GigaOM » Where

EBay puts WHERE to work as PayPal Media Network

Ryan Kim — Tue, 01 May 2012 18:30:31 +0000

A little over a year after eBay bought mobile ad network WHERE, it’s ready to show how it will put the Boston startup to work. WHERE will become PayPal Media Network, as it moves beyond serving location-based mobile ads to offering inventory across eBay’s different online properties.

In addition to the 70 million mobile users reachable through the existing WHERE network, PayPal Media Network will now offer advertisers the ability to target eBay.com, Shopping.com, Bill Me Later, RedLaser and other properties. This helps PayPal address the increasingly multi-channel nature of commerce, which is happening on smartphones and tablets, online and in-store.

Now, advertisers can entice new customers into a store with location-based mobile ads and offers, or they can reach them when a user scans a barcode in store using their RedLaser app. Advertisers can also find shoppers when they’re browsing eBay or they can hit them up after a transaction is completed through Bill Me Later or through follow-up emails.

Walt Doyle, the former CEO of WHERE who is now GM of PayPal Media Network, said these days consumers are shopping in a variety of ways, aided by smartphones and tablets. A person may walk into a store to buy something but then find it online for cheaper. Or they’ll start their research while commuting, and do some more comparing at home before heading out to a store to buy the item. This can make it hard for advertisers to know where to place their bets.

“The consumer shopping behavior has become multichannel; they don’t know where they begin and end a purchase,” Doyle said. “We’ve enhanced our platform to embrace this behavior to allow our partners to reach consumers anywhere on that pretzel journey.”

Doyle said the PayPal Media Network will also be able to lean on the mountain of data PayPal and eBay have to help deliver relevant ads and offers to consumers. If they can tie a user to their activity across different sites, PayPal Media Network can incorporate their tastes, location and purchase history to show really personalized ads.

This is why eBay bought WHERE. It knew it needed a way to provide its PayPal customers with better tools to increase sales. Having location-based ads and offers are helpful in bringing in consumers and can be a key component in PayPal’s new in-store and small business payment services. But WHERE gets even more powerful when you tie it into eBay and PayPal’s bigger ecosystem.

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Hyperlocal: opportunities for publishers and developers

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 21:19:17 +0000

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Opportunities and challenges for mobile deals

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 07:55:17 +0000

The trend “mobile deals” combines location-aware discounts with mobile marketing campaigns and often incorporates purchases made on the phone at brick-and-mortar retailers. This report sizes up the mobile deals space with an aim to present a comprehensive view of the influential companies and technologies. Heavyweights like Google, PayPal and American Express are moving aggressively forward with new offerings, and it will be worth watching their different strategies (e.g., deploying QR codes vs. NFC technology) to see which dominates and sets the overall bar for the market.

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The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 07:01:22 +0000

As our demand for data increases, so too do the number of mobile devices and services. Add to that the infrastructure needed to support such connectivity, and a wide, complex picture of the mobile industry emerges. This report examines the various sectors of the mobile landscape and what the future holds for each. Hardware, cloud services, mobile search, advertising, location-based services and the growing ubiquity of the Internet of Things will all play an important role in the concept of mobility as it shifts and evolves over the next several years. With the help of more than a dozen contributors, GigaOM Pro presents a comprehensive analysis of the companies and trends that will lead us into the next era of mobile.

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PayPal pitches its wider vision for mobile payments

Ryan Kim — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 17:01:46 +0000

PayPal has been a powerhouse in online payments but it hasn’t really cracked the much bigger market for payments for goods in the real world. Now, the company is starting to show off how it can put all of its components and recent acquisitions together to form a broad tool for mobile payments.

PayPal hosted a partner event for retailers yesterday and began explaining how they’ll be able to implement its tools for in-store payments. The big reveal will happen next month at PayPal’s developer conference in San Francisco, but the company showed a glimpse of how it’s marshaling its resources. It’s important for PayPal to step up with a compelling offering because the mobile payments market is getting crowded with options like Square, Google Wallet and upcoming services like Isis from the cellular carriers and digital wallets from credit card companies.

