Next Great Thing

Say hello to our little new category, “ReBlog of the Week”. Every Thursday, Next Great Thing will choose a smart, insightful, and relevant blog post from the world wide web to be featured on our site. This week it is Clive Thompson’s piece in Wired, “Future of the Web: Location, Location, Location” that caught our attention.

When Sam Altman visits New York, he’s never alone for very long. Altman is the 24-year-old CEO of Loopt, a company that makes a “location-aware” app for mobile phones that tracks where all of your friends are and what they’re doing.

“I’ll pull it out on the ride in from the airport, and before I’ve even gotten to the city I’ll have figured out who’s nearby me, and we’ll be making plans to get together that night,” Altman told me. If he looks on his phone’s map on a Saturday night, he can literally see groups forming in real time. “It’s getting to the point now where if you want do something social, you have all this information about the world around you,” he says.

Location-based applications are quickly becoming the hot new thing on phones. Since many mobiles today — most particularly the iPhone — can determine their location via GPS chips (or pinging local cell towers and WiFi signals), they’re spawning a whole new ecosystem of apps. There are social ones like Loopt or foursquare, which track the movement of friends as well as find-stuff tools like Yelp that locate top-rated bars and restaurants near you. According to web-research firm Compete, one in three mobile-phone owners uses location-based tools, and the number of apps has exploded from 500 to 2,500 since last October.

Yet this new class of information tool violates everything we normally think about the internet.

The whole reason the web revolutionized the world was that it rendered geography irrelevant. People connected worldwide based not on location but on their common interests: Model-train collectors and free-speech activists and Britney Spears fans could swarm onto the discussion boards and blogs, from Chicago to Tehran. By severing the link between location and geography, the internet turned everything upside down.

Now mobile phones are inverting everything again, in the other direction — because your location becomes most important thing about you. So how is the return of geography going to change our lives?

The near-term effects are obvious: We’re using it as a sort of radar for our social lives and Yellow-Pages needs. The first round of geo-aware phone apps has consisted mostly of “listings” services and tools for tracking your posse.

Altman thinks these apps are already tweaking people’s everyday behavior. Early adopters often allowed only approved friends to track them; but now a larger chunk of Loopt users publish their location openly, for anyone to see. Why? Being open allows for more happy encounters — hook-ups with friendly strangers who are useful, or at least interesting, to know.

What’s the next? It’s probably ”tagging:” Writing up notes, implanted in space, that describe something interesting about a particular location. Some apps already offer crude versions of this: With Socialight or Brightkite or Graffito, people can pick a spot on the map — using their phone or browser — and post a note that others will see when they’re nearby.

These markups are still pretty sparse, but they’re intriguing: When I wander through midtown Manhattan, I find it’s an odd mix of the utilitarian — notes warning me that a bar has awful service, or recommending an awesome music store — and grippingly personal: a dispatch describing where somebody had a breakup and what it was like.

“It’s like this form of Terminator vision,” jokes Socialight founder Dan Melinger, whose app is set to launch soon on the iPhone. He thinks that as more and more people tag the real world, it will create a sort of parallel, invisible internet of data floating over our everyday lives.

“You can figure out the mood of a place by searching for all notes in an area,” Melinger adds. What types of music do people listen to in this neighborhood? What do they argue about?

All those tracks of our lives form an enormously rich stream of information. So most geo-app pioneers are developing collaborative-filtering tools that find patterns in the data; for example, recommending other people you might want to “friend” because they have similar everyday behavior — going to the same cafes and schools and bars (at the same time of day) and talking about the same topics in their tags. (And, of course, alerting advertisers if you’re the type of person who drinks a lot of coffee, as evidenced by your daily route.)

Altman calls this the “life graph” — the lattice of invisible geodata you produce every day as your phone leaves trails through the digital ether

Geo-apps face one big technological hurdle, though: Most phones do not allow an app to constantly check its location — every minute, say — in part because that constant pinging would drain the mobile’s battery. They thus require you to pull out your phone and look at it, and many people find this onerous (or simply forget to do it regularly).

Assuming those tech hurdles can be overcome in the next few years, many geo-app makers envision physical space marked up with interesting information that actively pops up when you walk past a particular location.

In the long run, we could find ourselves living in a world where long, threaded discussions and conversations occur not only on blog postings or Facebook status updates but in specific cafes, public buildings, or rooms.

