The Praized Blog

I was inspired this morning by a “tweet” from Simon Baptist, a product manager at Fast Search And Transfer, who was “pondering the business value for Publishers to deploy a local search strategy”. It’s also something I spend a lot of time thinking these days within the context of this blog and as co-founder of Praized Media.

I now sincerely believe local search will permeate everything we do on the Web, in the same way we live our life “locally” as well (that famous statement that most of us buy products & services from a fifty miles radius around our home and workplace). Browsers (powered by Mozilla’s Geode, Google’s Gears Geolocation API or Skyhook Wireless‘ Loki) will all be location-aware, smart mobile devices (like the iPhone or the Blackberry Bold) will make our local lives much easier. And all this local commerce will have an important social component, with the ability to “ping” your extended social graph for advice and feedback.

Local search will be the online equivalent of product placements in the movies. The way you easily monetize content in a relevant, contextual and subtle local way, by allowing your readers to find the place where they can buy a product or service they’ve read (heard, seen) about in an online magazine, newspaper, TV/video site, blog, social network, etc.).

Local search is the “Last Mile” of Web search and enabling companies like Local Matters Inc, Intelligenx, FAST, Krillion Inc, Localeze, Navteq and Praized Media (amongst others) are building the “pipes” to connect the online world to real world commerce.

Without a compelling existing brand or a really innovative product with protectable intellectual property (some of the games fall into this category), the only chance these apps have for long term success is to start thinking about ways to have users interact with each other in order to build network value. I’ve long argued that social networking on the iPhone is a huge opportunity, and the fact that the big guys are ignoring it for now leaves the door open for a newcomer to get long term market share.

(From Most iPhone Apps Are Failing To Leverage The Network Effect on Techcrunch)

What it means: great insight from Mike Arrington today. I’ve also been talking about the fact that your mobile device is a social object. It holds your contact list, it knows where you are and it’s a multi-channel communication device. We’re not far away from a specific mobile device-centered social network. Is there a “Facebook” in Apple’s future? I wonder if it would be possible to integrate DiSo (distributed social networking) with open source mobile operating systems like OpenMoko, Android or Symbian?

As most people following the tech industry know, July was “iPhone 3G” month. In the local search space, the Kelsey Group (via Mike Boland) recently published an analysis of 25 representative local search iPhone apps. I haven’t read the document but I’m sure it’s excellent as always.

In a case of “I don’t know if I should be laughing or crying” though, I stumbled upon this Information Week article that talks about a restaurant app called UrbanSpoon (I’m pretty sure it’s not in the Kelsey Group report…). Here’s what it does:

When you start UrbanSpoon, it asks for permission to check your location. Once it does, you get a slot-machine-type interface with three thumbwheels: One containing names of local neighborhoods, one containing a list of cuisines, and one containing price ranges, from one dollar-sign to four. You can select any of the criteria manually, and lock that choice in. Then, give the iPhone a shake, and the device’s built-in accelerometer will detect the movement and set the wheels to spinning. I’ve found two good shakes do the job. Or, if you’re feeling lazy, you can press the “Shake” button at the bottom of the screen. The wheels spin with suitable sound effects, and when they’re done, you get a restaurant recommendation.

Not sure it’s useful but it’s certainly very clever. It seems to be working as the UrbanSpoon blog reported 300,000 downloads on July 23rd.

What it means: Hmmm… Clearly, if you’re in the local search space, I think you want to have an iPhone app/iPhone-compatible site out there (or be working on one) just to appear to be competitive. But I suspect we’re already close to “jumping the shark” in the space. The signal to noise ratio seems to be quite high and Apple controls the storefront. Regarding the UrbanSpoon app, the Information Week reviewer mentioned something I thought was really interesting: “The application is as good as any Internet-based restaurant finder — which is to say it’s mediocre. It’s no substitute for talking to trusted friends, or going out and trying and finding new restaurants on your own.” Again, word of mouth seems to be the #1 trusted source for local search referrals. Quoting Roberto Rocha (who was recently quoting an unnamed social media expert), “Whoever figures out how to bottle the friendly referral will be the next Google.” He might be right.

It seems like everyone is excited about the new iPhone that was introduced by Apple on Monday (many people are actually calling it the Jesusphone) but I think everyone’s missing the big picture.

