Now, instead of just relying on user in-app behavior and stated preferences to target messages, developers of apps with location data can look at where a user has been, in the last-minute or the last year. By combining both place and behavior data, Urban Airship is looking to help developers create more tailored messages that can drive re-engagement with an app, more sales and increase loyalty.

While other push messaging services have incorporated location data, Urban Airship isn’t just trying to create simple geo-fences that measure a user’s current proximity to a target. By incorporating historical data as well, it allows developers to target unique segments of users who have gone somewhere in the past.

For example, a developer can send a notification to anyone that’s traveled to a specific place over the last year. Or they can push messages to people who have visited Central Park or Madison Square Garden in the last day, week or month. A user who appears to have moved to a new location can also be targeted with a unique message.

Urban Airship has created 2.5 million unique geo-fences — everything from time zones and cities to neighborhoods or venues – that also allow developers to send different messages to people in the same area. For people attending a baseball game, for example, the local team’s app can push a survey or a special deal to people in attendance while alerting nearby users of available tickets. The Official London Olympics 2012 Join In app tested the service and sent more than 10 million location-based messages to people at Olympic venues and received a click-through rate of around 60 percent.

Location-based messaging and marketing has been touted as a potential game-changer in advertising, but it’s still struggling to fulfill its promise. But we’re seeing now with efforts from mobile ad startups Sense Networks and JiWire that combining place data with user behavior can create a lot more smart targeting of users. It’s not enough to just look at where a person is at the moment, you have to tie their historical movements together to better compose a behavioral profile of that user.

But I’m wondering how mobile app users will react when they realize how much of their historical data is being used to craft in-app messages for them. Right now, most apps ask users to opt into sharing their location data to help them find nearby things. But if my travel app starts asking if I want deals to go back to a specific vacation spot I visited, it might feel a little creepy.

Brent Hieggelke, chief marketing officer of Urban Airship told me developers will need to use some common sense in how they use location data. But he said users are now more aware of how their data is being used and they’re generally OK with it if it leads to delightful experiences. We’ll have to see if developers know the difference between delightful and creepy. But if done well, which will include more work than regular messaging, this could demonstrate the power of location-based services to users.

Disclosure: Urban Airship is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, the founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Cars	Drive the next always-on gadget Katie Fehrenbacher	Work	Work is no longer a place Jessica Stillman
Stuff	Access trumps ownership Katie Fehrenbacher	Data	Data is the new digital currency Derrick Harris
Media	We are all media now Mathew Ingram	Identity	Identity is an industry Mathew Ingram
Body	Your doctor is a chip Stacey Higginbotham	Travel	Go anywhere, instantly Colleen Taylor
Web	The future web is alive Om Malik	Location	Where is the new who Ryan Kim

Images courtesy of Tesla Motors, DaveBleasdale, Petteri Sulonen, KatBPhotography, Urban Aquarium Video and Light, xurde, guiguis, kowitz, Marc_Smith, Aperturismo.

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SimpleGeo helps mobile developers incorporate location-aware services into their apps, and the two companies have been working together for some time. In a blog post, Urban Airship CEO Scott Kveton laid out the plan for the combined company: to provide mobile developers with almost all of the behind-the-scenes tools they need to make their apps more interactive and in touch with the rest of the world, incorporating things like the push-notification systems that Urban Airship is probably best known for as well as mobile commerce tools.

It’s not clear how profitable a business we’re talking about here: Michael Arrington reported that the deal was worth just $3.5 million. But it does seem plausible that the companies are stronger together than they are separately, given that developers probably don’t want to piece together these services from multiple vendors.

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Among those debating the value of Groupon as it filed for its hotly-awaited initial public offering — which could give it a market capitalization as high as $30 billion — were two startup entrepreneurs who took to Twitter on Thursday night. On the “Groupon is doomed to fail” side of the question was David Heinemeier Hansson, a partner at 37signals and creator of Ruby on Rails, and on the “give Groupon a chance” side of the debate was SimpleGeo co-founder Joe Stump. Who won? You will have to judge for yourself. Their conversation is embedded below.

Hansson started the debate by tearing apart Groupon’s financials, noting that the company had not only lost more than $500 million so far, but that its losses and spending were actually accelerating, and that it was costing the company far more than $1 to make $1 in revenue — a fundamentally unsustainable situation. After a series of tweets on that topic, Stump joined the debate by saying Groupon should get some credit for being able to generate revenues of $600 million or so every quarter, and that this would give the company some breathing room to figure out how to generate a profit.

Stump also pointed out that Amazon started by losing huge sums of money and was widely criticized for it, but the company is “now doing $9bn a quarter and [is] quite healthy.”

Hansson, however, said that it would be difficult to figure out how to make the business profitable while still trying to come up with $120 million a quarter — the amount the company is losing. And the 37signals partner also said that it wasn’t fair to remember “the one company that made it out alive” from the 90s bubble, unlike dozens of others such as Pets.com and WebVan. Stump retorted that none of these companies had the revenues or revenue growth rate that Groupon or Amazon has had.