Granted, the privacy aspects of geodata are hair-raising. Many of these new apps intend to monetize their service by helping advertisers target you based on where you go — using your “life graph”, as it were, to sell you things. Geo-enhanced advertising is likely to be something potentially useful — and annoying and occasionally unsettling — as Google’s ads keyed to your search queries and e-mails.

Ted Morgan, the CEO of Skyhook — a company that maps out WiFi signals worldwide, to help phones pinpoint their location — thinks the way geotagging really changes life is by becoming part of everything: All Tweets, all Facebook entries, all MySpace posts, all news items become automatically marked up with geographic data. What will that do? He’s not sure. But then again, nobody predicted social networking, either.

“You’re going to see some Mark Zuckerberg guy come out with an idea that nobody could foresee,” he predicts.

The original post over at Wired

Clive Thompson’s Blog “Collision Detection“

In this economy, it’s important to stick to what’s been proven while still thinking outside of traditional ROI models.

This is why its often a useful exercise to look at new technologies and techniques in action abroad — to see what worked, what didn’t, and what might translate overseas. The “International Innovation in Mobile” session at the Mobile Marketing Forum earlier this month attempted to do just this, highlighting emerging ideas and trends abroad.

Panelists Harald Neidhardt, CEO and co-founder of Smaato, Federico Pisani Massamormile, CEO of Hanzo and Alberto Benbunan of Mobile Dreams Factory spoke about campaigns happeningaround the world, including:

• Coca-Cola Videogoals
  Launched in Spain, this mobile campaign allowed users to follow the action of their favorite soccer teams. When a goal was scored, a 3D animated MMS of that goal was sent to all users following that particular team. People registered for their favorite team on the dedicated Coca-Cola portal and then received MMS in almost real time and totally free of charge.

• Your Moment of Fame
  This campaign, sponsored by Sony Ericsson and implemented by Mediaedge and BHI Comunicacion, allowed residents of Madrid to send picture messages to designated stands throughout the city. Users sent a picture of themselves or their friends and family, and it appeared on the billboards inside the screen of a SE W880i. At the reserved times, all the ad stands changed to feature the user’s photo, turning anyone who participated into an instant celebrity.

• Half-Priced Mini
  Customers in the market for a Mini-Cooper were able to customize their dream car on their mobile device for the chance to win it for half the price. Those who entered but did not win were still allowed to use the car for the entire weekend at no cost.

When looking for some inspiration, it’s always fun to look at Japan, where 102 million people have mobile phones and 4 out of every 5 mobile users are on a 3G network. According to Kei Shimada, founder and CEO of Infinita, about one-third of mobile users are also on “all-you-can-eat” plans, opening up the possibility for usage based applications and realistic lifestyle functionality. In Japan, mobile is the focal point of a significant portion of day-to-day activity including job searches, weather and news information, concierge capabilities, transactions with vendors (i.e. mobile wallets) and 3D navigation that’s so advanced it can even tell users which route will offer the most overhead coverage in the rain.

No two countries are alike, of course, and so a deep understanding of the target market is absolutely essential. And due to the constantly evolving nature of the mobile platform, building a successful mobile strategy and presence requires an understanding of what is now, what might be tomorrow, and how users shift their mobile habits to their connected lifestyles. Finding that balance will continue to be the most effective way to innovate in the mobile landscape in 2009.

-Andrea Duchon

Mobile Phones Beat PCs for Young Women [Marketing Vox]
SRG released a survey about the mobile usage of girls between the age of 12-24. Some key stats include: 80% own a wireless device, 70% watch TV on it, and 74% have taken a picture with it in the last month.

Is a Mobile App Right for Every Brand? [Mobile Marketer]
Just because it is popular, doesn’t mean it makes sense for every brand to have an app. This article makes the point that an app store is like any other product/image distribution channel–if your consumers are not using it, why would you? We totally agree.
Related: Branded iPhone Apps and the Misleading Allure of Buzz

Mobile Pollution Sensors Deployed [BBC]
Imperial College London is deploying 100 sensors that are plugged into your average cell phone that can transmit pollution information for 5 common pollutants. The initiative will take place next Tuesday in London, Leicester, Gateshead, and Cambridge.

“MMS Lite” Debuts As SMS/MMS Hybrid Solution [Mobile Marketing Watch]
Feeling constrained by 160 characters? A company called Grapevine is developing an “MMS lite” product that includes a heading of up to 500 characters of text plus two images with optional captions. In addition, recipients can send a 250-character reply at almost zero cost.