Flickr photo by nedrichards

What triggered those thoughts was today’s blog post from Mashable, discussing what was really revolutionary about the new iPhone:

And, The Really Big Thing About The New iPhone Is… GPS. Global Positioning System . Geo-anything. Location based services. (…) Why hasn’t all this happened before? Three words: ease of use. While you could have done all these things for the Symbian or Blackberry or Windows ME platforms (provided the device had GPS capabilities), it just took too many clicks and required too much fidgeting for any of it to get mass appeal.

I actually agree with that statement. The iPhone is well designed, it’s very easy to use, it’s now location-aware and the touchscreen navigation is amazing…

BUT…

• RIM (Blackberry) is working on a similar device
• Nokia is working on a similar device
• Samsung is working on a similar device
• HTC is probably working on a similar device
• Google might be working on a GooglePhone

I give kudos to Apple for innovating, creating a user-focused device and forcing change in a market that badly needed the kick in the pants but, the same way the social Web is not about Facebook, Friendfeed or Twitter, the mobile Web is not about Apple and the iPhone. It’s about permanent change in the way we access the mobile Web and that’s good. But, it’s certainly not about the iPhone…

Update1: David Pogue from the New York Times reviews the Samsung Instinct.

AT&T is working closely with Apple to roll out several new and innovative applications that take advantage of the iPhone’s advanced capabilities. For example, AT&T is finalizing YELLOWPAGES.COM mobile for the iPhone, an innovative GPS-enabled application that combines local search with social networking capabilities, giving users the ability to search for information, share reviews and plan activities with friends, neighbors and co-workers.

(seen in Techcrunch, quoting the official press release)

Just listened to a video presentation from Jonathan Zittrain at Web 2.0 Expo. Jonathan holds the Chair in Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University and is a principal of the Oxford Internet Institute. He just wrote a book called “The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It “

Zittrain suspects we’re getting close to the end of thirty years of “free” development around computers and the Internet. He sees the rise of “tethered appliances” like IPods, iPhones, Xboxes, and TiVos as “the first wave of Internet-centered products that can’t be easily modified by anyone except their vendors or selected partners.” He also sees the rise of “platforms” (Google, Facebook, etc.) as centralized points that could potentially be disruptive to innovation. Finally, for him, things in the cloud (he gave Gmail as an example) are also a potential threat as users don’t control the information the way they use to when it was resident on their desktop.

What it means: I see those trends as well but I don’t think they’re new. It’s always been extremely profitable to build networks and closed systems. So, it’s not surprising to see a lot of companies going at it today. The second trend that Zittrain might be discounting is the rise of open source hardware. Organizations like BugLabs and OpenMoko are trying to crack that nut and keep hardware as open as possible.

“We thought it was a mistake and made our engineers check the logs again”

According to Apple Insider, “Google on Wednesday said it has seen 50 times more search requests coming from Apple iPhones than any other mobile handset — a revelation so astonishing that the company originally suspected it had made an error culling its own data.”

What it means: oh, oh! I think that’s he first real sign that mobile and local is coming… Get ready for the next evolution. More info in this Financial Times article.

Skyhook’s technology uses signals from WiFi hot spots to triangulate and find a person’s location, instead of using a chip that lets a mobile device communicate with the satellite-based Global Positioning System.Skyhook, founded in 2003 by Ted Morgan and Michael Shean, has gathered and catalogued the WiFi fingerprint of streets in thousands of US cities and towns by driving along roads and collecting the unique signatures of 23 million WiFi signals that flow out of houses, businesses, and public access points. The company uses that data to let WiFi-enabled devices know where they are. (…)The software upgrade that includes the new location feature - it’s available free on an iPhone and for $19.99 on an iPod Touch - allows people to simply press a button to see where they are.

A map displays a bull’s-eye that’s centered on the user’s location; Morgan said Skyhook’s technology typically is accurate up to about 165 feet. The technology builds in the likely margin of error and draws a circle on the map, taking into account the likely error of the location technology, so that the user will be within the radius 95 percent of the time.

(via Boston.com)

(flickr photo by tibopoix)

What it means: I believe Apple is betting that location-based services represent the future growth for their iPod line of product. During Apple’s Q1 2008 conference call, their execs called it potentially the “first mainstream Wi-Fi mobile platform, running all kinds of mobile applications”. With the upcoming release of the iPhone SDK, we should be monitoring the growing installed base of these devices.

In business blogs everywhere, it’s that time of the year again, when we start looking back at the year that was and we start to forecast what 2008 will look like. In this post, I look back at 2007 and discuss the most significant local and social media news of the year.

