For those that didn’t make it to last years’ inaugural conference, then named Metaplaces, I highly recommend it.  It’s the biggest concentration of like minded business folks that you’re likely to come across… and while last year had a lot of focus on monetizing the mobile social networks,  this years agenda covers a lot of ground spanning the spectrum from augmented reality to well Bloomberg and containers of oil floating across the ocean.

So the LBX Journal has a great Q&A with Andre Parris, global business manager at Bloomberg behind the Bloomberg BMAP application and he is going to present a case study about BMAP at the conference.  I also had a quick run first hand on it on my neighborhood Bloomberg Terminal, and I must say that it was pretty cool.

For those not all that familiar with Bloomberg terminals, they’re specialized machines used to tap into vast reservoirs of highly specialized data used primarily by the financial services industry… over ¼ million machines are in use and folks, mostly corporations,  pay a hefty price for the depth and super high quality provided by the service. It’s not just the access to information, but also the speed and ease at which a user can get at data and the tools there to help them to ‘interrogate and analyze the data’.

So in the world of oil and energy and gas, factors related to the production and movement of physical products is quite important… according to the LBX Journal articlethe Energy and Commodities Group is the only physical business at Bloomberg, and physical things demand maps according to Mr. Parris. So  the BMAPs initiative was developed to help add a new and powerful dimension to the interrogation of all that industry data, that was previously  there, but just more difficult to digest and analyze without the visualization provided by a powerful mapping platform.

For map nerds the first thing you notice about BMAP is how fast the map photo imagery renders and how fast and smooth the pan and zoom function… it feels like something you expect Jack Bauer to be swishing around on a screen in front of him at CIA… err CTU headquarters… except that it relies on good old fashioned arrow keys and a mouse.  In fact it feels a bit weird using old school DOS like prompts to work on a Bloomberg terminal, but I am sure that research shows that it takes .0234 seconds to get data by striking a button, versus .03465 seconds for aligning a mouse… and I suspect that is all that really matters.

For finance nerds well the first thing you notice is that you can see a lot of really powerful information pretty easily. Where is that $25 million worth of crude that was supposed to be delivered to LOOP last week? Clickity, clack, clack… ah there it is third in line to get through the Panama Canal. What about that tropical depression in the Caribbean? Clickity clack clack, ah good, just a 12.28% chance that the projected path will cross with the ship.  Now who else is headed to dock there in the next five days? Clickity clack clack. Model, model, model . Trade, trade, trade and voila! Fifteen minutes to get to Scores before Misty goes off the clock!

For Bloomberg customers an information advantage is everything… having access to the data is not enough, its gotta be fast and as easy to digest as it is to slice and dice… oh yeah, and for what you’re paying for the machine… it should look good too.  BMAP does all of the above pretty damn well.

But the presentation and tools surrounding the data are only as good as the data itself… and particularly when it came to tracking ships I was a little surprised at both what seemed like a dearth of oil ships floating around as well as a the lack of freshness of the locate signals… with over half on one screen having been without a location fix in the past 24 hrs…. potentially either a designed security measure or  an opportunity for someone in the asset tracking business to start chatting it up with Mr Parris at the conference!

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, to among other things look at similarities between the behaviors of people who ‘co-locate’ (visit the same place at the same time) and to draw out information on commutes and distances traveled based on changes in location. They also combine the location and call data in with other information sources that paint a picture of the places/geography around us that allow them to make inferences about people based on their visits to certain geographic areas.

The output from Sense Network could be used as stand alone “research” or could also be integrated into other corporate services or platforms like the mobile ad serving solution, Ad Orchestrator, from Ericsson for example.

Needless to say, the company has gone to great lengths to protect the identity of the individual customers behind that data and purposely does not receive any personally identifiable details or ID numbers tied back to a particular mobile device.

As I have said in previous posts, I believe that there is something potentially very big here, particularly for marketers, in a deeper analysis and understanding of actual human behavior around the places we all visit. Do people tend to go to ice cream parlors after sitting for 2 hours in a movie theatre? How do most people who arrive by airplane get from LGA to Manhattan? Does it vary by time of day? Where do fans go after a day game at Yankee stadium? How long and far are they traveling to see a game?

I was a bit surprised to learn that at the moment Sense Networks seems quite focused on serving the wireless carriers themselves, with a significant focus on reducing subscriber churn, which presumably digs as much into the call data as anything else. But the potential behind the location data just seems enormous, so I’d hope and expect to see more on that front in the months and years to come.

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.

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.

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…

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…

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.