Monthly Archive for May, 2010

I'm the mayor of this blog. So? Now what?

Location, location, location

If you haven’t heard about Foursquare, Gowalla, Latitude, Scvngr, MyTown, Loopt, Geodelic, Brightkite, Where, Check.in, and could care less about other location based services, just enjoy the Pongo illustration and don’t bother reading any further! (I want to mention Layar here, even if it is not strictly in this category of applications. If you haven’t seen this yet, you really should check it out. It’s described as an augmented reality browser. Using the geo-location, compass and camera functions of your mobile device, it displays information about the stuff around you as you aim your camera from place to place.)

This guy with the crown has checked in here lots of times, using an application on his mobile phone. In order to keep him coming back here, I let him earn a crown and the title of mayor. That may be enough for the honeymoon period, but I’ll probably need to start offering him free drinks as long as he keeps coming back and keeps on broadcasting his presence to his friends.

What is the business model that will emerge from this scenario? I’m just going to wait and see, quite a few come to mind…

Hyperlocal, not hype-local

But there are three startups that are coming at the issue from a different perspective and I wanted to mention them here, Lasso, PaperG and BlockChalk. They all are focusing on the hyperlocal experience, the places where we spend most of our time and, not incidentally, most of our money.

Lasso and PaperG are quite interesting from a business point of view because they are sitting at the crossroads of a very real problem — local newspaper advertising revenues are shrinking, yet local media still have a sales force to sell advertising (and other promotional services) to small local businesses that a digital pure-play would have a hard time reaching due to the high overhead of selling to small advertisers.

First up, Lasso, who are building a kind of self-help hyperlocal ad server with a dash of Google AdWords:

Lasso is a platform positioned to enable local media companies to reach small and medium-sized businesses with attractive new offerings: integration with social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and distribution through customizable widgets throughout a media company’s website…

“We [Lasso] have combined internet marketing expertise plus newspaper DNA. An effective product has to have the right metrics, and in terms of landing it appropriately, it has to be done in terms that newspaper ad sales people understand,” Treadaway said. “If people don’t feel like they’re getting value, the churn will be very high. The product demos very well, looks very slick by newspaper standards. Most of the response has been: ‘when will you come train our people.’ (from LostRemote)

PaperG takes a different approach:

PaperG is testing a software system called PlaceLocal that automatically generates ads for local businesses by crawling the Web. The system scrapes the Web for basic information about a business such as its address, phone number, and opening hours. Even if the business doesn’t have its own Web page, data can often be pulled from third-party services such as Yelp or Google Maps. The system then uses semantic analysis to find and extract photos and positive reviews, and it builds an ad automatically using Adobe’s Flash software. The business owner or newspaper ad sales representative can customize the ad, so if PlaceLocal didn’t choose the best photo or review, it’s easy to select another.

Lee expects PlaceLocal to help representatives sell ads in the first place. “The sales rep can have a beautiful ad designed for every lead sheet,” Lee says, “which makes a real difference in the conversation.” (from MIT’s Technology Review) (The NYT writes about it here.)

BlockChalk is taking a much different approach, the social media classic — build traffic and figure out how to make money once they get traction. The only reason I’m putting them in this post is because of their unique usage model. You don’t have to sign up to the service to use it, and you remain anonymous until such time as you decide to share your identity on a case-by-case basis with other users of the service.

Since anonymity opens the service up to spam and all sorts of abuses, and denies the service a registered user base and profiled social graph, I am really interested to see what kinds of checks and balances they build into the system. But the really cool part to watch will be to see what kind of behavior users will adapt on their own in this wild west of a service. What will be the equivalent of the Twitter hashtag, what cultural norms will people develop and adopt?

That is if it lasts long enough for a culture to develop…