Scott Thompson, president of PayPal, said in a blog post the company is looking to be a one-stop shop for merchants to help them address every part of the shopping lifecycle. OK, that’s a bit of jargon, but it means PayPal is going to help push out targeted advertising, help with in-store discovery and improve transactions with a handful of options.

In a video provided by PayPal, it shows how users will be able to walk into a store and check in to a location to unlock discounts and coupons. When a consumer goes to check out, he’ll be able to pay by entering his phone number. That leverages eBay’s purchase of Zong and its carrier billing capabilities, though it’s not clear how much easier or more convenient that is for consumers who pay with a credit card swipe. But it does open up the option to use carrier billing for physical goods in-store, which is good for people without a card, though the question of how large the transactions fees will be is important. Right now, carrier billing fees are still much higher than credit card fees, which might deter some merchants.

Users will also be able to scan items in-store and pay for them with PayPal without having to get in line. Customers can just flash their phone to an employee who will confirm the purchase. This is very much like AisleBuyer and it sounds like PayPal is looking to bring this to restaurant bills as well, something Thompson hinted at in his blog post. This is a cool step that makes sense for people who want to get in and out quickly.

Customers will be able to apparently pay ahead for coffee ahead of time and pick it up. Users will also be able to choose how they pay for something after the purchase with PayPal Credit, which seems to leverage eBay’s BillMeLater. All of this appears to work through PayPal’s mobile application and doesn’t seem to require any new investments by merchants. That’s a big concern for mobile payments built on near field communication, which requires many businesses to upgrade their point-of-sale terminals to handle contactless payments.

The new mobile payment tools don’t appear to include NFC payments. PayPal recently introduced person-to-person payments using NFC on Android devices, but the company told me at the time it was just focusing NFC on P2P payments. It sounds like PayPal is trying to work around the hardware constraints of NFC payments at point of sale.

Other shopping features on display included the ability to get push notifications for discounts that can be shared, which appears to build off eBay’s acquisition of WHERE. Consumers will also be able to scan an item in store and find inventory at other locations, something eBay got from its RedLaser and Milo pick-ups.

It’s unclear how soon all of this will come together and how many merchants will sign on. But providing a complete service for retailers and businesses to not only push out offers and discounts but also complete the transactions makes sense. Merchants can close the loop on transactions and understand how their marketing is doing. This is essentially what Google is trying to do with Google Wallet and Offers though it’s focusing primarily on facilitating targeted marketing, rather than taking a cut of transactions.

PayPal’s payment initiative is part of eBay’s broader commerce platform called X.commerce, which it’s building off the acquisition of Magento.

But there’s also a lot of questions to be answered. For instance, will consumers find this more convenient than a card swipe? Will PayPal make it any easier for people to set-up and manage accounts? Do all of these parts work well together in one solution? And how aggressive will PayPal be in selling this to merchants and consumers? I’ll be interested to hear more and I think PayPal can be a big contender if it gets its execution right. This is going to be a big market but it will require not only great tools but a lot of smart selling to consumers and merchants.

To hear more about mobile payments, check out our GigaOM Mobilize conference Sept. 26 and 27 in San Francisco.

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New Localicious app shows why some devs prefer Android

Ryan Kim — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 14:39:59 +0000

WhitePages is jumping into the local discovery space with a new app called Localicious that tries to improve the process by breaking down searches by very specific neighborhoods. It’s an interesting take, though it will face plenty of competition from Yelp, Foursquare, WHERE and others.

But what’s more interesting about Localicious is that it’s launching first on Google Android smartphones, with no firm timeline for an iPhone rollout. That bucks the trend of most big app launches, which start on iOS before migrating to Android. But as I’ve written recently, a small but growing number of developers are looking at Android first, and they’re finding reasons to go that route, something that’s true for Localicious.

Android presents opportunities

Bret Moore, the general manager of mobile for WhitePages, told me that this is the first time the company has launched an app initially on Android since its earlier Caller ID app. There is a void, he said, on Android for similar apps, and WhitePages has seen good traction in the past on Android. But dig a little deeper and it comes down to the power of Android to help Localicious achieve its advertising goals in bringing together merchants and consumers.

