Snowcrashing » Mobile Technology Trends

Are We There Yet?

Antonella Stellacci — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 18:00:41 +0000

Mobile services without location are similar to a car without the engine. You end-up with web-like clones: dating, games, news, etc. No offense to any of the players in the space. But it just tastes as a surrogate. Not surprisingly eMarketer labels m-commerce as a business in its infancy.

Unlocking the potential of location-based services means cracking the nut of mobile as a revenue machine. Like AdSense, it’s a mixing of what’s potentially useful for a consumer with a way to make money for advertisers.

Technological and privacy limitations have hindered the development of location –based services for the past 10 years. The “We’re not there yet!” phrase has indeed become industry cliché.

But things have been changing and a few interesting trends have emerged in the last few months.

What didn’t work

Pure location-based social networks: Brightkite, Google Latitude and Loopt. Turns out that just sharing your location with strangers or Gmail contacts is intriguing only for a small audience.

What could have worked

Dodgeball, but it was too early for its time.

What looks promising

Proximity marketing with a twist of engagement.

One bright execution is Foursquare that has been taking the early adopters’ sphere by storm, after its SXSW debut. Suddenly it doesn’t seem egotistical to broadcast your activities because it’s now part of a game.

Foursquare, founded by the very same men behind Dodgeball, Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai, pairs location based services with social game play. The game rewards you with points and badges for checking in at bars and restaurants, and lets you compete with friends. If any of your friends check in, you get the alert through a push notification: a compelling (read “irresistible”) reminder that you should check in as well, which generates a ripple effect and keeps fueling the addiction to the game.

The most coveted title is that of “mayor” of a venue, which happens when you visit a place more than anyone else in the past 60 days.

In less than 6 months, FourSquare has succeeded where others failed: being a local directory that combines mobile, location-awareness, and the ability to sort data by distance and social relevance. Users get addicted and retailers have new engaging ways to attract them. So far the involvement of retailers has been spontaneous and user-initiated: bars and restaurants have started creating special promos for “mayors” and FourSquare pros. Destination Bar in New York’s East Village and Marsh Cafe in San Francisco offer free drinks to the “mayor,” and Southside Coffee in Brooklyn listed the “mayor” on a chalkboard outside.

: Credits to Amit Gupta

Unlike Yelp, FourSquare has the advantage of offering retailers the ability to track the exact foot traffic driven by FourSquare, whereas the review site only measures a small percentage of it (the elite of the reviewers).

Most of the FourSquare users are on the iPhone. But, as of yesterday there is also an Android app and more are in the pipeline.

It’s no surprise that blogs such as Mashable have called Foursquare “The Next Twitter” and TechCrunch believes in Foursquare’s “ Business Potential of Location-Based Services.”

Being able to connect web advertising, recommendations, and social media buzz to an actual person walking into your store has long been the holy grail of the advertising world. The main challenge that FourSquare faces now is how to scale its business and start offering venues and retailers flexible tools to promote themselves and track the success of their initiatives.

What else is next?

1) The “Social Location” Era

The cat is finally out of the bag: Facebook wants to win the mobile advertising dollars. Yesterday it announced its partnership with Nokia to introduce lifecasting with Ovi, enabling users to publish their location and status updates directly to their Facebook account from the homescreen of their mobile device.

See the opportunity for advertisers to revamp their Facebook Fan Pages with something far more lucrative ? Facebook knows better and today it made another major step by announcing the availability of its Facebook Connect API for the mobile-web.

2)Local Deal Finders

Here’s a nice example of what’s coming. Mastercard “Priceless Picks“, a dynamic, social app which uses your location to show the nearest ‘priceless’ deals that other consumers have pointed out.

3) Mobile Search with a Twist

The space is a very competitive one with 800-pound gorillas as Google and Nokia and smaller startups like Geodelic, Dopplr and NearbyNow, who claims that iPhone shoppers average 6 to 8 percent conversion to purchase, with most of those purchases going to local stores.

A couple of interesting new entries:

-GetFugu – The debut is scheduled for next week at GigaOM’s Mobilize 09. On that occasion, GetFugu will demo something that on paper looks unique and intruiguing from both a end-user and the retailers perspective : a service with four options, “See It,” vision recognition (ARL) “Say It,” voice recognition (VRL) “Find It,” location recognition (GRL)and “Get It,” Hot-Spotting services.

In the words of Rich Jenkins, the Company’s Co-Founder: “With GetFugu, you can take a photo of a logo on your sneaker, or a store window, and it’ll take you wherever the company wants you to go, whether it’s to its website or to a coupon. Or you can access the brand by voice, saying ‘Coca Cola,’ and it’ll take you right there. The third dimension is hotspotting where once you go into one of these brands, you see a pair of Gap jeans you like on the video, you press the screen on the pair of jeans you like and it gives you the ability to buy those jeans, pay for it, select the color and size and 3 days later you have it in your home.”

In addition you can also earn cash with a GetFugu debit card which rewards loyal customers.

