Loopt and other Location Aware iPhone Apps

After having read quite a bit about Loopt over the past year or so, I must say that I was pretty excited to see them offer a free iPhone application of their product. Free and iPhone being the critical components here… the hell if I was going to switch over to Boost mobile, and I am not so sure that I’d be willing to pay for Loopt, at least not yet.

As soon as Apple opened their app store I loaded every application I could find that looked like it might make cool use of location awareness, and I must say that after playing around with quite a few, Loopt certainly seems like the best so far… not including the Google powered maps application that comes standard.

But before I get too far along in my experiences with the various applications, I think that everyone that is currently making a living or hoping to make a living in the world of LBS, needs to drop whatever they’re doing and personally write a hundred thank you notes to Steve Jobs and all the staffers over at Apple that made location awareness such an important part of the iPhone (for the computer geeks among us, the thank you notes are that stack of little square pieces of paper that your grandmother gave you that you stuck in the bottom drawer of your dresser).

Ok so with that out of the way, there are a number of finder applications available for the iPhone and they’re all trying to do something slightly different: find friends, find places, find events, etc. From the initial batch that became available with the launch of the app store I tried Loopt, Yelp, Eventful, Whrrl, Where, EarthComber, Limbo and Nearby.

The only ones that I still use today are Loopt and Yelp.

You can tell from using the application that Loopt has been doing this for a while, and has learned the pain points for consumers and has done a great job of streamlining and simplifying the interface… there is a difference between complexity and power that I think Loopt gets… Loopt is not complex, but that doesn’t mean it’s not powerful.

First of all, getting a new Loopt account up and rolling was super easy, in fact it was so quick and painless that I’ve long since forgotten exactly what I had to do, I think it was just supplying my phone number and maybe a password… but I remember going from tapping on the icon to having a new account in well under a minute, and that’s all that matters.

Next it allows me to add friends either by typing in their phone number or going through and selecting friends from my iPhone contacts… again a very easy process.

The maps are provided by Microsoft Virtual Earth and are great quality and easy to navigate around through one finger panning and zooming, and they’ve partnered with Yelp to help beef up the POI listings and reviews.

Updating your friends on “What’s Up” is another simple 2 step process, just click on “What’s Up” and “Update” or feel free to add a blurb or photo (either from the camera or from your saved pictures) about what you’re up to.

But the coup de gras, is the link you can create with a Loopt Facebook widget. Once you’ve added the application to your Facebook account and linked it with your mobile application, all of your updates feed into your Facebook account and show up on your wall. This is important for me because at this stage in the game finding friends that can or want to get Loopt is not easy, so being confined just to Loopt with just my tech savvy friends would be a pretty lonely experience, but the Facebook updating utility allows me to connect with my larger group of Facebook friends, even if it is just for me to post “What’s Up”… in fact I now find myself providing updates through Loopt instead of directly via Facebook.

Now I am hoping that they come out with an embeddable widget where I can add my location and ‘What’s Up’ in places besides Facebook, like the Skyhook/Loki widget.

The Others

Ok so here is a quick rundown of my experiences with Yelp, Eventful, Whrrl and Where. I’ll save the others for another post, another day:

Yelp, is also another well done and slick application, although I think they still have some work to do in organizing the information. The default categories include categories that seem random to me… are that many people really looking for coffee & tea? Maybe so but not me. And when I search for restaurants around me, there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason behind the results provided, which I find frustrating… the top 10 results can be up to 20 blocks away, even when there are obviously ten restaurants closer… it seems to be taking into account quality/popularity in addition to proximity but the heck if I can figure out how to change the default setting. In reality I don’t typically get the results I want from proximity searches, although when I already know the name of the restaurant I do use the Yelp search function to get a better idea about the restaurant before committing to going.

I loaded up Eventful hoping to be able to quickly find nearby and last minute activities around the city to do with my kids, ala GoCityKids. In reality Eventful on the iPhone seems to really focus on the young hipster crowd looking for a band or show. I tried playing around with it anyway to see if I could find a upcoming and nearby college football game to go watch in the New York City area… a search for “college football’ returned some comedian’s routine under “Events” and a midtown bar that evidently was showing the BCS championship game back in January under “Venues”. I know NYC is a bad town for college football, but c’mon it can’t be THAT bad!

Whrrl and Where were non starters for me.

Where kept crashing for the first few weeks I gave it a try, I tried again more recently and it seems a little bit more stable now, but I still get error messages. Like Yelp the organization of Where seems to leave quite a bit to be desired… I am still not sure what to do with Quibblo Polls, SkyMap or HeyWhatsThat (no mountains in NYC, so I assume I don’t need that) and I’ve tried signing up for Buddy Beacon twice now with no luck. Zipcar and Starbucks locators are nice, but I don’t drink much Starbucks coffee or rent Zipcar vehicles, so don’t need those either. The application feels like one of those really slick $2 million dollar commercials for a financial services company that forgets to put the name of the bank in at the end… in other words it gets you all worked up and interested through the slick look and feel, but then forgets what the original purpose was in the first place…

Whrll gave me major password problems. I had a Whrrl account from online that didn’t seem to work on the iPhone application, so I couldn’t get into it for a while. When I did get in I remembered that none of my other friends use it and I didn’t really care what other top Whrrlrs thought about stuff in my neighborhood. So despite a nice slick application, I can’t figure out what to do with it and don’t want to hound and explain to my friend why they should get on it. So I am taking that one off.