You see, Localicious will be rolling out a number of ad products that revolve around getting advertisers to pay for each call, visit or check-in a consumer does at their store. If WhitePages can tie an ad to a verifiable action, it can charge a premium, perhaps 10 times a normal ad, because it can show an advertiser that its ad produced results. The holy grail would be to direct users all the way to the store and get them to actually buy a promoted product, thereby “closing the loop” and showing advertisers the high return on their investment.

The power of background location processing

Localicious is trying to get a good part of the way there by partnering with Foursquare to get people to check in at stores, so it can verify that they arrived. It’s got a nifty pre-check-in feature that lets users automatically check in at a location when they arrive. But it’s also using Android’s background location processing to verify that a consumer who may have seen an ad followed up by visiting a nearby store. That arrival information can be very important in showing the efficacy of an ad to prompt an action, especially if a user doesn’t choose to check in. And that’s something that’s easier to do with the Android operating system, which allows apps to run processes in the background more easily. Moore said that that is one of the key reasons WhitePages chose Android. He said he could try and stitch together a similar solution for iOS, but it would be a lot harder.

“This is one of the benefits of Android: You can follow things in the background, without someone having an app open all the time. This plays really well with the entire evolution of our search platform,” Moore said.

This kind of flexibility is attractive, especially as mobile advertising becomes more location-based. It’s not enough to deliver a locally relevant ad to a mobile user. Showing that the ad works in bringing in foot traffic or spurring more calls can really boost those ads. It may be unnerving for some privacy advocates to know that their mobile apps are tracking them all the way to a retail store, but that’s where the market is apparently going, thanks to platforms like Android.

Fewer barriers to publishing

It doesn’t hurt that Android has almost no barriers to publishing an app. WhitePages is also working on a separate app, a reverse-phone-look-up service, that has been held up in review by Apple for the last couple of months.

We’re still a ways off from seeing Android be the first platform for most developers, but for some, it’s more attractive, thanks to the platform’s capabilities.

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Mobile Q2: Smartphone growth surges; iPad’s rule continues

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 07:01:07 +0000

The second quarter of 2011 in mobile was all about smartphones, thanks to Google’s Android, Apple’s iOS and mobile data consumption ramping up. In the tablet space, the iPad lacked any real competition, though that dominance will surely fade as more and more alternatives — from Cisco, HP and others — emerge. Elsewhere, location-based marketing finally made some headlines, and the groundwork for near-field communications looks to be finally falling into place. Additional companies in this report include Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Research In Motion. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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Local, Mobile Ambitions Driving eBay’s Purchase of Where

Ryan Kim — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 14:48:31 +0000

EBay is buying location-based service and ad network WHERE in a deal that gives it added ability to drive more local and offline commerce. The company said the pick-up will add important talent and technology to eBay and PayPal as those businesses aim to become more local and relevant to users. And it builds off eBay and PayPal’s growing focus on mobile, which is driving a lot of the growth in local commerce.

Where is a good acquisition for eBay, which will now have to show it won’t screw up this purchase like it did with StumbleUpon or Skype. The Boston-based location company offers mobile apps that help people discover local places to go nearby and provides deals on local products and services. The company also runs a fast-growing ad network that only serves up localized mobile ads. And it recently bought LocalGinger, a daily deals group buying site that it converted into a product called WhereBuys.

“Local commerce companies like Where are blurring the lines between in-store and online shopping. By giving people hyper-local, relevant retailer information and deals on their mobile phones, we see a huge opportunity for local merchants to reach more buyers, and for consumers to get more choice and value when they shop,” wrote Amanda Pires, PayPal’s senior director of global communications, brand, experiential marketing, in a blog post.

The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but eBay said it expects the acquisition to close by the end of this quarter. Pires said the first step will be to integrate PayPal into the WHERE app so users can pay for local offers. But eBay and PayPal see much more opportunity in expanding into local deals. The company paid $75 million for Milo, a local shopping engine that provides real-time, nearby store inventory and pricing.