1) Facebook

Clearly, Facebook was the number one news of 2007. By allowing anyone to open up an account in the Fall of 2006 (at about the same time they introduced their newsfeed function), Facebook paved the way for the arrival of tech enthusiasts and early adopters/influencers. Silicon Valley got very excited in the Spring and the launch of the F8 platform in May, allowing third-party developers to build applications, brought more excitement. I believe early adopters’ interest in Facebook has peaked (and has even started to decline) but the job is done. More than 55M active users of all ages access the site every month. The social network had a couple of setbacks around the end of the year with the beacon fracas and the launch of OpenSocial by Google but I believe it does not tarnish their luster. Facebook retaliated by opening up their infrastructure. The biggest benefit to the Web in general: Facebook is introducing people to the social web (micro-blogging, blogging, pictures uploading, “friending”), people who will eventually graduate to more complex social applications.

2) The opening up of the social web

Symbolized by the publication of the OpenSocial standard, the web is becoming more social and more open. Additionnally, the announcement by Six Apart that Movable Type, their leading blogging software, is going open source and the launch of the DiSo initiative to create open source implementations of distributed social networking are also important projects. Social will be part of the fabric of the web.

3) The launch of the iPhone and the unveiling of Android

Apple created quite a stir in June by launching the iPhone, a beautiful device that changes the way we see mobile web access. It’s not a perfect machine by any mean (still very closed) but it’s a game changer. The Android mobile platform by Google is also potentially very disruptive and paves the way to an interesting 2008 in that field. Local mobile search, the famous holy grail of local search, is on the verge of becoming reality.

4) The acquisition of Ingenio by AT&T/YellowPages.com

This purchase is a critical move for YellowPages.com and it clearly signals to the rest of the directory industry that call-tracking/pay-per-call will be the unifying standard in local product bundling, allowing a single sales force to sell multiple media formats. In the same vein, Marchex acquired Voicestar earlier this year.

5) The Radiohead “pay what you want” experiment

Even though it wasn’t as radical as industry watchers wanted it to be (Radiohead is still going to release a CD version of InRainbows), this trial by one of the most preeminent alt-rock group generated a lot of discussions in the blogosphere. Consumers were allowed to pay whatever they wanted to pay for the download including not paying at all. ComScore released some disheartening information about the percentage of people who paid for the album but that was quickly shot down by Radiohead’s management. In any case, the music industry needs more bleeding edge experiments like this one to find their future business model(s).

6) Reality check in the local search industry

The last two Kelsey conferences offered a sobering and realistic look at the realities of local search. Local is tough, hasn’t been cracked yet but offers tremendous opportunities. Stakeholders are realizing that partnerships will be needed to succeed. Two senior executives from the print directory industry talked openly about the opportunities and challenges of being a traditional media publisher and it was the first time that we heard that kind of discourse publicly. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are all courting traditional local media companies that possess large sales forces to help them increase local revenues. I think we’re getting close to the “acceptance” stage of the Internet grief cycle and we should see a lot of action next year on the local search front.

I’d love to get your feedback on 2007 events. Anything important I forgot?

The Wall Street Journal reports (via ZDNet) on Google’s efforts to disrupt the wireless industry.

Of note:

“Within the next two weeks, Google is expected to announce advanced software and services that would allow handset makers to bring Google-powered phones to market by the middle of next year, people familiar with the situation say.” (…)

“The Google-powered phones are expected to wrap together several Google applications — among them, its search engine, Google Maps, YouTube and Gmail email — that have already made their way onto some mobile devices.” (…)

“Developers could, for instance, more easily create services that take advantage of users’ Global Positioning System location, contact lists and Web-browsing habits. They also would be able to interact with Google Maps and other Google applications. The idea is that a range of new social networking, mapping and other services would emerge, just as they have on the open, mostly unfettered Web. Google, meanwhile, could gather user data to show targeted ads to cellphone users.” (…)

In related news, it looks like Google is the first choice among wireless developers for developing location-enhanced application.

In another related news, YellowPages.com (owned by AT&T) announced the release of a version of their site for the iPhone. According to iLounge, “the new web app can be used by visiting yellowpages.com on an iPhone or iPod touch”

What it means: if I read between the lines, I think Google is trying to get the better of Facebook via their mobile strategy. Google is clearly designing a mobile development platform that will include basic Google applications like search, video, maps and e-mail. Developers will be able to build additional features and functionalities on top of these building blocks (like Facebook apps). Combined with the GPS-enabled phones, you will truly be able to create local social networks.