-Aloqa - Yesterday, Aloqa partnered with SkyhookWireless, an early entrant in the space with a proprietary hybrid positioning system that combines the benefits of GPS, Wi-Fi positioning and cell-tower triangulation. The partnership will allow Aloqa to offer a mobile service that proactively notifies users of interesting places, events, and more in and around close proximity.

4) Augmented Reality

As predicted , AR is taking the mobile world by storm. As soon as the new iPhone SDK will be available, expect your augmented reality applications to tell you what you are looking for and where to find it. All nearby restaurants, bars, and cafes will be reviewed and their menus easily available at your fingertips. Detailed sales information for all books, dvds, and videogames will be available.

A sneak peak at what’s coming is now available through the Yelp new iPhone app and on Android phones with Layar.

5) Nokia Point&Find

The platform, in its beta, uses real-time image processing to recognize real-world objects in a Nokia database of virtually tagged items using the phone’s camera, Internet connection, and GPS data. Think of this platform, combined with the new Ovi-Facebook lifecasting possibilities…

: via Engadget

6) Twitter?

With its upcoming geo-location API and business analytics, it is definitely a potential disruptor in this scene.

Stay tuned for more!!

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You’re Not a Sci-Fi Nerd Anymore…

Antonella Stellacci — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 14:34:47 +0000

There’s a fascinating new trend in the mobile application space: Augmented Reality.

The technology, which superimposes graphics and information on live camera feeds, is not new, but the newest generation of smartphones are about to make it mainstream.

So what is Augmented Reality and what’s the big deal? AR is a graphics-oriented technology that blends sounds, haptics, and even smell to the natural world. So for example picture yourself using your cell phone to view the real world through its camera lens and while doing so, being able to interact with it. How? You could get twitts of the people all around you or the playlists and music streams of your neighborhood or see who built that statue that you’re staring at…

Now stop dreaming, you’re not a sci-fi nerd anymore! This is happening now…And Augmented Reality App space can already count on big investors.

USC and Nokia have partner to work on the next frontier of AR. “While there is no limit on future applications for augmented reality experiences on mobile devices, the enabling technologies behind complex augmented reality are still in the research stages,” said USC professor Ulrich Neumann of the Computer Science Department in the Viterbi School of Engineering.

Apple too has patented its own AR technology for mobiles. And a new breed of start-ups is betting on the future of AR for mobile devices.

Dutch start-up SPRXmobile, is one of them. Its cell phone browser Layar, is an app for Android phones that provides information about points of interest as you’re seeing them: real estate listings, job posts and reviews.

Unfortunately you can not get this app on your iPhones or in the US. Apple resistance to making its live video feed API public, has hindered the roll-out of Layar and many similar AR apps on the mainstream iPhone platform. A few companies have protested and signed a petition.

The revolution that AR can usher has not been stopped though, and sooner or later we will start interacting in a totally different way: with content, with the environment that surrounds us, with brands. As an artist you could offer apps to interact during your live gigs (sell your music or send a personal playlist or card to your fans with links to videos or to your site).As a end-user you could point to a movie poster and download reviews, find the closest theater, buy a ticket, maybe get one for free with a 3D coupon on your phone, and that is what Nokia’s Point and Find will soon allow you to do. As a retailer or brand you could offer information and promotions when they are most relevant (in-store and on-pack like Lego’s digital box); learning could become pervasive instead of compartmentalized into the books experience…

Watch these videos for some amazing inspiration and start getting ready for a new era….

Nearest Tube

The first version of the app, which has already been submitted to Apple, will cost $1.79 per city and will support two U.S. cities to start — New York and San Francisco. Apps for London, Tokyo and Berlin have also been submitted.

TwittARound

You hold the phone in front of you and then get a view of tweets based on their location data — as long as the user has decided to share that information. TwittARound isn’t available on the App Store yet

Virtual Graffiti

Amazing 3-D mapping application today that captures the real world and then lets artists draw graffiti all over it. Check VentureBeat coverage for more details.

TAT Augmented ID

This utilizes facial recognition software (supplied by Polar Rose) to visualize the digital identities of those around you.

Zagat

The latest application from NRU and Zagat for Android phones that finds restaurants and bars near you.

Wikitude

Austrian company Mobilizy launched Wikitude, an augmented reality browser based on the Android platform using information from Wikipedia, user-generated recommendations from Qype and the photo-sharing community Panoramio. It is a travel guide that can annotate landmarks and mountains.

At Wimbledon this year, Mobilizy worked with I.B.M. to develop an application for the T-Mobile G1 phone that displayed real-time information about matches in progress, as well as dining and transportation options for fans.

Recommended Readings

Game Alfresco Blog

Kicking Reality Up A Notch – NYT

Startups looking to make money by enhancing reality- VentureBeat

The Experience Revolution: How Augmented Reality is about to change how you live, advertise and brand- Simon Mainwaring

Augmented Reality On iphone Delayed, But Hardly Prevented – ThinkArtificially

AR Consortium