From the carriers perspective, location look-ups are expensive and taxing, almost the same overhead as setting up a full call
- None of this stuff really takes off in a mass market way until we figure out ubiquitous always on location
- The fragmented nature of mobile/carriers is still quite an issue when it comes to trying to get any one thing to scale and for getting advertisers to take notice
- There are a lot of cool and interesting LBS things being built with only the faintest idea of how they’ll one day make money. Reluctantly, advertising seems to the revenue source of choice… but often knowledge of the industry is very limited and attitudes borderline hostile. If you’re a vegetarian, animal rights activist, it’s going to be very hard to make a career as a butcher.
Metaplaces: Mobile Social Networks or as they would say in California, Mobile Social Graphs
So there was a whole session yesterday focusing on the location based social networks and essentially how the hell they’re going to make any money. I am not sure why folks expect that this has been figured out on the mobile side of things when the 800lb gorilla’s in the web world is still just figuring things out there, but alas. On a related note, it’s worth checking out the breakdown of how Facebook currently makes money today from an interesting post from SAI.
While there were few direct answers here, the read between the lines answer seemed to be that “we’re not sure but we’re experimenting with a bunch of different things”… premium services add-on’s seemed to be a popular option. But it was also clear that regular old banner ads just didn’t seem to be cutting it, bringing in maybe just a handful of dimes per thousand… which when combined with a respectable, but not overwhelming, audience of a few hundred thousand users, wouldn’t amount to much. One of the speakers did throw out that with some of the geo targeting qualifiers, they saw CPMs jump into the few dollars range. Overall it sounded like some of the core economics around the costs of location dips and maps made it challenging to make it work on the pure low network advertising cpm’s model, so CPMs needed to make it into the dollars to make it work.
I was particularly impressed by Rob Lawson’s presentation on behalf of BrightKite which earlier this year merged with Limbo. In the world of digital advertising, it wasn’t necessarily that what they were doing was amazingly original, but you got the feeling that they understand the advertising world and they seemed to be doing the basic blocking and tackling to move ahead… first they combined two strong companies to get enough audience to make it worthwhile for advertisers to notice, then they hired five dedicated sales guys who either already got it or were trained to understand the space and what makes it unique.
The moderator of the panel Claudio Schapsis keeps a running tab on all the new location based social networks popping up, and its getting to be quite long these days. Not surprising some of these guys are coming to the realization that it will become tougher and tougher to compete and grow as a stand alone consumer destination, and are instead switching gears to help bring the goodness of location awareness to people who already have large existing networks.
MetaPlaces 2009: Location is like Paint
I am currently out at the MetaPlaces conference happening in San Jose where the focus is on how to make some money from all this cool location awareness stuff… or as they put it “how to keep the industry sustainable”.
Oddly enough, that phrase gave me a flashback to attending the first SiRF Location Ecosystem summit a few years ago where Kanwar Chadha was hoping that his would be the first and last location summit… where he was hoping that location awareness , via his GPS chips of course, would become so accepted and integrated into everything, that there would no longer be a need for a stand alone conference to talk about things specific to location awareness…
Things didn’t really work out as planned there I guess.
There always seems to be a bit of an overhanging question in this area which is the age old question of ‘is location a feature of another thing, or some thing unto itself?’ , and one of yesterday’s panelist had a great answer for: it’s both. The analogy that came to mind for me was paint. Paint is great. Everyone loves it and uses it in a variety of cool and different ways… from a Picasso painting to something to reflect the sunlight off your sundeck. The world is a much more practical , interesting and colorful place because of it. And while certainly there are the folks at Sherwin Williams that are very into everything about paint, the rest of us use it when we need it and otherwise don’t give it much thought.
I am not sure how long it took to get modern paint to the state where it, but I am sure there were a few thousand years of people tinkering with it all along the way.
I think it’s safe to say that there are more than a few years ahead for folks to continue to ruminate on all things location. As a number of panelist mentioned today, the tipping point here may very well be ubiquitous, always on location awareness… once that milestone is achieved the experimenting and ruminations will likely turn into a frenzy. For now it seems that folks are trying to attract people to their service because location makes it unique and interesting…
MetaPlaces 2009
So its been a while since I posted anything here. After a summer hiatus, you can expect to see more frequent, albeit potential more brief tidbits on happenings around the LBS world.
I have been wanting for a few years to go to the Where 2.0 conference, but have yet to make it, but next week I am looking forward to heading out to San Jose to the MetaPlaces conference which should be a good one… held all day Tuesday and Wednesday of next week.
It’s certainly worth checking out the complete agenda, but the focus seems to be more on the business and monetization of all those cool things that are being done with location these days. For some folks its cool to see all the whiz bang creativity that goes along with a slick hipster mobile location aware social networking application, but what seems a lot more challenging and thus more interesting is how the heck folks are going to turn those into real revenue generating businesses…
Besides the standard sessions on the privacy issues and market overview type stuff, there are more than a few sessions which will focus on making money… Jon Spinney leading a session on how to make the map pay, and Loopt will share how it is monetizing its service… and on day two more than a few sessions on location based advertising including local search.
I am really looking forward to hearing the discussions and meeting a bunch of like minded folks, if you’re planning to attend drop me a line.
LBS Conference-palooza
While I only attended the Where2.0 conference virtually this year, vicariously through twitter, etc, it seemed like the event covered a lot of cool stuff… fortunately for both attendees and non attendees a bunch of the presentations are posted on the O’Reilly website. If you’re already thinking ahead to the next LBS conference, it looks like Metaplaces 09 being held in San Jose, Sept 22-23 is shaping up to be a good one, potentially with more media and advertising players and a focus on monetization to it (Placecast 1020 is its Gold Sponsor). They just updated the agenda… definitely worth at look
