The Praized Blog

From the Twitter API developer group:

i wanted to give you all a heads up on some big changes we’re making to our  geo-tagging API. (…) people, we find,inherently want to talk about a “place”. a place, for a lot of people, hasa name and is not a latitude and longitude pair. 37.78215, -122.40060,for example, doesn’t mean a lot to a lot of people — but, “San Francisco,CA, USA” does. we’re also trying to help users who aren’t comfortable annotating their tweets with their exact coordinates, but, instead, are really happy to say what city, or even neighborhood, they are in. annotating your place with a name does that too. (…) for this first pass, we’re only going live with United States-centric data,  but that will quickly be expanded geographically as we work out the kinks in our system

What it means: in a move that shouldn’t surprise anyone, Twitter will now enable attachment of “place” information to individual tweets (messages). It’s a brilliant move as people talk about places all the time but they don’t know their latitude/longitude coordinates. By the way, I think lat/long coordinates are for machines, i.e. auto-geolocation tagging. Humans mention “places” when they talk about geography. This means Twitter is starting to embrace structured local data in a way that’s much closer to the DNA of directory publishers. This crystallizes even more the importance of “local” in Twitter’s strategy.

Robert Scoble reports this morning that he’s now “heard from three separate Google employees that Google will release a news feed that will compete with Facebook and Twitter”. He gives an excellent description of the products that will serve as building blocks for that feed: Google Profiles and Google’s Social Circles Connections. Scoble says it’s a serious threat to Twitter.

On a related note, ReadWriteWeb makes the case that Facebook could soon become the world’s leading news reader because of the enormous size of the social network and the ease of sharing/commenting information.

What it means: yet more proof that my prediction that we would soon consume all local content in a real-time activity stream format will come true. Traditional media companies: when Google launches this newsfeed, don’t say you were not warned in advance. Embrace the real-time Web and the newsfeed format. It’s becoming a de facto Web standard.

One of the first things you learn when you launch your own startup is to actively monitor opportunities in the market and move quickly to leverage them. In my case, it happened three times in the last three years.

The first strategic move happened back in the fall of 2006 when Sylvain Carle, Harry Wakefield and I founded Praized Media to help local media companies leverage the rising force of social media and online word-of-mouth. I also started blogging about what I call “local 2.0,” the intersection of local search and social media. At the time, most people believed that this convergence would not happen. Three years later, it’s one of the hottest sectors.

We made the second key move in fall 2008. Having launched our first social local tools (for WordPress, Movable Type, Facebook and our hub site) a couple of months before, we were approached by a few major media players who signaled to us they would be interested in using the technology we had built within their own online platform. This gave us the confidence to develop white-label enterprise versions of our social local media software, which has been in the market since spring 2009. Building on the popularity of our initial module, we developed many more enterprise modules described here.

The third strategic move is happening now. Last fall (what is it with fall???), we were approached by two US investment banks who aspired to represent us if we ever wanted to find a strategic partner for Praized Media. A few companies also hinted to us that they might be interested in investing in or acquiring Praized Media. Based on that enthusiasm, Sylvain and I (along with our board) discussed the pros and cons of going to the altar with a strategic partner vs. continuing alone.

The market is super-hot for technologies like ours. In the last three months, there has been a flurry of acquisitions and funding events in the “social local” space (we’ve created a document listing them if you’re interested). We could go on the road and raise new VC money to fuel our growth, but anyone that has raised those kinds of funds before knows that this is a brutal process, even when your market is hot. It takes a lot of time and energy, and for small companies, the process forces you to take your eyes off the product/company development roadmap. At the core, Sylvain and I are product/technology guys and that’s what we want to do. In the last two years, we’ve built world-class real-time social local search technologies. We’ve assembled a five-star (pun intended) social local technology development team. We’re notable thought-leaders in our space.

The future of local media will be centered on Aggregation / Discovery / Social / Search and our technology stack enables that. We believe what we’ve built (team and technology) represents the cornerstone of the next-generation local media company (traditional or pure play), and we want to focus on building that vision with a larger organization.

For all those reasons, we have decided to hire Siemer & Associates, LLC., an investment banking firm in Los Angeles that specializes in digital media, to represent us in our search for a strategic partner. We’re obviously supported a 100% in this decision by our board and the whole team is excited by this new move. For our current customers, collaborators and service providers, it is business as usual as this does not impact our day-to-day operations (actually, it frees up more time!). Given current market conditions, we are extremely confident we will find the right strategic partner.

