GigaOM » geodelic

How the Little Guys Can Compete in Local Mobile Advertising

Colin Gibbs — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 20:00:45 +0000

There’s been a flurry of activity lately in local mobile advertising, which is often called the Holy Grail of marketing. Players like Google and Facebook have an edge thanks to their sheer size, but smaller players will have a place at the table if they keep a few key rules-of-thumb in mind.

Shopping Matters When it Comes to Location-Based Apps

Laurie Lamberth — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 07:00:11 +0000

Location-based shopping services (LBS) have made many headlines recently, and studies have shown that users actually like receiving ads and offers well-targeted to their interests. Couple that with an influx of Tier 1 venture capital and the show-stopping Facebook Places, with which several startups have already joined forces, and it’s no wonder LBS is suddenly such a hot topic in the mobile sector. That doesn’t necessarily mean LBS shopping apps will be easy to implement. A number of challenges — privacy concerns, scaling issues and check-in integrity among them — provide a potential barrier to widespread adoption. This note examines both the drivers and inhibitors for making location-based shopping services a mainstream phenomenon, and includes focused profiles of Facebook, Twitter, Google, Loopt, Foursquare, BrightKite, Whrrl, Gowalla, Plancast, Groupon, AisleBuyer, Bizness Apps, Offeretti, ShopAlerts, Shopkick, Bakodo, Stickybits, Yelp!, Geodelic Sherpa, WHERE, MyTown, InCrowd, SCVNGR, Waze and Layar.

The Great Open Database of Place Pages in the Sky

Liz Gannes — Fri, 07 May 2010 18:38:09 +0000

Every web portal would love to be the dominant and trusted provider of information about local businesses. But what are chances of an open collaborative database for places?

All businesses have a physical location of some sort, but there’s no clear and open way to publish those locations on the web. Some service providers just barely have a web presence to begin with. Others, like popular coffee shops, are active recipients of check-ins on Gowalla, Foursquare, Loopt, MyTown and similar services on a daily basis, with no central aggregation of that valuable user data. Meanwhile, Google, Microsoft, Yelp and now Facebook offer retail stores decals that link their storefronts to their pages on each service. As an indication of where these web portals want to go, Google recently renamed its Local Business Center to Google Places. And the venerable Citysearch recently changed its strategy to become a sort of local business API, providing information and reviews to developers through an offering it calls CityGrid.

But an open location database is a ways off, was the consensus at a Web 2.0 panel yesterday. While Martin May from Brightkite championed the idea of a single open database for places, including not only landmarks but current business information, Google’s mobile geo product manager Steve Lee said it was unrealistic. Per VentureBeat’s writeup:

“Google licenses a lot of its data from third-party providers, and we can’t give that data out for free,” Lee said. “It’s really difficult to figure out a win-win situation for all of the companies involved. What may be great for one company’s strategy may not work at all for someone else.”

Problematically, web portals may not be willing to give up the control local businesses will surely want — determining what information they want to provide associated with their location, designing a layout to suit their personality, helping them pull out their data so it can be combined with that from other services and soliciting a lasting relationship with their geo-located customers.

At our recent GigaOM Pro Bunker Series session on location, Michael Liebhold of the Institute for the Future proposed that every place page be written in HTML 5, have an independent URI and freedom of layout.

At the same event, Geodelic CEO Rahul Sonnad predicted that within the next few years, every business will realize it needs to have a place page, just as how in the past decade or so, nearly every business came to realize the value of a web page.

Geodelic in fact provides such pages — a custom mobile experience that loads on a user’s phone when they are physically in a participating business’ actual location. So rather than being a recruiting mechanism by telling you a store is nearby, these geo-sites would give you information for finding inventory within the store you’re already in, connecting you to the business on Facebook, seeing relevant tweets and getting deals. Accessibility is going to be key for these micro-sites — you should be able to access them from any phone. Sonnad predicted that the expected transition from native mobile apps to HTML 5 web apps over the next couple years should kick off an era of geo-targeted sites.

Here’s a video interview we did with Sonnad to elaborate on these topics:

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

Location: The Epicenter of Mobile Innovation

With the iPhone, Geodelic Finds Dollars & Seoul

Om Malik — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 23:32:05 +0000

Ever since we first tried out Sherpa, a location-based services application, we became fans of Geodelic, the Santa Monica, Calif.-based company behind it. The app, which automatically learns a cell phone user’s favorite locations and lifestyle behavior and was initially launched exclusively for T-Mobile’s myTouch phone, has been downloaded some 350,000 times. Adding to that user base are the recently released versions of Geodelic for Android devices as well as the iPhone. (Click here to download from the iTunes App Store.)

