As CEO Dennis Crowley explained at GigaOM’s recent Mobilize conference, Foursquare is quickly evolving from a simple check-in service to one that’s aggregating the best of local businesses to challenge traditional search recommendation tools like Yelp or Google. Friday’s announcement that the company will partner with popular restaurant booking service Open Table is just another step in that direction, allowing users to check out menus and book reservations right from the app.

Personally, I was never a huge Foursquare fan until I moved to San Francisco this year. I didn’t understand the point of becoming “mayor” of something, or seeing where my friends were hanging out. But living in a new city, I found that Foursquare is actually a pretty good resource for finding nearby restaurants and businesses when I don’t know the area well, often much better than Yelp, which provides an overwhelming amount of information. I like the more limited options that Foursquare suggests, and it’s helpful to see what local friends have recommended.

A big part of Foursquare’s increasing utility is the recently-updated “Explore” feature, which allows a user to search the nearby area for popular restaurants or stores, partly based on where someone’s friends have checked in, but also based on Foursquare check-ins overall. At Mobilize, Crowley noted that the site’s 25 million active users have produced more than 2.5 billion check-ins, a staggering amount of data that can inform recommendations for others. The company has already worked to monetize the app through promoted suggestions in the Explore tab, so connecting users from searching to booking seems like a logical step.

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Meanwhile, if you missed Mobilize 2012, our two-day mobile conference in San Francisco last week, you can catch up on the coverage  here.

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Some of the more poignant thoughts from our Mobilize speakers exemplify this theme, so here are a few I thought worth sharing:

• Don’t count out HTML5 just yet. Mark Zuckerberg may not have been happy with HTML 5 for Facebook, but Spencer Rascoff, CEO of Zillow said, ”In my mind, we’re moving more towards a world where apps are basically bookmarks for mobile websites.” Native apps will surely have a place in the future — and its users are more highly engaged, says Rascoff – but mobile web technology is still improving.
• The “point of sale” is now everywhere. While near-field communications (NFC) payment methods haven’t yet taken off significantly, alternative solutions that align more with traditional payments are becoming popular. Square COO, Keith Rabois noted that “35 million unique Americans have paid with Square,” or roughly 11.1 percent of the 314 million population in the US. Take into account that a number of the total population is too young to actually make purchases and the adoption figure rises even higher. Coincidentally, I had my first Square experience on the way to Mobilize; my taxi drive used it with his Galaxy S III smartphone to process my fare from airport to GigaOm HQ.
• Video is becoming a primary mobile activity. The granddaddy of all video sites, Google’s YouTube, is now delivering 25 percent of its content to mobile devices and the figure is likely to rise in tandem with mobile broadband subscriptions. In Korea, for example, which has 91 mobile broadband subscribers for every 100 people, YouTube’s mobile delivery is closer to 50 percent, said Shiva Rajaraman, YouTube’s director of product management. This means we’ll see a greater need for faster mobile broadband, offline playback support and improved video compression technologies in the future.
• Connected homes will only appeal if the solutions are simple and add value. As a do-it-yourselfer, my own connected home is a mishmash of networks, protocols, products and interfaces. “Most consumers really, really, really don’t want to be integrators,” said Bill Brown, GM of converged consumer solutions for Motorola Mobility. Watch for more plug-and-play modules that talk seamlessly with each other instead of more complex, centralized home servers for connected homes.
• Developers need to consider the broadband their software needs. Third party apps that eat through gobs of mobile broadband could passed over for similar apps that use less data. “You want an app that does 50 miles to the gallon, not 10,” suggested T-Mobile CTO, Neville Ray. As our mobile software gains more complex functionality, it’s important that developers temper the need for cloud access and even consider offline use-cases if possible.

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And that bottleneck is … advertising. While developers and publishers have evolved to support a digital video eco-system, advertisers are a step behind. The problem is common to all sorts of media transitions: the impulse to replicate old experiences on new platforms.

YouTube’s director of product management, Shiva Rajaraman, summed up the situation at this week’s Mobilize conference. Rajaraman explained that many conventional constrains of video advertising — especially the 15 or 30 second time limits — are artificial and dictated by the strictures of traditional TV. But in the online digital environment, many of those conventions don’t apply and there is endless opportunity for new types of creative ads.