If you’re interested in discussing more the opportunity, you can contact Siemer & Associates at (310) 496-4510 or info@siemer.com.

Google just launched a “status update” field that merchants can use to send real-time messages to their profile page (i.e. Place Pages) in Google Maps. Accessible from the Local Business Center dashboard (which means it’s only available to businesses who have claimed their listing), you can read more about it on the Google LatLong blog.

Excerpt:

Holding a special event today? Want to post a coupon for 5-7pm tonight? Have a new product in stock? You can now get the word out by posting to your Place Page directly from your Local Business Center dashboard. Once you’ve logged in and are on your business’ dashboard, post an update and it will go live on your Place Page in just a few minutes. To see an example, check out the Place Page for Mission Mountain Winery which posted to introduce a new wine.

What it means: After Facebook, Google is now having real-time envy (or is that Twitter envy?). This is a small addition but it tells a lot about the product direction. As you can see in the example, attribution for the message is showing it’s coming “From the owner”. Expect Google to allow users to give that kind of real-time feedback in the future, hereby improving on user ratings/reviews. You can also expect broadcast bridges to other social networks.

If I was in Facebook’s or Twitter’s shoes, I would move quickly and enter the structured local business listings world by offering pre-populated fan pages (for Facebook) and merchant profiles (for Twitter). This would simplify the entry for SMEs and basically enable a “claim your profile” function on those two social networks. It also would simplify the mass structuring of real-time content (which is very valuable).

In the most-awaited session of the afternoon of Day 1 at LeWeb, Michael Arrington (from TechCrunch) sat down with Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products and User Experience at Google to discuss a series of hot topics like recent Google innovations, mobile and the newspaper industry.

On recent innovations:

• Mayer says Google is focused on future of search and they expect different modality of search, not just through keywords. That’s why they launched Google Goggles this week which is basically image recognition (you take a picture and Google tells you what it is). See this example. They also expanded voice search to Japanese and added the “What’s nearby” mobile functionality. Mayer thinks that people will eventually talk to their phone or take a picture to make a search. They also added real-time results (from Twitter, blogs, Facebook, MySpace, etc.) to regular search results, which drastically increases the relevancy of Google search results.
• On Google Chrome, she mentioned the release of Chrome Extensions which allows anyone to add functionalities via plugins in the Chrome browser (like Firefox). She said there are “tens of millions of Chrome users”.
• On Google Wave, Arrington stated “there’s something there” but wondered if we needed more “training”. I think most people are unsure of the value of Wave today and that’s why the Techcrunch founder asked the question.

On mobile searches:

• Mayer says they’ve grown tremendously on smart phones. Asked by Arrington if their total share of mobile searches over total searches was in the 1 to 5% range, she answered “slightly higher than that”.

On newspapers:

• Arrington started by saying we all understand the dire situation of print media and mentioned Eric Schmidt recent vision piece in the Wall Street Journal. He then asked Mayer: “What’s your vision?”. The VP from Google answered with a question: “how do you get users more engaged with news online?” She continued by stating that if we could build a news site from scratch today, it would probably look very different than what we have today. She then mentioned The Living Stories experiment they’re doing with the New York Times and the Washington Post. “What if the story was alive? Not just the print version posted online.” She added that the Web ”puts pressure on the atomic unit of consumption. The article is the atomic unit.” She then suggested we could aggregate all news story on the same topic on one page, like Wikipedia, to help with discovery in Google.
• She closed that topic by suggesting “personalized stream of news”, probably on your mobile phone, would be interesting. The stream would be filtered according to your social circle, location, the news brands you like, the writers you like, and the important news you should know about (she called them “veggies”).
• Asked if newspapers will move fast enough, she thought so and mentioned the New York Times and Washington Post are very progressive partners and very interested on how they can reinvent themselves.
• On Murdoch, Mayer mentioned the partnership with MySpace. Asked if she thought News Corp would pull their content from Google, she answered ”I hope not” as it would impact comprehensiveness of their results set. She added ”we have to respect the content owners. We would respect his will.”
• Finally, Arrington asked if Google would consider paying for content, Marissa Mayer proposed that they already have programs for content monetization through Google Adsense and their display ads network.

See more on Techcrunch.

Mike Jones, COO, MySpace, and Monica Keller, Group Architect, stepped on stage right after Twitter. It was a tough act to follow given Twitter’s growth (and Facebook’s for that matter) but they still managed to announce exciting things. MySpace is opening up its real-time activity stream unrestricted using push technology with no time delay. The first three partners are Google, OneRiot, and Groovy Networks. They also announced a few other improvements to their API, the details of which are on their corporate blog.

