The space has really caught fire as of late due to combining location-aware technology with social network applications and the pervasiveness of smartphones. This combination has really provided the foundation for the space to flourish. And it has. Companies like Where.com, PlacePop, Placecast.net, and Urban Mapping are just a few examples of small companies with big plans and with geolocation at the heart of their business models.
Also, user-initiated, location-revealing "checking in" seems to be the latest craze, as Web applications such as FourSquare, GoWalla, and BrightKite are competing heavily, enabling an individual to see who they might know is also in attendance at an event. This can also help in the discovery of new places and meeting new people. The group location review site Yelp has recently added check-in capabilities as well.
And of course the likely suspects are in on the land rush too. Google's Latitude tells others that you allow to know your current location as you move about. Facebook and Twitter are rolling out location-based features as well, and Yahoo has already done an acquisition in the space with Indonesian-based Koprol (the "Asian FourSquare"). Even location-based games such as Booyah's MyTown are on the upswing.
Now that the technology exists, the value is fairly obvious. Clearly it makes sense for a travel company to provide trip-related content specific to a site visitor's nearest airport. As preseason football magazines discovered long ago with their regional magazine covers, locally relevant headlines are more likely to get attention (and therefore clicked), especially with sports teams and news. And there are clearly regional differences in product interest. Earthquake preparedness for example is probably much more eye-catching in Northern California than say hurricane preparedness which will resonate more in the Carolinas.
Remember all of those frequent membership cards the local sandwich shops hand out so you can get a free sandwich every seventh visit? Unless you are living by the penny, they are just too much of a hassle to carry around and manage. However, in a geo-savvy smartphone world, they should become unnecessary. A store ought to have the ability to keep track, with permission and incentives of course, of who is frequenting their stores and purchasing habits, and reward appropriately.
The customer loyalty possibilities are endless. Imagine the local ice cream shop being able to determine at the press of a button who its top twenty-five customers are, and hand delivering to these customers on their birthday an ice cream cake based on their flavor history.
Software companies are also using IP address-oriented technology to ensure location-based license compliance. MLB TV is using it to enforce blackout restrictions for watching streaming broadcasts of Major League Baseball. Business Intelligence applications are also integrating these types of products to gather site trending information, geographical response to offers, customer base location, and more. The use case list is practically endless.
However, there are still some challenges that don't make things entirely easy. Most Web applications are using IP address related technologies and API's to determine location when someone visits a site, and then providing location-specific content to the visitor. However, this is problematic for browser-based smartphones, as they will typically show the IP address for the location of the carrier's hosting servers rather than the location of the smartphone.
For example, the location for a Blackberry will show as Toronto when using standard IP address-based technology, which is where RIM, the creator of the Blackberry, is headquartered. Of course, this is not useful for location-specific custom content on the device's browser.
Instead, smartphones are using carrier-specific location services or built-in GPS to determine location and therefore require user permission (they are usually prompted) for location to be used. This can make application development for location-based applications to become more complex with different requirements for different devices, and require device-specific applications to be built.
Auto-determined location-specific content can be dangerous however with search engine robots if sites are not implemented correctly with location-specific URLS (which sometimes requires performance trade offs) as robots will only see the content for the location of the servers from which they happen to be crawling from, and only index as much. This can hurt traffic potential.
Also, latitude and longitude coordinates can be obtained from site visitor-provided addresses to determine more precise locations. This of course provides for a whole new slate of use cases, and actually has been around for awhile.
All in all, despite some of the challenges that exist, powerful location-based technologies will continue to become increasingly sophisticated, and location-based applications will become more and more a part of our lives. Look for a lot to happen in this space in the next 12-24 months.
There is a cool location-based checkin service in NC called TriOut. You can check it out at: http://trioutnc.com @triout
Posted by: Rogesmith | June 17, 2010 at 09:42 PM