More location awareness related advertising stuff...

More location awareness related advertising stuff... I put some slides up related to the location awareness opportunity for advertisers.

We're certainly not there yet, but some potentially interesting implication for where this could go in the future.

Summary is:
- GPS and location awareness in mobile devices is growing like a weed across a variety of devices - e911, 3G data, PNDs all contributing to bringing this to mass market
- location awareness anywhere and everywhere (ie not just where GPS works) is a key to consumer success
- all the big players are investing big NOW (Google, Nokia, Yahoo, Microsoft, Garmin, TomTom)
- web world was just warm up for mobile in terms of size and opportunity, and location awareness is key driver
- relevance (targeting) and time appropriateness is a key benefit and driver of the advertsing opportunity
- ad targeting is important key driver of revenue for existing web players (Google makes $12+ per average monthly unique, while MySpace makes $1.32)
- behavioral targeting, ROI metrics and search all get one step better with mobile location awareness
- privacy is a huge issue, but web cookies also once seen in a similar light



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Making Up Stuff About Yahoo Fire Eagle

Yahoo announced the arrival of its FireEagle location brokering product last Wednesday. What the heck is it you may ask? Well, straight from the source… according to Yahoo it “is the secure and stylish way to share your location with sites and services online. We want to make the whole web respond to where you are, and to help you discover more about the world around you.”

Ok. Well to start from the beginning. Yahoo wants to be the broker for your online location information. So what does that mean exactly? Well just like other types of brokers: stock broker, real estate broker, mortgage broker, and insurance brokers…. They want to help mediate the exchange between a buyer and seller of something of value. In this case, the thing of value is information related to where you are on this lovely planet.

So to be clear, there is currently no money directly exchanging hands and so far, the broker is doing his brokering for free.

So let’s think about why someone would want to buy and sell such a thing and why Yahoo would want to step into become the broker. So what do the buyer and seller in this brokerage relationship get out of it?

Buyers (websites, application developers) get relatively turnkey access to better information that makes their service more convenient and valuable. Nearly everyone who offers an online or mobile application would like to be able to easily know and use their customers’ location and integrate it into the features of the application. Granted it’s more important to some than others, but the need is widespread across a variety of applications for anything from letting you know the weather forecast or showing only relevant apartment listings, or showing pages in the correct local language. Heck if local governments takes a fancy to this, you might see them trying to collect different taxes based on where the user was when a transaction was consummated. Woo Hoo! Don’t worry, that ain’t happening anytime soon.

Sellers, (ie you the consumer), get the convenience of not having to explicitly tell every site or application you come across, your location information and you get to decide what to share or not share each time. Remember the eWallet phenomenon from the late ‘90s? The eWallet was going to save everyone the hassle of having to re enter their personal and financial information and the eWallet was the gatekeeper to your wallet online. In many ways Fire Eagle is a cross between the location equivalent of the eWallet and a cross site/device “smart cookie” that knows and holds your location information and just shares the detail that you want shared and only with “approved” sites.

Last but not least, assuming it’s not out of pure benevolence, what does Yahoo get out of this whole thing?

Well the answer is probably not that simple and straightforward, but I’ll hazard a point of view on where you could take this: Yahoo’s business is primarily selling advertising. And forget about amassing more and more page views as a strategy, the absolutely massive supply of potential impressions on the web means that only a very small fraction of those impressions ever get monetized. Instead, the name of the game is to have the high valued stuff that advertisers want.

So the next logical question is, well what kind of stuff do advertisers want? Well it can generally be broken into two parts…

1. Mass concentration of eyeballs in a single place. Think of the price premium advertisers place on an ad on a hot primetime program versus the equivalent number of eyeballs pieced together from running 100 spots at 3am

2. Targeting. The degree of match or correlation between the advertisers product and the reason the online impression was generated… ie there are billions of page views being generate out there on arcane scientific matters, oceanic current, Chinese consumer electronic company balance sheets, etc, etc that advertisers want absolutely nothing to do with

So here are some leading businesses who make their money from online advertising, and the stuff they provide that advertisers want:

• Google: just amazingly good at targeting/filtering, effective revenue per thousand is off the charts relative to anyone else. They could directly monetize the mass concentration aspect as well, but so far have chosen not to.