Is growth enough? Hansson said it is not — that increasing scale “only makes the problem worse if your losses scale just as bad,” and that Groupon’s losses are actually accelerating. Stump countered that with scale comes lower costs, and that if Hanson wanted proof he should “ask Walmart’s suppliers.”

A 30-month-old company that is generating $600 million in revenue per quarter should get the benefit of the doubt at least, argued Stump — but Hansson said it was hard to give that benefit to a company losing $117 million every quarter. He added that he was concerned that the IPO was going to be “gamed like a casino and pop massively before crashing leaving the public with the bag.” He called this a “wealth transfer to a select few bandits.”

In the end, Stump said that he wasn’t planning to buy Groupon stock, but that he didn’t believe the company was necessarily destined to fail. Hansson, meanwhile, said that while failure was not guaranteed, the company should be “treated like Greek bonds” because the likelihood of failure was so high.

Excerpts from their full conversation are embedded below:

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Thing Three

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It seemed every app was just aping Foursquare and its check-ins. There was little imagination. Sure, there are a handful of interesting apps, and I have written about some of them (Whrrl, for example). But most of the other apps were basically Foursquare facsimiles.

Matt Galligan, co-founder of another location-based services company, San Francisco-based SimpleGeo, has an interesting theory. He believes that because Foursquare was first out of the gate with check-ins and had tasted early success, people thought the check-in was the innovation — not the geo-local aspect of the application. As a result the check-in behavior was quickly imitated and now has become pervasive in the geo-local apps.

My problem with the check-in driven apps is that they treated checking-in as an end in itself. (And unsurprisingly, those apps prompted check-in fatigue.) As my colleague Ryan Kim puts it, “the check-in is like wearing a shirt in a restaurant, without it, you have no service.”

To me, geo-location is just another vector; it’s a way to slice and dice information, filter it and make that information available in a location-relevant manner.

So I asked Crowley if he thought that we would have this world where location defines all content and data consumption experiences? His answer in short was yes, because geo-location is about experiences — not places.

People are giving us one or two or three pieces of data every day about the places they go to. We can cut that data up. This is a new way to look at your neighborhood based on the places you’ve been, and your friends have been to. (You can read my full interview with Crowley here.)

Foursquare had about half a billion check-in last year and recently passed the 7.5 million-user mark. Yesterday, Foursquare launched its new version 3.0 and took the first steps towards this new future. It started offering recommendations based on inputs such as places you visit, places visited by your friends, the type of places they frequent and favorites. In our review of the new Foursquare app, Ryan pointed out that:

Many of the updates put the focus back on check-ins, but infuse the action with much more meaning. Now users have more reasons to check in to places, instead of just broadcasting their location.

Is the new app perfect? Not really, and I would go as far saying not even close. But as an active and avid user of Foursquare, I think this is not only a big step forward for the fledgling service, but I feel that this should have a positive impact on the geo-local ecosystem.

Just as copycats embraced the idea of check-ins, perhaps, now they will also start thinking about the possibilities of local and start building applications that help bring information to us. I suspect that will remain wishful thinking on my part, because the focus will be on two other big upgrades in Foursquare 3.0 — Rewards and Loyalty.

Gilligan thinks that, soon enough, the geo-local coordinates are going become just another feature inside an app, and it will be an app developers ability to layer data on top of that which will help the apps stand out. Makes sense.

After all, in the middle part of the last decade, everyone was trying to build their own social network. When Facebook offered a big social network for other app developers to use, smart companies like Zynga jumped on the opportunity and built social games that have now turned it into a multi-billion dollar company. Geo-location information is going to follow the same trajectory and we going to see what Galligan calls “location aware” applications. So if you are an app developer, there are two things you need to be thinking about:

• Your app needs to be social. (Facebook Connect and; Twitter make that possible.)
• Your app needs to have the ability to use location, marry it to other data and offer suggestions to get relevant information easy.

For instance, instagr.am is going to become even more fun (and useful) if it starts aggregating popular photos based on location and creating a local version of the photo stream. Wouldn’t it be nice to get a quick visual glance into the lives of people near you and at the same time have the option of keeping tabs on your entire network of friends?

Looking beyond a photo service, I think it is not hard to imagine that in the very near future we are going to see apps offering “suggestions” much as the new Foursquare app does, and help people do things and connect with each other.

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Fast forward to today’s cloud era. Deploying applications no longer mandates a soup-to-nuts approach from hardware infrastructure on up. Rather, applications can be created and assembled atop a variety of infrastructure services that, due to the availability of cloud computing, are consumed more like applications themselves. I call them infrastructure apps.

Unlike Infrastructure-as-a-Service, which focuses on virtual compute cycles and storage capacity as examples, infrastructure apps enable companies to build new end-user facing applications without having to do all of the heavy lifting. These infrastructure apps can be consumed as services themselves, procured via simple web sign-up forms, purchased with a pay-as-you-go model, and integrated into higher-level applications with software development kits and APIs. In short, the infrastructure consumption model is finding its way into the Software-as-a-Service framework.