In the meantime, Geodelic has just signed a deal with Korea Telecom that will see the company create a Seoul-specific application for Korean iPhone users. The move is expected to bring in revenues in the “high seven figures,” CEO Rahul Sonnad told me. Korea Telecom, an iPhone distributor in South Korea, signed a multiyear deal with Geodelic.

This revenue boost will prove to be quite significant for Geodelic, which is hoping to put some distance between itself and a growing number of competitors including Foursquare and Gowalla. Sonnad explained that the reason his company is able to build Seoul Tour is because of its publishing platform. Using it, Geodelic has worked with Universal Studios Theme Parks and Best Buy Stores to create what Sonnad calls “experiences.” It’s also worked with Greenopia, which has created an experience around “green shopping” across the U.S. The company now plans to create airport experiences, which will not only show flight information and airport maps, but will also be able to showcase location-based promotions.

“The publishing system makes us unique,” Sonnad said, “allowing major brands to create hyper-local experiences around it.” But that’s not all. The company is hoping to open up this publishing system to consumers sometime later this year. “Much as Ning made it easy to create social networks for everyone, with Geodelic you will soon be able to create your own location-based, hyper-local experiences,” he said.

It’s a clever idea. Imagine, for example, an experience that centers entirely around the best pizza joints in a particular city. Now imagine thousands of such “experiences.” Geodelic, thanks to the efforts of others, will end up with a fairly deep and accurate database of many different places around the country. I especially like the fact that it’s using location as a way to provide context to local information.

However in order for this plan to succeed, the company needs to do two things: substantially increase the number of its users and get those users to use the service more often. At present, some 100,000 folks check out Geodelic’s Android-specific application once a month and a mere 10 percent of those 100,000 check it out five times or more every month.

In my opinion, in order for one to judge the success and value of a location-based application, one needs to measure the intensity of engagement in addition to the number of downloads. The higher the engagement, the more valuable a location-based application!

Sonnad is betting that with the release of an iPhone app, as well as more city-specific versions of Sherpa, his company will get the big bump it really needs. Let’s hope so -– if not, he will soon be watching one of its competitors take the lead.

This article also appeared in BusinessWeek.com.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Does Location Need a Special Purpose Device?

Stacey Higginbotham — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 20:10:38 +0000

Qualcomm is trying to patent a removable module for devices that would contain all of your location information and allow you to share it across gadgets (hat tip GoRumors). Instead of your phone or laptop knowing where you are at all times, you plug in a module when you want to share your whereabouts. Now, this is just a patent application, so it’s not clear if anyone at Qualcomm wants to build this thing, and I’m not sure it should.

At first I thought the module might do for location what the Kindle has done for electronic readers or what the iPod did for stand-alone music devices — basically act as a single-purpose device for providing location and applications that could use it. Here’s the description:

The removable module may store subscription information, personal information, and/or other information for a user and may be inserted into a terminal, e.g., a cellular phone. The removable module may include LBS applications that may utilize location information to perform various actions. The location information may comprise a location estimate, speed, orientation, etc., of the terminal.

In other words, my location would become an accessory that I could plug in when I elect to share with people where I am and what I’m doing, rather than something tied to a particular device with complicated steps for turning location sharing on and off. Plus, I could use a variety of location apps that work with the module rather than applications that work with a specific phone.

Since the device would have my location as well as my location-using applications, I checked with some developers and those in the industry to see how something like this would play out. Rahul Sonnad, CEO of Geodelic, which makes the Sherpa application, said that most of the functionality Qualcomm seems to have developed with this module is already available as part of various web-connected platforms like Facebook Connect. He added, “I’m sure I would lose this module, and my location would be lost with it. And then where would I be?”

Without a location module, many of us might not know. All kidding aside, Sonnad’s point about already having the functionality is the key here. Sonnad as well as Ted Morgan, the CEO of Skyhook, which provides a Wi-Fi database to determine a user’s location, think that thanks to Apple, Google and other platforms already offering location services on myriad devices and shared between a variety of web-based technologies, the opportunity ship has sailed. And it’s sailed without Qualcomm. What do you guys think?

Thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user Chokola. Diagram image courtesy of GoRumors.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Who Will Foster the Great Location API?

