Tag Archive for 'mobile'

Some thoughts on Color with a capital C

Published on June 14, 2011. 4 Comments Tags: advertising, anonymity, future, identity, location, mobile, pongo, social.

First, I wanted to set this up with a couple of assertions, that location is a signal, as John Battelle defined it, and that this signal will be extremely useful when wrapped around social objects, in the way that Jyri Engestrom intended the term way back in 2005, and it’s every bit as true today.

This is a slightly more structured way of just saying that location becomes meaningful in context.

I think we can all agree that Color flopped its launch. It chose proximity-oriented photos as the social object upon which to base the serendipitous creation of affinity groups. The hope was that this activity would be so engaging that people would be motivated to invite more people to use the app, they’d use it very frequently in many locations and Color would thus have access to a hyperlocalized two-way channel into the lives of their users.

The idea is that they would then use this so-called anonymous data to create user profiles and a rich database from which to launch advertising, local promotions and news-oriented feeds. I say so-called because they neglected to understand just how identifiable photographs of faces are! (Yes, I’m looking at you Facebook.)

Another surprising oversight given the data-driven nature of the founders is that “for the average person, knowing their approximate home and work locations — to a block level — identifies them uniquely.”

Isn’t it amazing how fast anonymity breaks down?

As if this wasn’t enough, Color’s original user interface was unintuitive in the extreme and absolutely required that you use the the application with at least one other person. So, it flopped big time.

Now that Color has quietly withdrawn from the scene, it’s back to the drawing board to roll out a different application that will feed their hungry proximity algorithms champing at the hyperlocal bit, not to mention their investors looking for gorgeous pivot. How will they deal with privacy and can they find the secret sauce to make me want to share my location with nearby strangers?

My prediction is that they will not. Their approach is all wrong; it’s backwards. You cannot define yourself “much more of a research company and a data mining company than a photo sharing site,” as Bill Nguyen did and expect to have the wild imagination and fire in your belly to create an amazingly compelling social application that lots of people will love. He has some interesting ideas about the social stickiness of proximity, but it’s all wrapped around how much data he’s going to collect and sell to advertisers.

My next post will explore another proximity application…

Update: Well this seems to support my guess… “Confirmed: Co-founder Peter Pham Leaves Color” and “Troubled Startup Color Loses Cofounder Peter Pham“. Trojan horses are not lovable.

Published on June 14, 2011. 4 Comments Tags: advertising, anonymity, future, identity, location, mobile, pongo, social.

Been there, done that.

Published on May 31, 2010. 0 Comments Tags: advertising, location, mobile, pongo, social.

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…

Published on May 31, 2010. 0 Comments Tags: advertising, location, mobile, pongo, social.

Cool tools

Published on May 26, 2010. 0 Comments Tags: location, mobile, pongo, social, UX.

The Cool Tool, aka hammerhead

Is it a good strategy to base your web business idea on a cool tool? Well, if you’re the talented Loren Brichter, the answer is probably YEAH. He created and distributed the premier Twitter client for the iPhone, an application that cost me €2.39 on iTunes. His 1-man shop made a good income from sales and then was acquired by Twitter and he was hired on, in a presumably pretty sweet deal.

Yet the percentage of developers who are able to make a living from the sales of client applications is rather small and once a few big applications gain traction, it’s going to be very difficult to compete. And let’s not forget that in most segments there are a plethora of good enough clients being distributed for free.

It makes a lot more sense to think of your cool tool as facilitator, one that does not call attention to itself, but that enables, simplifies or reveals an experience in a way that is better than what currently exists. The business opportunity will be found in the value that you can create in the experience, not necessarily in the tool itself.

As an example, this is what Foursquare, Facebook and the other slew of mobile location-centric applications are all about. The holy grail here is to help connect local businesses with existing customers and for them to be introduced to potential new customers. Putting it together correctly, businesses will be happy to pay for more, and more frequent, customers while users of your cool tool enjoy the benefits of social discovery, special deals and the nearly magical power to know the best nearby places even if you’ve never been there before.

Published on May 26, 2010. 0 Comments Tags: location, mobile, pongo, social, UX.

Familiar strangers

Published on May 12, 2009. 2 Comments Tags: future, identity, mobile, slideshow, social.

I came across this slide deck today and thought I’d post it here and make a few comments. David Reed is the Reed of Reed’s Law, a person with genuine visionary status.

David Reed – Social Mobility and the 3rd Cloud

View more presentations from Venice Sessions.

He sketches how the technologically-mediated public social fabric might look in the future. In slide 2 he postulates that in order to be well-connected we will need to feel safe, establish trust with “familiar strangers” and to share and collaborate with people in the same location. I am particularly interested in the term “familar strangers,” a seeming oxymoron.

I was first reminded of a quote by Diane Arbus, “Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. It’s what I’ve never seen before that I recognize.” But then I learned that it’s a term is commonly used in studying social networks and is generally defined as “an individual who is recognized from regular activities, but with whom one does not interact.”

In the future, however, I think the definition can be extended. The recognition can take place via machine-readable data. It all comes down to context, what elements we pour into the concept of context and how we weigh these elements in relation to each other. But it will never be really useful or trustworthy until our digital lives are tagged with open metadata and semantic protocols.

Since the people we don’t know will always be more numerous than those we do, we can gain much more from social search and discovery tools that tap into the knowledge of familiar strangers, applying rules learned from examining our declared identity and our relationships with people we do know and applying them to people that we don’t know.

Yet.

Published on May 12, 2009. 2 Comments Tags: future, identity, mobile, slideshow, social.

Always on!

Published on May 11, 2009. 0 Comments Tags: future, India, mobile, social, statistics.

Many of you will remember the early days of the web when The Next Big Thing was “always on” — fast, cheap bandwidth that would liberate us from the curse of dialup and would naturally enable new business models to emerge. We normally thought about this in terms of Internet connectivity, separate from mobile telephony. Since those days we have seen the blurring of the lines between voice and data due to the emergence of VoIP, 3G mobile, smartphones and (still too expensive) flat rate data pricing.

I just came across this article in the NYT, A Pocket-Size Leveler in an Outsize Land, by Anand Giridharadas. And it really hammered home the reality of where we are heading as a planet as far as digital connectivity is concerned.

But the technology has seeped down the social strata, into slums and small towns and villages, becoming that rare Indian possession to traverse the walls of caste and region and class; a majority of subscribers are now outside the major cities and wealthiest states. And while the average bill, of less than $5 per month, represents 7 percent of the average Indian’s income, enough Indians apparently consider the sacrifice worth it: if present trends continue, in five years every Indian will have a cellphone… There are 65 times more cellphone connections than broadband Internet links, and the gap is widening.

A huge percentage of the world’s population is coming online not through PC-based Internet, but through their cell phones. There are 3 billion active mobile device users in the world, 92% of them outside of the US market. (Stats are from Tomi Ahonen.)

What does the social web look like, how does it feel, when your first and only window into that world is a handheld mobile device? Like the Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant, your perception is determined by where you touch the animal.

A mobile device is by its very nature always on. Since there is little doubt that even the cheapest cell phones will be able to send and receive pictures and videos, listen to and share music and navigate the so-called mobile web in the not too distant future (as many already do), it is fascinating to think about what kind of new social networking businesses will be built to scale to, um, billions of members.

Published on May 11, 2009. 0 Comments Tags: future, India, mobile, social, statistics.