Significant new technologies often emerge as “stacks.” You can look at stacks through a technological (e.g. OSI stack) or business lens. Here I am using a business lens, thus dividing layers by function and including things that aren’t technologies but have economic value, e.g. relationships with customers and users.
Normally stacks are constructed from the bottom up and some layers turn out to be valuable and others do not (Christensen argues compellingly that stacks tend to alternate between commodity and non-commodity layers).
The PC is a famous stack. In the 80’s and 90’s the most valuable layers were the processor (Intel won), OS (Microsoft won), and applications (Microsoft mostly won with Office). Assembly of desktops became a commodity which Dell exploited (you can still make profits on commodity layers, you just need to take a low-cost strategy). The PC demonstrates how hard it is to predict which layers will become valuable: otherwise IBM would never have allowed Microsoft to own the OS.
The internet is another famous stack. In the 90’s a ton of investment went into the infrastructure layer – switches, fiber, CDNs etc. Innovation on that layer continues (particularly in wireless), but mostly the action has moved up the stack to web apps.
An interesting new, emerging stack is the “geo stack.” The first layer is latitude/longitude location detection. This is mainly provided by satellites and GPS chips which seem to be getting so affordable they will be in every mobile device soon.
The next layer is connecting lat/long to human-understandable locations. Google Maps, NAVTEQ etc. do this by connecting lat/long to roads. Location-based apps like Foursquare, Gowalla, and Yelp do this by connecting lat/long to “venues.” It seems Gowalla is building their own venue database. I assume Yelp has built their own. I don’t know how Foursquare gets theirs. I suspect venue databases will become mostly a commodity as they are fairly inexpensive to build and once built mostly interchangeable.
The next layer is the relationship with the user, particularly getting a user’s permission to track her location. Apps like Foursquare require explicit check-ins at each venue. Other apps like Loopt automatically check in for you. Building this trust relationship with users could be very valuable.
The next layer is what I’ll call “recommendations”: giving useful advice to users based on their location. Maps do this by providing driving direction, traffic info etc. Foursquare is doing this with “tips.” I think recommendations will be critical for geo apps to appeal to Normals. Geo apps are currently wooing early adopters with badges, games, and the idea that you might have a serendipitous meeting with your friends at a bar. I suspect these incentives won’t work for the broader population, but recommendations could. Recommendation data is hard to build and vast, hence could be a very valuable layer. (I am biased here as Hunch is working on this layer).
Social graphs could be a geo layer. It’s rumored that Facebook will be adding venue check ins soon. Facebook has by far the largest (opt in) social graph. As the recent Google Buzz debacle demonstrated, it’s not obvious that the people you email with are the same as the people you friend on Facebook. Perhaps the people you want to share your location with are different than the people you friend on Facebook. If so, there could emerge valuable geo-specific social graphs.
Finally, monetization could be a very valuable layer. There are (at least) two parts to monetizing location. Getting local businesses to embrace the internet has been very slow going. Companies that make money on local businesses today (Yelp, Yext, ReachLocal) use expensive outbound calling and other “push” techniques to sign up local businesses. There remains a huge opportunity to supplant the yellow pages as the default advertising platform in local business owners’ minds. If apps like Foursquare can build up enough marketing / PR momentum that every restaurant, dry cleaner etc feels like they need to “get on Foursquare” this could finally open the floodgates for local business advertising.
The second part of monetizing location is facilitating and tracking offline purchases. 90%+ of purchases are still offline, although for many of those transactions people do research and make their decisions online. The internet doesn’t get paid for these transactions. Companies like Milo (disclosure: I’m an investor) are doing interesting things in this space and I expect we’ll see a lot more activity on this layer soon.
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It's interesting you gave monetization its own layer. Do you not think it's also a possible attribute of any layer?
I didn't mean to imply you can't monetize other layers. I probably should have named it better to make this clearer. Also, you can probably slice these things up in many ways and mine is just one of those.