Look out for another post on round two of the iPhone location aware apps coming soon.

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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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Maybe Soon Your TV Can Sit on Its Butt and Watch You

Another interesting company using alternative technologies for determining location seems to be getting some traction. Rosum, founded by James Spilker, the co architect of GPS, announced a new licensing and joint development partnership with Intel yesterday where Intel will help market and distribute the Rosum technology.

Spiker and fellow GPS co-architect Dr. Brad Parkinson, a Rosum board member, are well aware of GPS’s limitation, particularly with dense urban and indoor environments, and created Rosum to address those limitations.

According to the company’s marketing, “Traditional positioning systems are satellite-based and were designed for outdoor applications. However, they have limitations indoors, in obstructed areas or difficult urban environments. TV signals are plentiful, powerful, low and diverse in frequency, and easily penetrate walls, automobiles, and city buildings, making them optimal for urban-area and indoor positioning applications.”

The Rosum module integrates with Global Locate’s Hammerhead A-GPS chip, however in this case the “assistance” is provided by server based positioning information about the location of nearby television towers, rather than cell tower typically used in A-GPS.

The system requires monitoring units in the geographic area being covered to send data about the areas broadcast signal to a location server, the location server then sends location aiding information to the device via either SMS or GPRS. The Rosum module on the mobile device receives signals and send information information back and forth to the server to help determine location.

It looks as though for the moment at least Rosum is targeting the technology toward the government as a fail safe system for back up to GPS. The location information for broadcast tv transmitters is controlled by the FCC and the TV-GPS technology not only meets the FCC E911 Phase II specifications but 50% of their tests were conducted indoors as compared to the recommended 5%.

This technology for indoor positioning seems promising, at least on paper. It may be better than some of the existing positioning using cell towers that can only give a very coarse position, and it may also have a larger coverage grid than Wi-Fi positioning. However, the seemingly large amount of communications required with the network may create a barrier to this technology gaining traction as a mass market alternative for non emergency uses.

Eng Hua Yap/Ben Allen

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MIT iFind; Intel Place Lab

A team of folks over at MIT are running an interesting wireless location based social networking project called iFIND out of the MIT Senseable City Labs. The project allows anyone with a valid email address from MIT to download the iFIND application and use it to share their location with other iFIND users anywhere on campus. The application which works in conjunction with the Intel Place Lab software works by sniffing out the beacons transmitted by a variety of wireless access devices throughout the campus including over 2,800 wi fi hotspots as well as fixed Bluetooth and local GSM cell towers. The beacons carry with them an identifier associated with each device, the location of which has been mapped out by the iFIND team. The application determines the devices position to within a few meters by triangulates off of whichever beacons are present.

The system is also unique in that, for added security, it doesn’t store user’s location information centrally, but instead distributes via a peer to peer system that stores information on an individuals device.

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Latest FCC e911 Requirements

Last night the FCC passed new requirements for carriers to provide wireless e911 services. U.S. carriers will have until 2012 to achieve phase II location accuracy, which means locating devices to between 150 to 300 yards 95% of the time, depending on the technology in use. Be sure to check out last months post about the different technologies in use to satisfy these requirements and why all e911 calls aren’t created equal.

The FCC evidently decided that it needs to more closely project manage the whole thing this time around and is requiring carriers to meet interim milestones to ensure that they’re effectively working toward that goal. Given that the original goal was end of 2005, this is probably not a bad idea.

But the CTIA is not so happy with a new wrinkle that the FCC added… requiring that carriers test and achieve this level of accuracy down to the individual local e911 calling area rather than just achieving accuracy at a statewide average.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin comments "Meeting location accuracy standards on average in the entire state of New York by providing enhanced 911 capability in Manhattan does not help first responders in Buffalo."

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Garmin Connect: Location Awareness + Community

Garmin announced today a makeover for their online community for fitness devices formerly known as Motion Based. This makeover, renamed Garmin Connect itself is not particularly of interest but some of the underlying implications and insights from the program are. And maybe it’s just me but the move from a fitness friendly moniker like Motion Based to a more general name, Garmin Connect, signals to me that there are likely more of such initiatives on their way for other Garmin Products.

The service is an online community designed to allow users of Garmin's fitness products to store and share information related to their fitness routine using Garmin products. In addition to being a personal fitness portal, it appears that some of the information will be taken in aggregate in order to add value to the entire community at large, so visitors can see popular jogging paths and general stats of runners or to compete in virtual races. It should be noted that similar offerings are available through Bones in Motion via BIM Active for use with your cell phone.

The combination of location awareness and community continues to build and these added value features are likely to be an effective way for Garmin to put up a barrier to its customers adopting another GPS fitness devices, while also laying a foundation for building a higher margin component to its low cost and low margin product lines.