Liz Gannes — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 01:38:51 +0000

[qi:gigaom_icon_geolocation] Nextstop, a user-generated travel site, is releasing an API for its location-specific short-form recommendations. The self-funded company, founded by former Google product managers, only launched in June and has attracted low hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors, however it has ambitious plans to be a global (read: not hubbed around a few cities like Yelp) and comprehensive resource of recommended places and activities.

For now Nextstop is just a web site, and an English-language one at that, but the API enables things like automated Twitter queries (built in-house as an example) where you can ask @nextstopbot what’s good and near to an address. The six-person Nextstop team, said co-founder Carl Sjogreen (best known as product manager of Google Calendar), has put much focus into laying the groundwork to scale to be “a Wikipedia of all the great places in the world,” spending much of its time working on things like a reputation system to give good users more contribution powers.

The race to build a database of the world’s coolest locations may be moving faster than San Francisco-based Nextstop, though, with companies like Foursquare — which also just released an API — using the real-time and personal nature of mobile, as well as social gaming, to incentivize user contributions. Others working on location databases include Mozilla, uLocate and Geodelic. Though it seems folks like Twitter and Facebook could easily propel themselves past the competition with their highly social user bases.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Meet Sherpa, the Hottest Android App

Om Malik — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 04:08:59 +0000

Sherpa, a location-based services application developed by Santa Monica, Calif.-based startup Geodelic, is among the fastest-growing applications for Google’s Android. In the past week, the company claims that it has seen 50,000 downloads from the Android market. The T-Mobile MyTouch 3G, which launched earlier today, has been providing the impetus for growth.

Nearly 4,500 copies of the app were downloaded today alone. Sherpa, as we’ve previously explained, constantly learns your favorite locations and starts to aggregate them. The more you use the application, the smarter it gets, thereby serving up location information that’s unique to you.

The idea of an application such as Sherpa (and to some extent, Where) makes a lot of sense as we start leveraging the location beacon to do our thinking. I have been playing around with the Sherpa app on my Google I/O version of MyTouch and so far it works as advertised. As I spend more time with it, I will share my experience.

Check out this cool video of T-Mobile’s MyTouch promotion in San Francisco. That’s a whole lot of skydivers captured on camera by Chris Albrecht from NewTeeVee.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Geodelic Brings Serendipity to Location

Jennifer Martinez — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 22:42:28 +0000

From chip makers to mobile phone giants to tiny upstarts, location-based services are seen as the wireless world’s pot of gold. Among those looking to dip into that pot is Geodelic, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based startup that this week announced $3.5 million in funding from Clearstone Venture Partners and Shasta Ventures. Even more impressive is the fact that Geodelic has partnered with T-Mobile to offer an LBS application known as Sherpa on the the company’s myTouch phone.

Unlike other mapping applications, Geodelic’s technology customizes your location search according to your interests and preferences. According to Geodelic:

Sherpa uses a learning engine called GENIE (Geodelic Engine for Interest Evaluation) that automatically learns a user’s favorite locations and lifestyle behavior. If a user eats out more than they shop, it modifies itself and tailors the experience to begin showing more restaurants and less retail stores.

When you launch the Sherpa application on your phone, it assigns you a random number that’s stored at Geodelic’s data center. That number is used to reference you and all of your preferences that the app gleans from your searches, so there’s never a need to input anything manually. And the GENIE tech means the more you search, the “smarter” the application gets — with just a few clicks on your phone, Geodelic’s technology yields location information that’s instantly customized to you, but for which you may not have been looking. To learn more about how Geodelic’s application works, please see this video.

Geodelic CEO Rahul Sonnad said he wants Geodelic to become the environment in which businesses will create their own local applications and store them within the Geodelic user interface — a model similar to that of Where, which also wants to be a portal for a variety of location-based services. This model will be key to monetizing Geodelic’s mobile applications in the long-term, as businesses will pay to publish applications within the Geodelic user interface in the future.

Sonnad is no stranger to taking a platform-like approach. Before Geodelic, he founded thePlatform, a digital video and management company that publishes video content over wireless and broadband. It was sold to Comcast for $108 million in 2006, and according to Sonnad, is now the third-largest video publishing infrastructure behind Yahoo and Google.

So far Geodelic’s application is slated to be available only on T-Mobile’s MyTouch, which is due to hit retail shelves in August, but the company plans to launch one on the iPhone later this year, after which it will be looking to expand to other smartphones and netbooks.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.