• Yahoo: both large aggregator of eyeballs for premium display ad business and also big player in search

• AOL: was once the largest aggregator of all Internet eyeballs, but is now forced to be an aggregator of large broad verticals of consumer friendly eyeballs (family, finance, entertainment type stuff). They also leverage their size by double-dipping and renting targeted search from Google.

So going back to Fire Eagle. By knowing people’s location information and matching that information with knowable information about the world around those people, the opportunity exists to target like never before. To date, targeting has been one dimensional from the point of view that it has been limited to indexing information from web pages and only reflects the view as seen from the time a user spends in front of a web browser.

If you look at how quickly mobile location awareness technology is proliferating into everyday consumer devices like cell phones, there is no reason to expect that everything that is currently done in the world of web based targeting won’t be stretched, linked and recreated into the ‘real world’ with mobile location aware devices at the foundation.

Let’s take a look at the way a few things work in the web world and see how they may translated into the mobile location awareness world:

Everything from PageRank to click through rates and behavioral targeting, could be recreated, through a widely available mass market location awareness program. So in theory this could be the foundation of what FireEagle is all about.

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Part 2: Maybe Soon Your TV Can Sit On It’s Butt and Watch You

After some more digging around on the web, I’ve now dug up enough new stuff to update the original post about Rosum’s new TV-GPS technology with some fresh tidbits.

So, first a quick review:
- Rosum is trying to develop a technology to supplement GPS and solve some of the major shortcomings of GPS… most notably the inability of GPS to be able to determine location indoors where it can’t see GPS satellites.
- Its solution: why not use something a little closer to home like broadcast television signals rather than those weak girly-man GPS signals from outer-space that have trouble even getting through the flimsy roof on your ’71 AMC Gremlin !


Now for the new updates. So it seems that they’ve rolled out coverage in the Northeast corridor from Washington DC to New Hampshire, well actually had it back in Fall of 2006… and given that the company has raised just $20 million to date, that must mean that the required network infrastructure build out must not be too much of a big, expensive an unwieldy process.



Rosum does talk extensively about how their solution uses existing technology on the broadcast tower. I can remember working with a company in the late 90’s called WavePhore that was trying to stuff various digital media down to web users over the unused portion of the broadcast signal called the vertical blanking interval (ie the portion reserved for the government to send emergency broadcast messages), so I just assume it works something like that.

Their solution does require regional monitoring units, but it seems that just a few, 3-4, are sufficient to cover each market, so maybe nothing like the thousands of boxes needed for alternative solutions. Overall the network deployment costs look like they may be favorable to alternatives like S5 Wireless.

It also looks like the actual location calculation is done on a server, off device. The Rosum equipped device will know only its pseudo location and need to check in with the regional monitoring unit to get a proper location fix. Which brings up the question of how does the device communicate with the location server to get a fix… well the answer right now is SMS. And it does seem that this poses an economical hurdle for use as a consumer solution… although I guess it depends on exactly how much SMS is necessary. And they’re working on a GPRS solution it seems. For folks like the military and first response teams, this SMS issue is of course a non issue.

It also looks like they’re pursuing a software only strategy that relies on mobile devices having tv tuner cards installed… but I am not sure I see that happening anytime soon despite what official research reports may say.

If you want to read more, fortunately their presentations seem to be all over the web, here are a few links:

http://www.e911institute.org/Events/2007/Rosum_CompanyOverview_WCAHomelandDefenseE9-1-1panel_18-January-2006_2.pdf
http://www.nlectc.org/training/commcorr2006/young_commcorr2006_indoor.pdf
http://www.ece.wpi.edu/Research/PPL/Workshops/2006/PDF/Rosum.pdf

Overall it looks pretty promising.

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