“Since we don’t compete with our merchants, we are in a unique position to partner with retailers of all sizes and help people shop and pay anytime, anywhere and in any way they want,” Pires wrote.

I’ve talked to WHERE on a few occasions. and they have some great ideas about tapping the local market and using data to improve its performance. They’re seeing great results on their location-based ads, which leverage the company’s sophisticated location-targeting technology. About 120,000 advertisers, mostly local retailers and merchants, are using the network to help drive local traffic into their stores. The company employs a big data team of 12 people, including 8 Ph.D.s, who help tune the company’s location-based ads and also help provide relevant local recommendations for its mobile apps, which have about 4 million active users.

The WHERE pick-up is also about the company’s intellectual property, including a pivotal patent it was awarded late last year on serving up local coupons and offers through geo-fencing. WHERE CEO Walter Doyle called it the “mother of all geo-fencing patents,” at the time, in part because it can conceivably cover any type of local alerts and tailored information based on a person’s movements. Though WHERE executives said the patent was more defensive, it could certainly prove valuable to eBay as it looks to get more local.

This is the second purchase of a location-based service this week, after Groupon bought Pelago, maker of Whrrl. It shows bigger commerce companies are looking to get more hyper-local and mobile and compete for the marketing budgets of merchants. It also raises the question of what other location-based services may be next. It’s hard competing against Foursquare, and increasingly Facebook, as WHERE and Whrrl found out, but the work these location companies is interesting and perhaps more importantly, the data they’re gathering, is very valuable. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more location-based companies get acquired.

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WHERE Uses Facebook and Bump to Socialize Local Recommendations

Ryan Kim — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 18:52:01 +0000

We’ve talked about the shift of locations-based services moving into the local recommendations business, which looks like a smart use of location data. WHERE is taking the next step in the recommendations game by integrating its service with Facebook and Bump, helping its 4 million users get and share suggestions more easily.

The latest updates, which are in the newest versions of WHERE’s iOS and Android apps, build upon the service’s existing recommendation engine which debuted in December. That engine took explicit cues from users on their tastes and favorite places and offered “best bets” suggestions for where users should go. Now with Facebook integration, a user will be able to sign into WHERE using Facebook Connect and will be able to find other Facebook friends who use WHERE. By tapping on a friend’s profile page, a user can get a list of recommended places to go — called Perfect Places — based on the tastes of the user and his friend. The Facebook integration is only for finding friends, so it doesn’t utilize any likes, Facebook Places data or profile information. Still, it’s helpful in connecting two people and enabling WHERE to see places they might want to go together.

The recommendations are built off places that a user has saved on WHERE or has listed as a place she’d like to go. It also incorporates places that have just been viewed though the WHERE app, which is good for users who don’t actively save locations. Dan Gilmartin, WHERE’s VP of marketing, said more than 20 percent of users save information. But by using implicit data about viewed sites, which aren’t weighted as much as explicitly saved locations, WHERE is still able to provide recommendations for users.What’s also nice is that WHERE can use a person’s taste graph to recommend places in a new city unfamiliar to two friends.

Gilmartin said the opportunity now is in tackling the problem of where people should go instead of location services that are focused more on checking people in when they arrive. ”People get together on Friday nights, and co-workers go out for lunch, but the question is: Where do you want to go?” said Gilmartin. “That can be really time-consuming, but [with] this social release [of WHERE], we really eliminate the pain point there.”

WHERE is also integrating the Bump API to allow two WHERE users to bump their phones together and get recommendations. Sharing through Bump can happen between users who aren’t friends. It’s a simple mechanic, but it also connects more users to WHERE’s recommendation engine. That’s where the power of local recommendation services come from: in user data. It’s why the Facebook and Bump updates are useful, because it helps WHERE better understand its users and what they might like by making the process more social. The recommendation business is still young, but WHERE is proving it’s taking this very seriously. It would be nice if it got more data from competing location services, but it seems to rightly understand the value and power of delivering good places suggestions.

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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.