Ad agencies, however, have been slow to pick up the ball, according to Matt Minoff, the CEO of Selectable Media. Minoff’s company makes a business of dropping short video ads into places where viewers might encounter a paywall or an offer to buy something. In practice, this might means that a video game player can receive virtual goods in exchange for watching a video. The player might see a screen like this:

If the player wants to earn the virtual cash, they can choose from a variety of videos:

After watching the video, the viewer receives a benefit such as virtual goods credit or access to an article. Minoff says publishers are embracing the ads and viewers are willing to watch them. His company is profitable and growing but he says appropriate ads are in short supply.

“What holds back advertisers from taking advantage of new platforms is that have to repurpose creative built for TV. They’re utilizing 30 second TV spots online and for mobile.”

Minoff believes that ad agencies should consider reallocating their budgets to create more custom content for online platforms. While this would take a larger investment into creative, the potential pay-off could be large if it improves advertisers’ ability to deliver the rights ads in the right situation.

(Image by Jacek Chabraszewski via Shutterstock)

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“There’s no reason developing an app has to be something esoteric that requires a lot of knowledge,” said Kevin Lacker, the CEO of Parse, speaking at GigaOM Mobilize in San Francisco. “Someone else should be doing that boring work for you.”

Parse is that someone, and because he sees a lot of applications, Lacker also offered up a few tips for aspiring programmers to use in their apps to help with getting them picked up and keeping users involved. First, to help drive adoption of your app, or at least distribution, he recommended integrating with Facebook. He also said that to keep users coming back, implementing some sort of push notification could make sense.

If Parse or other platform plays like it are a success, then mobile development and supporting those apps could be as easy as setting up a Tumblr. Imagine what kind of world that would be.

Check out the rest of our Mobilize 2012 coverage here, and the live stream can be found here.

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Maghsoodnia was joined onstage by Vineet Madan, SVP of New Ventures and Strategic Services for McGraw-Hill Education, who agreed that there is still lots of room for innovation. “The answer isn’t putting a piece of paper on a screen,” he said. McGraw-Hill Education has partnered with Inkling for some interactive publications, and Madan said that the feedback has been very positive. “It’s certainly gotten a lot of buzz,” he said, adding that these kinds of interactive experiences offer much richer forms of engagement than print ever did.

However, turning a book into an interactive experience is often just the first step, explained Maghsoodnia. His company, which supplies higher ed institutions with a cloud-based software suite to manage their content needs, realized early on that the real challenge can be the the deployment. He illustrated his point with just one experience, during which his team brought a bunch of iPads to a school only to realize that there was no Wifi. In that case, the Rafter folks simply went out and bought a router at Fry’s – but that’s not really scalable. “You need a lot of infrastructure,” said Maghsoodnia.

And then there’s something else education needs to jump onto the innovation bandwagon: openness. “The innovation you see in this space tends to be very similar to the early days of the internet,” said Maghsoodnia, arguing that most companies simply build walled gardens. What’s needed are instead open platforms, where smaller innovators compete with the likes of McGraw-Hill, he said, adding: “If the innovation curve comes to education, and at the end of this process there are still only four or five publishers, then we didn’t innovate very much.”

Check out the rest of our Mobilize 2012 coverage here, and the live stream can be found here.

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“We’re in the software business, so we produce technology that substitutes for human beings,” Rabois said at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference in San Francisco, noting that the physical Square reader sells itself through physical stores that use the product. “When I go to the coffee shop, I see it, when I get in the taxi, I see it,” he said.

Rabois commented on the partnership with Starbucks, noting that one of the biggest benefits for Starbucks stores and customers is that the national chain will be able to better recognize local customers and treat them the way a local coffee shop might.

“75 percent of Starbucks payments are anonymous, and paying with Square allows you to forge a relationship with everyone who makes purchases in your store. I go to my neighborhood bar because they know what I like to drink,” he said. “We can do that at scale for every business in the United States.”

The company is increasingly facing competitors looking to get into the mobile payments space. Just this week, Groupon launched Groupon Payments, and PayPal has a similar product as well.

Unlike Square, PayPal has a sales team, but Rabois didn’t seem threatened.

“They’re going to need it,” he said.

Check out the rest of our Mobilize 2012 coverage here, and the live stream can be found here.

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Some big issues have to be sorted out before that will happen. For one thing, there is a Tower of Babel of standards for communicating between various devices made by different vendors to serve different purposes. That has to come together first, according to speakers at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference on Friday.