Garmin had previously announced the USB ANT Stick to support the Forerunner 50. The stick plugs into your PC to automatically retrieve data from the Forerunner whenever it is within range.

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Atoms + Bits: How Location Awareness Will Change Search Advertising

Searching for things, not information about things.

Not that long ago there were just a few television stations or newspapers that everyone watched and read and advertisers would reach huge masses of people without regards to their suitability or interest. This shotgun, mass media for the masses, led to massive waste. As Wannamaker’s famous quip puts it “I know half my advertising budget is wasted. The trouble is I don’t know which half.”


As media became more fragmented, appealing to niche interests and demographics, advertising fragmented along with it, continually gravitating toward content with the best contextual match for their brands and products.

Search engines moved this whole evolution into high gear by providing the ability to target ads in maximum context, not only to a vertical category of interest, but down to the level of a single search query, with an audience of one.

While better context alone has been a huge improvement for advertisers, the search engines’ combination of maximum context with the predisposition of users actively in search mode has proven to be the killer combination that is revolutionize advertising.

This high level of context combined with high engagement has allowed search companies to price on performance, which has been the linchpin of their success. This has proven to be such an incredibly lucrative combination that Google alone is now worth more than the leading old media companies of Disney, Time Warner and Viacom combined.

The most important contributors to the search success: 1. Maximum Context and 2. Right Timing

Location Awareness is The Next Step: Atoms + Bits

For all their successes, web search engines are currently still largely confined to the world of data on web-servers, connecting atoms to bits (you to information), not atoms to atoms (you to other people and stuff), at least not directly. Discovering a profile or description in a database can sometimes be the end goal, but very often the true end goal, particularly in mobile environments is to connect to some THING that exists in the real world, not information about that thing. Either to buy it, experience it, or hook up with it.

Location awareness will add a new and very significant dimension to the search business. As access to the Internet becomes ubiquitous, the location and circumstance under which a search is conducted could dramatically change the results sought. In the real world, people move around, as do the things that they may be interested in searching for. Items in one location will have a different context than if they were in another location and physical proximity will play an important role in determine if the timing is indeed right.

Mobile search users aren’t likely to be researching book reports… so understanding that the needs in the mobile circumstance may be different will be key. Search needs to develop to the point where searching for ‘bathroom’, ‘bus’ or ‘coffee’ on a mobile device can mean finding the nearest one of those THINGS in the world around you.

Take for example the man standing in the rain at bus stop in New York City. Opening up his mobile browser and searching for the term ‘bus’ today will get him the Greyhound corporate website, the city bus service in Hawaii, the Los Angeles county MTA, and two Wikipedia entries as the top five listings. Even if it did return a NYC transit based website, all you’re likely to get there is corporate information and timetables. Certainly this would be better than nothing, but still far short of what he really wants to know which is where is his bus!

Major developments needed to take place in order to take this next step in search services, specifically gaining situational knowledge and awareness, or the context in which the search is being done. Much of this context can be inferred from specific location cues, is the user at a bus stop, or in a baseball stadium or away from familiar territory?

Someone will also need to better attach bits to atoms and know the location of those atoms. Portable mini data storage that can communicate information about itself and its location out to the web will need to come into more widespread use to give web server like information that can be attached or associated with real life stuff, and its whereabouts factored into the search equation.

As the volume and usefulness of the underlying data expands, so too will the number of search queries… and we all know what that will mean for the bottom line of the search engine that enable it.

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Holding out hope for LBS on my first-gen iPhone...

These days I find myself missing my GPS-enabled services from Verizon Wireless. Back in late June, I played into the hype, throwing my Samsung u740 to the side for the iPhone. I loved having this location-aware device always sitting right by my side, helping me find my nearest Starbucks or getting me back on track when lost in a new city. Now with AT&T, I am treated to hundred-page bills and the need to know where I am when I want to find things around me, given the widely-publicized omission of GPS from the gadget of the century.

However I still hold out a glimmer of hope that LBS will come to my first generation iPhone - with companies like Skyhook Wireless taking an alternative approach to offering location-based services through Wi-Fi. Skyhook has gone to great strides to map out the location of public and private Wi-Fi networks across the United States and enables websites to offer location-aware services through its technology and database. Back in May, Skyhook announced support of its technology in Mac OS X. Since the iPhone runs a version of Mac OS X and contains built-in Wi-FI, could we see Skyhook-powered Wi-Fi location-based services running on the iPhone in the future?? I hope so...
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Global Trek Xploration Corporation develops "GPS Footwear” to track loved ones.

These GTX GPS Xplorer Smart Shoes will let you keep track of your children, novice marathoners or your scavenger hunt team, wherever they roam.

The Xplorer Smart Shoe allows you locate the wearer of the shoes. Like many GPS locator devices, you are able to define a "safe" zone that sends an alert when the boundary line is crossed. For example, you can create a safe zone around a school or neighborhood where you feel safe for your children. When the child wanders outside of the safe zone, an SMS alert will be sent to your phone. This finder device allows for piece of mind while minimizing the risk of the device being lost. These shoes can stay charged for several days for an extended feeling of security.

For more info, go to: http://www.gtxcorp.com/

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