So I noticed a few month back where Nokia had acquired MetaCarta and I just finally had a chance to try to have a look and figure out what that was all about. After 10 minutes of digging, I am walking away with the conclusion that they basically have a way to search through natural language documents (ie a bunch of words) discover and recognize location oriented references (“hey guys I am in Newton”) and then apply a geo-tag to them to provide a new dimension and layer in which to organize and discover new information and patterns.
It seems that the folk that have found this most useful so far are governments and energy companies. According to the Metacarta site, there are millions of government documents of which over 70% contain significant geographic references. Read more
I am a regular reader of Silicon Alley Insider (SAI) and usually love their articles… they certainly play looser with the facts at times than say at the New York Times, and would rather be wrong and apologize later then to be boring, which is why I like them so much, because although they’re often not fully on track, at least they take a great college try at getting into details that other journalists don’t even come close to touching and can admit when they screwed it up and get it wrong.
The writers at SAI have been huge fans of Carol Bartz and the things she is doing in her newfound reign as the lead Yahoo, which is why I was surprised to see them take such a negative view on a recent interview given by the head of Yahoo Search Strategy Prabhakar Raghavan. You can see Prabhakar’s comments for yourself in his own words via the allthingsd video above, but after hearing all the journalists and pundits hammer Yahoo over its lack of innovation in search, I found the comments from Prabhakar to be as dead on accurate as anything I’ve heard in a long time in that industry, and was surprised to see it dismissed by SAI as essentially over-thinking something that is “stupid simple”.
What’s all the fuss about? Well essentially WOO stands for “web of objects”… and quickly and painlessly connecting Yahoo users with the “object” they’re searching for is the focus of much of Yahoo search development efforts according to Mr. Raghavan. The question then becomes what the heck kinda “object” are we talking about here, which is where the whole thing turns a little obtuse.
Well, no worries… the good news is that what IT IS isn’t as important as what IT ISN’T… which is yet another webpage (which in the spirit of Yahoo, we’ll abbreviate as Yanw).
The point being made here is that webpages are very often merely a proxy/replacement for something else, the real thing of interest, and in many instances what someone really wants is something more than yet another webpage. This “more than yet another webpage” is the “object” in question here and could be damn well near anything including digital things like movies or MP3s, or real world things like people, or items like bikes, computers and movie tickets, etc.
Yahoo is simply recognizing that a webpage is often a means to an end and not the end in itself, and is evangelizing its desire to take out the middleman and directly connect their users not with yet another webpage but instead directly with the item their users are really in search of.
When what is being searched for transcends out of the virtual world to the physical one, obviously location awareness of both the searcher and the “object” becomes a huge piece of the equation… and a key component of the future Yahoo search strategy.
Yahoo announced the arrival of its
FireEagle location brokering product last Wednesday. What the heck is it you may ask? Well, straight from the source… according to Yahoo it “is the secure and stylish way to share your location with sites and services online. We want to make the whole web respond to where you are, and to help you discover more about the world around you.”
Ok. Well to start from the beginning. Yahoo wants to be the broker for your online location information. So what does that mean exactly? Well just like other types of brokers: stock broker, real estate broker, mortgage broker, and insurance brokers…. They want to help mediate the exchange between a buyer and seller of something of value. In this case, the thing of value is information related to where you are on this lovely planet.
So to be clear, there is currently no money directly exchanging hands and so far, the broker is doing his brokering for free.
So let’s think about why someone would want to buy and sell such a thing and why Yahoo would want to step into become the broker. So what do the buyer and seller in this brokerage relationship get out of it?
Buyers (websites, application developers) get relatively turnkey access to better information that makes their service more convenient and valuable. Nearly everyone who offers an online or mobile application would like to be able to easily know and use their customers’ location and integrate it into the features of the application. Granted it’s more important to some than others, but the need is widespread across a variety of applications for anything from letting you know the weather forecast or showing only relevant apartment listings, or showing pages in the correct local language. Heck if local governments takes a fancy to this, you might see them trying to collect different taxes based on where the user was when a transaction was consummated. Woo Hoo! Don’t worry, that ain’t happening anytime soon.
Sellers, (ie you the consumer), get the convenience of not having to explicitly tell every site or application you come across, your location information and you get to decide what to share or not share each time. Remember the eWallet phenomenon from the late ‘90s? The eWallet was going to save everyone the hassle of having to re enter their personal and financial information and the eWallet was the gatekeeper to your wallet online. In many ways Fire Eagle is a cross between the location equivalent of the eWallet and a cross site/device “smart cookie” that knows and holds your location information and just shares the detail that you want shared and only with “approved” sites.
Last but not least, assuming it’s not out of pure benevolence, what does Yahoo get out of this whole thing?
Well the answer is probably not that simple and straightforward, but I’ll hazard a point of view on where you could take this: Yahoo’s business is primarily selling advertising. And forget about amassing more and more page views as a strategy, the absolutely massive supply of potential impressions on the web means that only a very small fraction of those impressions ever get monetized. Instead, the name of the game is to have the high valued stuff that advertisers want.
So the next logical question is, well what kind of stuff do advertisers want? Well it can generally be broken into two parts…
1. Mass concentration of eyeballs in a single place. Think of the price premium advertisers place on an ad on a hot primetime program versus the equivalent number of eyeballs pieced together from running 100 spots at 3am
2. Targeting. The degree of match or correlation between the advertisers product and the reason the online impression was generated… ie there are billions of page views being generate out there on arcane scientific matters, oceanic current, Chinese consumer electronic company balance sheets, etc, etc that advertisers want absolutely nothing to do with
So here are some leading businesses who make their money from online advertising, and the stuff they provide that advertisers want:
• Google: just amazingly good at targeting/filtering, effective revenue per thousand is off the charts relative to anyone else. They could directly monetize the mass concentration aspect as well, but so far have chosen not to.
• Yahoo: both large aggregator of eyeballs for premium display ad business and also big player in search
• AOL: was once the largest aggregator of all Internet eyeballs, but is now forced to be an aggregator of large broad verticals of consumer friendly eyeballs (family, finance, entertainment type stuff). They also leverage their size by double-dipping and renting targeted search from Google.
So going back to Fire Eagle. By knowing people’s location information and matching that information with knowable information about the world around those people, the opportunity exists to target like never before. To date, targeting has been one dimensional from the point of view that it has been limited to indexing information from web pages and only reflects the view as seen from the time a user spends in front of a web browser.
If you look at how quickly mobile location awareness technology is proliferating into everyday consumer devices like cell phones, there is no reason to expect that everything that is currently done in the world of web based targeting won’t be stretched, linked and recreated into the ‘real world’ with mobile location aware devices at the foundation.
Let’s take a look at the way a few things work in the web world and see how they may translated into the mobile location awareness world:
Everything from PageRank to click through rates and behavioral targeting, could be recreated, through a widely available mass market location awareness program. So in theory this could be the foundation of what FireEagle is all about.