There are cool home automation devices coming out of Kickstarter as well as from consumer electronic giants. That variety is great except for the fact that if these things can’t talk to each other, they really aren’t connected at all.

“We need to see some consolidation,” said Eric Bruno, VP of strategy and planning for Verizon’s consumer and mass business markets group. “Honeywell or Ingersoll Rand or GE –all that stuff has to talk,”

“At least service providers can control the infrastructure. Do it yourself is a challenging market though — you have to be your own integrator,” said Bill Brown, GM of converged consumer solutions for Motorola Mobility. And, most consumers really, really, really don’t want to be integrators.

Rather these interoperable devices have to be drop-dead easy to use or people won’t use them. Five years ago, that wasn’t the case. People had to get their laptops out, call up an application to control their system. Now that can be done with a smartphone. “If you can take something that took 10 minutes and now do it in 10 seconds, you’re good,” Bruno said.

The adoption of a small set of networking protocols to tie these devices together, and then a single way to interact with all of them, is something to strive for — but will be also difficult to achieve.

“The idea of [UI] ubiquity across devices is a holy grail to aspire to, but we’re not there yet,” said Chris Jaffe, director of product innovation, at Netflix. The simple truth is that people are used to different interfaces for different device types and applications. “With TV it’s left-right, up-down where as with the iPhone or tablet, it’s omnidirectional. We have to resolve the tension between being ubiquitous and being the best interface for the job.”

Check out the rest of our Mobilize 2012 coverage here, and the live stream can be found here.

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For a long time it was reported that iOS monetization was five times better than what you could make on Android, said Raj Aggarwal, CEO and co-founder of Localytics. But because there are so many more ways of examining the data that tells a developer who is interested in their app, and different methods of making money from users, things are changing. “iOS’s lead, in terms of the minds of developers, is only slight right now,” according to Aggarwal. Android is a much closer second than previously thought.

Josh Williams, president and chief science officer at Kontagent, agreed with that assessment. When comparing app downloads between iOS and Android across the same geographic area and by device (smartphone versus tablet), “iOS actually monetizes only 40 to 50 percent better than Android, from the data we’ve seen. It’s actually pretty viable,” said Williams.

And in some cases, Android can even be more profitable, if developers and their marketers are really focused on their objectives, he said.

“While Android monetizes a little less well on a per user basis than iOS, the acquisition costs on Android today are much lower on a per user basis. So sometimes profitability on Android is higher,” said Williams. “Smart businesses that are operating scientifically look at that and allocate their spend for development and marketing across platforms on a profit per user and profit per install basis.”

Other platforms, like Windows Phone and Blackberry, aren’t really in the conversation for most mainstream app makers, though. Unless, Williams said, a business is “trying to do a real brand-building play and be a mass, mass market play,” like Rovio has done with its megahit Angry Birds franchise. For most app makers, it’s still all about Apple and Google’s mobile platforms.

There is, however, one area where iOS still holds a really big lead in the minds of developers, however.

“More than 70 percent are focused on iOS for the enterprise,” said Jeff Haynie, CEO of Appcelerator. ”BYOD is a big trend … and I’ve heard quite a number of concerns about customers being burned from a security standpoint on Android,” said Haynie.

So, in at least one sense, iOS still has a big lead in the minds of developers.

Check out the rest of our Mobilize 2012 coverage here, and the live stream can be found here.

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Eliott Noss, CEO of Tucows, which launched the Ting mobile service, said it was likely that his company and other MVNOs would be like a “revenge of the ants,” as his and 50 other MVNOs innovated from the bottom up, but didn’t really disrupt the top players.

David Morken, the co-founder and CEO of Bandwidth.com, which operates the Republic Wireless service, vehemently disagreed, saying “I’m not an ant. I think Free [a French MVNO] is a great example of where the market is going.” Free launched a Wi-Fi based mobile phone service that has been highly successful in France. But Free also had sold a broadband product for years, so it already had an established customer base.

Morken, whose Republic Wireless service also makes use of in-home and in-office Wi-Fi to serve of the majority of the plan’s data, said that in 19 months he hopes to have turned the mobile market on its head. While he refused to answer questions about how much cellular data his users need each month, he told me in a conversation before the panel that the current usage allowed the company to be profitable. “If software is eating the world like Marc Andreessen says, it’s eating at a table set by Wi-Fi,” Morken said.

Check out the rest of our Mobilize 2012 coverage here, and the live stream can be found here.

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