Moms’ Social/Mobile Web Use Up by 400% [ReadWriteWeb]
91% of moms say they never leave home without a mobile device. Over 50% have replaced photo albums with online photo-sharing services. And, perhaps most surprisingly, moms are also the primary console gamers in the household after the birth of a first or second child.

Popeye’s mobile campaign garners 54 percent opt-in [Mobile Marketer]
The fast food chain is claiming an SMS subscription conversion rate of 54% in Kansas for special events and product launches. The number is even more impressive when you factor in the two-step opt-in process of SMS replies.

MagicJack Will Top $100 Million In Sales This Year [Business Insider]
It’s no ShamWow, but MagicJack must have a pretty effective infomercial. The product, which easily enables cheap internet calling over home phones, is selling in the range of 10,000 a day and will soon have a cell phone version.

Your Favorite iPhone Apps With AppsFire [TechCrunch]
Getting users to discover an app can often be harder than building one. AppsFire makes it easy to recommend favorites to friends.

Windows Mobile App Store Will Launch With 600 Apps; Some Free Games Included [mocoNews]
Windows is the latest to enter the app store game. Theirs launches in the fall with a pretty low number of apps as compared to Android and Apple, but the company promises to rapidly roll out the 20,000 apps that have already been developed for the platform.

A prepaid mobile phone is only useful if you’ve got enough airtime to use it, particularly here in the U.S. where subscribers are charged for making and receiving calls. But for the rest of the world, subscribers aren’t charged for calls and texts that they receive, although running out of prepaid airtime is still a problem. For South Africa and its millions of pay-as-you-go users however, this isn’t an issue. If they have no airtime and would still like to contact a friend or a colleague, all they have to do is to send a free ‘Please Call Me’ message (PCM) to let the other party know that someone is trying to reach them. The recipient simply clicks on the PCM to call back the PCM sender.

A New Medium

PCMs were introduced by South African operator Vodacom in the early 2000s as a replacement for ‘beeping’ – the prepaid subscriber practice of ringing a party’s number once as a signal that they had no airtime left and would have to be called back. South Africans were sending millions of beeps a day, clogging Vodacom’s network and prompting the carrier to think up of a less resource-intensive means of beeping. They introduced a solution on a USSD platform – similar to SMS except that you can’t store and forward USSD messages – and thus PCMs were born.

Today, South Africa’s 45 million prepaid users send tens of millions of PCMs daily – Vodacom alone claims to process between 10 to 20 million a day. There are so many of them, in fact, that they’ve turned into a viable advertising and communications medium. MTN, Vodafone and Cell C initially attached short messages at the end of PCMs (which can handle about 120 characters) that announced carrier-specific promotions and activities. Eventually, they opened the service to mobile content providers and advertisers, charging fees or asking for revenue shares for every million PCMs they tagged with an advertisement.

A Relevant Message

The power of PCMs to influence an entire society became truly evident when it was used as a vehicle to promote HIV consultation and awareness in a social marketing campaign launched by SocialTXT and South Africa’s AIDS Helpline. During a six-week trial in which the Helpline was promoted on a million PCMs a day, the call center experienced a 136% increase in calls – over 1,500 additional callers a day. For the 5.6 million South Africans coping with HIV, PCMs are becoming a lifeline, quite literally. For more about the SocialTXT HIV campaign, see Corinne Ramey’s blog entry at MobileActive.org.

- David Zarraga

Tristan

ThisMoment

What if Twitter and Facebook had a baby? The resulting child would be thismoment. Launched on Monday, the site offers users the possibility to create profiles centered-around what is happening to them now, in this moment. The interface is very sleek, and offers youtube, flickr, and facebook uploading amongst others. The site is obviously mobile friendly and you can just upload a pic by emailing it or using the dedicated iPhone app. With the sales of the iPhone 3G S through the roof, recent related data on Youtube usage, I am betting that thismoment is going to be huge in 2009.

Andrea D.