They also announced a developer challenge starting in January. More details will be found soon in their developer section. MySpace currently has 110M users each month and 46 million events are published in the activity stream every day.

Additional information:

ReadWriteWeb: “Myspace Opens Floodgates: Developers Get API for Real-Time Stream”

Techcrunch: “MySpace Launches New Set Of Realtime APIs With Google, OneRiot And Groovy”

Ryan Sarver, Director of Platform at Twitter, took the stage this morning at the LeWeb conference to discuss the developer roadmap and make four big announcements. Sarver mentioned that Twitter application developers have been very vocal about four key themes. They are:

• Transparency. The need for Twitter to be more public, how they engage with 3rd party companies, etc.
• Communications. Be out there when there are problems or new features or give previews.
• Utility. Providing robust APIs to create all sorts of applications.
• Profitability. Provide money to the ecosystem partners, through a shared business model. More details in early 2010.

With this background, came four big announcements.

1. The launch of a program to provide access to the Twitter content firehose to everyone in early 2010
2. The launch in a few weeks of a Twitter developer site in a few weeks including documentation, known issues, API console, status dashboard, etc.
3. The move to OAuth for identity authorization (with its positive impacts on rate limits & authentication). Sarver says that application developers using OAuth will see an increase in rate limits of 10x. They will also introduce an API for browser-less apps to get the OAuth token. Given that announcement, basic auth deprecation will happen in June 2010 (which means all applications will need to use OAuth by that date, otherwise they’ll stop working).
4. The first Twitter Developer Conference, “Chirp” happening in 2010 in San Francisco. They want the conference to be affordable (around $400 a ticket).

Just listened to a fireside chat with Jack Dorsey, Inventor, Founder & Chairman, Twitter. A few interesting insights:

Q:How did you invent Twitter?

A: “It took a long time. I’ve always been fascinated with how cities work, fell in love with maps, obsessing with maps. I taught myself to program maps when I was a teenager and put dots on maps. I eventually got a rich picture of everything that was happening in a city (in this case, Manhattan). But the citizens ( (i.e. my friends) were missing from the map. The idea came out again later in 2006 when I was at Odeo. We created the first version of Twitter in 2 weeks.”

Q: Did you expect twitter to be this big?

A: “No. I knew the concept was big but velocity has been surprising. I’m also surprised at how the users are defining the product. Many features were defined by users: hashtags, retweets, mentions, replies, etc.”

Dorsey then talked about his new company: Square. He mentioned that three concepts emerged from Twitter: immediacy, accessibility, transparency. Starting with the iPhone, the application is called Square. You can take credit card payments without having a merchant credit card account. They built a piece of hardware called square. It’s a swiper that connects into the headphone jack and it transforms the information from the swiped credit card into sounds for the iPhone application. They’re going to give these away for free starting March 2010. Consumers can add their picture on the Square Web site so the merchant can verify your identity. You sign on the iPhone with your finger and you receive an e-mail/sms receipt. You can shake the phone to erase your signature. Jack Dorsey did a demo with Loic Le Meur’s credit card and charged him some money. Asked by Michael Arrington (Techcrunch) how much money he has collected from “demos”? Dorsey answered $650 so far. He added it’s been the best startup to demo and he’s managed to charge money to a few VCs he presented to (which made all entrepreneurs laugh!)

He left us with an inspiring thought: “the hardest thing about any idea is getting started”. Given the success Twitter has attained, I think all aspiring entrepreneurs should “get started”!

Update: Techcrunch has a post on this presentation as well.

This morning, I had the chance to sit down with Gilles Barbier, CEO and co-founder of TellMeWhere (Dismoiou in French), a Paris-based European social Yellow Pages service. As with any ratings/reviews service, people can find places (see Le Louvre profile page for example), read the basic information, see the map and pictures, rate/comment on the place, see what others have said and discover related places. So far, although well executed, it’s not very different feature-wise than a lot of ratings/reviews sites like Yelp or Qype.

Mobile as a differentiator

Where it gets really interesting is with their iPhone application (they also have an Android one). The beautifully designed (both from a user interface and user experience) app is where the rubber really hit the road for the young startup founded three years ago. Launched in July, the mobile version has been downloaded more than 400,000 times (on a total of 2 million iPhones in France).

