Tag: Foursquare

Here’s a Challenge: Marry Mobile & Local…

On 03/04/2013

So, what if you could effectively combine mobile and local? As in asking someone if there is a free washing machine in the launderette down the road (before you haul your laundry down there), if Lady Gaga is on stage already (or if it is still that pesky opener), that sort of thing. Sounds cool? Yeah. Have we heard about this before? Hell yeah. Do you know of anyone who has solved this successfully? Erm…

The funny thing is we all know how important it is. We all use mobile local services all the time: the use of maps and navigation (for one thing) have changed tremendously by the introduction of GPS into mobile phones. There is a plethora of services we all use that use it. However, they barely seem to scratch the surface as yet.

MoboQ to the Rescue?

But, alas, help is on hand. There actually IS a service that is doing just that: it WILL tell you about that washing machine, about free parking slots, about almost everything you want to know. And they have, well, 100,000 users so far. So not Twitter but, alas not Color either (they allegedly had 400,000 users before they shut down). But, hey, they didn’t raise 41m bucks for nothing either… And, well, that means that there might just not be someone in just my neighbourhood just now, huh?

It gets better (no, worse) though: Because, if you ask just who that mythical company is, the answer is not the former employee # 21 from Google an unknown Facebook rockstar engineer or, sorry, a Stanford nearly-grad, either? No. The service is called MoboQ and is operated by Sina Weibo, the “small” Chinese provider with some 400m users on this Twitter-esque service.

(And, no I did not pick this up myself. Hal Hodson wrote about it in the New Scientist. Really cool magazine, you should subscribe to it! [and, no, I don’t earn a commission if you do])

Unicorns are Hard to Breed

Sooooooo: 100,000 users out of 400m and the service has been operating for a year now. That’s a conversion rate of, what, 0.025%. Not really a landslide victory then, huh? And that is the challenge of this unicorn of all mobile services: they are really hard to breed (scil. scale).

Why is that, you say? Well, because they are, well, local. That is to say, you need to convince a fair few people in your area to use it. And unless you have a really successful SXSW launch (the stuff of legends, I know), this might not be that easy to do. Mobile & local each work on the combination of total usage plus really smart algorithms. This is why I am blogging about mobile stuff: huge scale there. This is why Yelp, FourSquare, you name it thrive: huge scale there. But the moment you need real-time response, you need an insane amount of usage to be able to make sensible use of algorithms. I would posit not even Facebook can do this (oh, wait, they try: there is this thing called Nearby they do. Heard of it? No, me neither…)

Help at Hand?

The New Scientist offers a couple of soundbites from execs involved in the various programmes and all sound a little stale, to be honest: “people will use it once they become aware of it” said someone from USC. Really? Well, I don’t know.

Now, I agree that this is somewhat of the holy grail of combining two hugely powerful concepts but the big spanner in the wheels is as per the above: tough to algorithmitise (is that a word?) and possibly slowed down by privacy concerns and queries as to the value extraction formulae applied: what is in it for me if I am over-sharing local information about my very own locale; I know my own environment, no need for me to reciprocate then… Because, you see, 95%+ people do not actually race around the world that much other than on vacation. And isn’t the first thing they look for when they finally are on vacation either a drink or bliss uninterupted by digital hyper-connectedness? Just sayin’…

So I continue to wait for that killer combo app/service a little longer then, I guess. Sigh…

Mobile Zeitgeist Special on Mobile Marketing

By Volker

On 02/05/2010

In 1

The most excellent German-language blog on all things mobile, Mobile Zeitgeist, has recently published one of its MZ Specials on mobile marketing and advertising. Besides yours truly contributing (pp. 11 et seq.) it is a thoroughly good read.

Go here to download your copy!

Mobile 2.0 worth $19bn only? Never, It’s More!

By Volker

On 23/03/2010

In 1

Juniper Research, makers of research and publishers of mindblowingly big 5-year-predictions recently released a report on “Mobile 2.0”.

The term, according to the free promotional white paper that comes with it, is to mean mobile services around the social web, geo-location and presence and may be based on

a mash-up of application functions and communication channels [that] can include mobile messaging and voice – namely SMS, MMS, mobile IM and VoIP.

All this is spot-on and quite agreeable (and I haven’t come to the predicted market size in – you guessed it – 5 years yet) but I feel they are missing a major, major point here, and that has to do with (if you want to call it that way) “mash-ups” and “convergence”: in short, they fall foul to the old mistake that, as media move on, the predicted revenues for a new medium is being comprised of the products and services of the old one; and that is wrong!

Mash-ups can already be seen between different kind of applications the report mentions (and, most notably, with some it didn’t mention at all): E.g. FourSquare or Gowalla are service that utilise presence (allowing your friends to see where you are). You can also share it via social networks and contact these friends (perhaps to ask them if they want to meet up as they are only 2 blocks down the road) but they have also added gaming elements (mayor of Oxford Circus or Union Square anyone?), and it was these latter ones that arguably gave the edge to the service and lifted them over and above many similar location-aware apps. The combination of a variety of the feature sets Juniper identified as being distinctly “2.0”, namely presence, social, and geo-location with other, “classic” products and services will unleash an even greater power: playful social interaction is not necessarily confined to “classic” games:

For instance did Ford take it a step further with the latest model of the Fusion Hybrid: they put something akin to a Tamagotchi into the car, which promotes economical driving: a plant grows (at the very right in the picture) when you drive economically, and it withers when you don’t. Cool, huh? What they do is to appeal to the senses of competition and, arguably, care in order to foster more economical driving. What’s missing is that drivers could share their “scores” with friends, challenge each other and, long-long-term, get rewards (eco-tax credit?) if they perform particularly well. Playful social interaction in a car – who would have thought?

A mash-up of e.g. games (and the playful-ness in all of us) with some of the other services that are available and – now – increasingly accessible will likely result in a completely new range of products, which will – I would suggest – exceed the predictions made by a large margin (check Jesse Schell’s talk at DICE 2010 for more [and even wackier] musings of what the future may hold). And the reason for this is that addressable user base and, indeed, usage will multiply because completely new and untouched segments (both in terms of users and products & services) are being unlocked for value-added mobile services.

So, for once (!), I think I may be able to beat Juniper’s lofty predictions; not sure if in total numbers (they’re always hard to beat on that: the one for mobile 2.0 is already at a not too shabby $19bn) but as to the scope of the market. Good times!