Tripeedo

I know that when I make travel plans, I want to share them with all of my 500 Facebook friends immediately!… Ok, not really… but if you’re someone who can’t resist updating your status the second the flight confirmation hits your inbox, Tripeedo.com might be your new best friend. The site works like other aggregate travel websites (think Kayak or Orbi

tz) but takes your trip viral via Facebook Connect. It might not be the most practical website out there, but it eliminates the additional step in declaring your awesomeness to the masses. And when your reputation for jet-setting is top priority, what could be more important? Other than, you know, the trip itself…

Laura

Lyle Owerko for GelaSkins

I’m almost inclined to keep this one secret, but alas, my benevolence knows no bounds. You’re welcome. Let me put it this way: Photographer Lyle Owerko and handheld device skin retailer GelaSkin sittin’ in a tree…c.o.l.l.a.b.o.r.a.t.i.n.g! Dubbed “The Boombox Project,” the iPod, iPhone and laptop skins of this collection bear images of the iconic ghetto blaster. I could attempt to draw meaning from this tech dichotomy, but really, this is just really freaking cool. I look forward to carrying my laptop on my shoulder.

Valerie

Racevine

I learned of this social networking site for runners recently and was intrigued. I’ve cheered on my dad (an “ultramarathoner” before the term even existed) and friends — as well as many complete strangers — as they’ve run races over the years (my favorites so far: the New York City Marathon and Marine Corps Marathon in DC). Racevine right now is very basic, offering only the reviews that members have posted about various races, mostly marathons and half marathons. To grow its community as well as its utility, the site should allow for the creation of groups, for example, those who are training for this year’s London Marathon. I’d also love for the site to offer training and gear recommendations. These too, like the reviews, could be crowdsourced. Of course for those of us who are inspired by cheering on marathoners, but have only, and probably will only, run far shorter races themselves, I’d love to see some reviews from and/or tips for those of us on the sidelines.

Allison

Good Transparencies Archive

I am fascinated by infographics, the data visualization meets digital art that Jeremy wrote about earlier this year. Some of the best I’ve seen have been from Good magazine—a publication that thoroughly understands that web journalism will be driven more by compelling visuals than lengthy text, and that those visuals need to impact rich information in a glance. Thus I was excited to learn that they now have an archive of the infographics from their “Transparency” feature on Flickr.  For example, here’s a great one on the money spent on advertising.

Chris

Seer Android
Interesting to see how one sport completely misses an opportunity while another embraces technology. The NBA Draft came and went without any new mobile fan engagement beyond alerts when teams select a player. Meanwhile, Wimbledon is here and doing some really cool stuff. The All England Lawn Tennis Club and IBM developed a mobile application designed to transform how fans view live information and keep up with the action at Wimbledon 2009. From IBM’s press release:

The Seer Android application features location-aware visualization technology developed for the T-Mobile G1. The augmented reality application acts as a real-time guide and map for tournament allowing users to see scores, stadium info, and even lines at the food stand. In addition, The Seer Aggregator is a downloadable Twitter app enabling fans to receive real-time ‘tweets’ about Wimbledon from different sources, including players, commentators and a team of IBM scouts at the event.

Mike

UCLA Squirrels

Riding the NYC subway this morning, I was crunched up against a sweaty businessman and a tourist’s backpack. I used to adore Europeans, what happened there? Seeking a “get-away” cognitive experience, I broke out my mobile device to watch YouTube’s daily video podcast. Now I’m captivated (nearly missing my stop) as I’m standing their clutching a nasty subway pole with one arm and throwing out a “Tiger Woods” fist pump with the other as that DANG squirrel finally gets over the cement divider. Can I tell you how excited I am for the new iPhone video editing function? Mobile video uploads will be off the charts with the new feature. And yes, I’m submitting this wonderful moment to the Tiger Woods Fist Pump Challenge.

Reming

Kinetic Sketch

Feeling artsy, but not naturally artistically gifted? Check out Kinetic Sketch, a cool website that combines art tools with physics simulations. The website features a drawing tool that allows you to create different shapes in colors and by controlling how the shapes interact with each other you can create your own masterpiece. You can even suspend reality and adjust the gravity level. Create away!

Jeremy

Video Interview with Adobe’s Director of Technology

Between Web TV aggregators like Boxee, the success of Hulu and mainstream services like AT&T’s U-verse, it’s no surprise that the future of television is becoming an interactive, web-based experience. Further driving this point home is this insightful video interview with Adobe’s Anup Muraka, Director of Technology, Strategy and Partner Development. The segment breaks down some new ways Adobe is using their Flash language to bring the interactive experience of the web to the TV experience, including video on demand, video self-publishing and casual gaming. Laptop vs. plasma TV cage match coming soon!