Features include:

• Location-based business search
• Ability to rate/comment places and broadcast your comment on Twitter/Facebook
• See feedback from other users and your friends
• See recommendations based on your tastes
• Great integration of Facebook Connect with instant account creation based on your Facebook information
• Push of your activities to your friends’ phone and possibility for your friends to answer you back via SMS
• Integration with Google Maps
• Integration with the iPhone camera allowing users to take a picture and upload it right away to the place profile page

The release of their iPhone application has created a lot of user traction. Barbier asked me to pick a small town in France just to prove the breadth of usage. I chose Venasque, a small 1000-inhabitant village in Provence where I stayed last spring. I think there are only a dozen businesses in the village. TellMeWhere had two votes in their system. They even had a few activities in smaller towns in Canada. And now they’re on the verge of releasing version 2.0 of their mobile application of the iPhone and it will include check-in functionality (like Foursquare) and an activity stream of everything your friends are doing to enable real-time discovery. You can see a video of the new application here.

Barbier shared with me that they’ve now realized their mobile applications (built in-house) have become strategic for the small 7-employee company. The combination of mobile + local + social (utilizing an existing identity system like Facebook Connect) is a winning formula.

Mobile will be disruptive

And this is where, in the future of local search, mobile wins (as opposed to the Web). I finally see the light and now realizes that mobile will probably be the great disruptor it was always supposed to be. Why? Because, as Barbier said, mobile usage is real. It’s grounded in real life, with your day-to-day local usage and your social graph. That’s how you build usage. In web-based local search, it’s all about search engine optimization (SEO) these days as it’s very expensive to build new brands. It’s traffic coming from Google and other search engines from users with little loyalty. And with the Mountain View goliath hosting more and more content on their own site, I suspect that strategy will soon go off its rails.

Real-time business model

As for TellMeWhere’s business model, they’re monetizing using “special offers”. Merchants can claim their listing and submit deals/coupons/special offers (the best way to monetize real-time local as I’ve often said). It’s a pay-per-action model (or as Barbier coined it “pay-per-visit) where merchants only pay when the user displays the coupon on their phone on location. With geo-location, it’s easy to verify if the user was really on premise or not when he displayed the coupon. Barbier told me he can charge 4 euros to restaurants each time someone uses a coupon. Sounds like a good model.

I think TellMeWhere has everything to become Europe’s Foursquare. The application is beautifully executed and is easy to use. Current usage seems to show a very positive trend. They have traction in France and other francophone countries and want to go after the rest of Europe and the English-speaking world. You should definitely check out their iPhone application if you want to see a great social/local mobile app.

Update: Gilles Barbier tells me version 2.0 of his application has been approved by Apple and is now available for download.

I attended the kick-off of Lady Gaga’s World Tour on Friday night at Centre Bell in Montreal (for those who don’t know her, she’s a rising star in the pop world, you can read more on Wikipedia). The evening allowed me to generate some interesting insights on real-time media, real-time search and mobile phones.

1. At the end of the first act, a group called Semi Precious Weapons, Lady Gaga tweeted from backstage ”You had 96 hrs to learn the lyrics. I can hear u screaming.” (the 96 hours was a reference to the release of her new album 4 days before). It wasn’t much but isn’t it cool when the artist you’re going to see is actually sending Twitter messages minutes before stepping on stage? It definitely increases engagement with the fans and personalizes the relationship. Interestingly enough, Semi Precious Weapons had also tweeted before going on stage and they also shared some pictures on Twitter after the show.
2. After the first act, we were supposed to listen to Kid Cudi but the guy didn’t show up. After waiting patiently for one hour without any information, the crowd consisting mostly of teenagers started getting restless (some people even booing!). I picked up my phone and did a search on Twitter for Lady Gaga, see if anything had popped up in the “back channel”. I saw that Perez Hilton, the well-known celebrity blogger, was in Montreal that evening and had just tweeted “Just for tonight… GaGa is going on at 10 pm. Tell everyone near u!”. That information wasn’t shared with the audience even though it was known. Real-time search won that night.
3. Now, being a good guy, I shared the information with the people around me. The teenager in front of me had a Blackberry (a Pearl, I think), which surprised me because I didn’t think RIM had been successful in promoting their devices to teenagers. I still associate Blackberries with “work”. The other thing that surprised me was that the teenager and his friend were vaguely aware of Twitter but were clearly not users of the service. These teenagers were clearly in a Facebook world. An anedocte, but still interesting.