There are great examples of infrastructure applications emerging from a bevy of startups in the following categories:

• Voice. Twilio (see disclosure) integrates the world of voice and SMS communications with web applications.
• Logging. Loggly, which we profiled earlier, offers logging and log management as a service.
• Location. SimpleGeo enables application developers to build location services on top of their APIs. The company recently raised a Series A funding round.
• Video. Encoding.com, Zencoder and other hosted video encoding services were profiled in Putting the Cloud to Use for Video Encoding.
• Performance Management. New Relic offers web application performance management as a service.
• Mobile Notification and Purchase Services. Urban Airship gives mobile application developers robust, out-of-the-box push notification and in-app purchasing capabilities.
• Security. Dasient provides Security-as-a-Service with hosted malware monitoring.

Too often, companies building applications are presented with horizontally focused infrastructure solutions that require time and understanding to envision where they fit. Infrastructure apps mask that horizontal reach with simple, purpose-built solutions for specific application needs. This clean and direct sales message is coupled with a straightforward adoption model.

Infrastructure apps represent a significant shift in how new computing architectures will be designed, built, and maintained. The technical flexibility, combined with the economic advantages, presents dozens of opportunities to displace dedicated enterprise approaches with pure software-based offerings. These software services, backed by robust cloud architectures, will eventually deliver greater capabilities than any single end-customer could build themselves.

It seems like there is no better time than the present to build new solutions using these infrastructure applications. There will certainly be plenty to choose from. What are the infrastructure areas and companies that we missed?

Gary Orenstein is the host of The Cloud Computing Show.

Disclosure: I have consulted previously with Twilio.

Loggly and Urban Airship are backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

SimpleGeo founders Matt Galligan and Joe Stump

For some rumor mill watchers, it’s interesting to note that Redpoint is making the big bet on SimpleGeo (though the venture firm was also in the company’s seed round) and Accel Partners just led a big round for Booyah, the maker of MyTown. Both firms had reportedly been in talks to put a major investment into Foursquare. SimpleGeo and Booyah aren’t necessarily direct Foursquare competitors, but it’s clear both VC firms wanted to have a big location investment to put them on the map.

What SimpleGeo does is provide location data from its API, as sort of an instant geo-juice for your app. So if a service acquires information about where one of its users is (usually through their phone), SimpleGeo will relay what’s nearby that latitude and longitude. The company charges customers between $400 and $10,000 per month, commensurate with the number of API calls.

SimpleGeo also announced a number of additions to its team, including many from Digg, where co-founder Joe Stump formerly worked. One notable hire is Jeffrey Kalmikoff, who was until recently at Digg and before that was chief creative officer for Threadless, the innovative user-generated T-shirt shop. He will be VP of product for SimpleGeo.

SimpleGeo competitor Mixer Labs (aka GeoAPI) was bought by Twitter last year and its founders now lead Twitter’s location efforts.

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SimpleGeo launched today, promising to build a contextual infrastructure of points and eventually polygons for the world so that people can build apps that incorporate where users are located. The company says it’s already received 600 beta inquiries in its first day out, and it also received both audience and judges’ choice accolades at the Under the Radar event where it debuted.

“We’re selling shovels at the beginning of a gold rush,” is how co-founder Matt Galligan put it on a call today. “You want to add location, just come to us — it’s done.” Though four-person SimpleGeo still measures its age in months, it already has a price sheet: free, $399/month for small businesses and $2,499/month for custom implementations. Galligan said he expects to announce a funding round soon. (BTW, this follows the launch of competitor PublicEarth, which calls itself “the wiki for places,” yesterday.)

While Boulder, Colo.-based SimpleGeo may have moved quickly in its short life, big social sites aren’t necessarily waiting for little startups to come fill their location-based needs. Today Twitter launched a geotagging API, at first only available as an opt-in feature for outside apps like Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid and Twittelator Pro. When used, this feature associates a tweeter’s exact location (as best as it can be determined) at the time of tweeting with the tweet itslf.

And lastly, Ambient Industries debuted a social location app for the iPhone today called Flook. While there’s no lack of competition for fun iPhone apps that enable users to mark up the world, Flook is built to be quirky, easy to browse and contextual-ad ready. The basic interface consists of virtual geo-tagged “cards” with facts, photos and recommendations left at particular locations by Flook users. Users can swipe through cards and turn them over to leave comments in a jaunty orange and purple interface manned by cute little robots (see video demo above).

What’s interesting is that Flook comes from two Symbian founders, Roger Nolan and Jane Sales. Said Nolan on a call from London today, “Apple seemed to just do all the things that Symbian and Nokia should have done for a long time.” So he and Sales (they’re married) along with two other co-founders raised $1 million 1 million pounds ($1.65 million) from Eden Ventures and Amadeus Capital and founded Ambient a year ago. Flook is the company’s first project.

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