Chris, I think you tweeted that you see the monetization layer as being the most defensible. Do you mean that once one service gets a credit card on file, or otherwise becomes part of the merchant regular spend, that the service will be harder to dislodge?
Good commentary.
I would add that I think the “venue stack” has actually been in evolution via “business directory” and “POI” (point of interest) databases for some time. Personally, I find the model FourSquare is using of recreating as user-driven content is a waste of time and makes the site inefficient (ever try checking into an airport, where you get 15 random user defined check points (driving poor aggregation of activity and tips)?
Localeze and Navteq (by example) are putting MUCH investment and energy into aspects of this layer, and Google Place Pages is clearly looking to create an integrated stack, alongside the GeoSimple's and Public Earth's of the world.
Good question. As I mention, there are two totally separate location monetization opportunities. I think the key for the first, local business advertising, is become the “default” service in people's minds to radically lower acquisition costs. CC on file is important too, but more important is just the branding/PR challenge of being top of mind.
Nice segmentation. Agree that the recommendation layer data will be important and difficult to build. A lot has to do with how users are viewed today within mobile networks – e.g. the delineation between fixed (home, work) and mobile.
Users really need to be mobile entities (pre geo movement we were all fixed). The application layer shares only some of this data between networks – e.g. what apps you access – but much of contextual and behavioral attributes of users don’t carry over.
I think user awareness in wireless networks will affect evolution of the “recommendation layer”. Some more high level thoughts here: http://stevecheney.posterous.com/the-ultimate-k...
Great post. Definitely food for thought to bring recommendations, social data and monetization into the geo stack. I believe there's a lot of potential in products and technologies that can combine data from several layers in this stack and easily extract value out of them.
For example, it turns out that a lot of geo data is actually graph oriented (POIs connected to one another through roads etc). That kind of data can easily be stored in a graph database like Neo4j. (See e.g. http://wiki.neo4j.org/content/Neo4j_Spatial, disclaimer: /me <—- vendor.)
At the same time, a graph database is kickass as a backend for recommentation algorithms (several customers here) and is obviously good at storing the social graph.
All of that combined makes for a potent brew, as you suddenly have your users social graphs, recommendation data (likes this, viewed that, read this mail, etc) and the geo data in the same data structure. There's a huge amount of value in being able to easily run algorithms on a combined data set like that. We've seen over and over again that handling complexity is becoming increasingly relevant for many of these emerging stacks.
-EE
Interesting commentary. However, I'm not sure that recs delivered to your phone would appeal to a wide population. There is a huge difference between recs or “tips” delivered to you at home on your laptop vs. outside on your phone. On a laptop, the user is probably seated, has time, and is committed to making a decision. Often this is a purchasing decision, and they are actively searching for the rec (like when they go to Hunch.com).
When delivered to a phone, the tip is delivered involuntarily (like on 4square), and the person is often in a rush, already has a plan for the next few hours at least, and not making a decision related to the tip. They could be at Starbucks and get the tip “Eric. S thinks you'd like XYZ restaurant or XYZ store.” However, its early in the morning, and the user isn't making a decision related to eating or buying. People are less likely to remember a tip when they are not making a decision related to it. So, the tips aren't useful, but rather annoying. I'd bet that a small portion of the population would read these tips, and an even smaller portion would act upon them.
If tips are less about where else to go, and more about what types of product to buy once you are at the store, maybe it is more relevant. I could see a wider audience finding location-specific tips useful, such as “you are at XYZ restaurant. People like you loved the steak,” but is the there really a big difference (to Normals, not early adopters) between looking at this tip and simply asking the waiter what is good?
I think the real usefulness to Normals is real-time rewards, delivered to your phone (similar to what Fred Wilson wrote about a few weeks back). Everyone likes to save money, and the rewards would be directly related to the purchasing decision at that moment (“hey, this is your 10th stop at Starbucks, you get a free coffee”).
btw in case those thoughts sounds too high level here is an example:
LTE (the next 4G gen wireless network) has session intelligence info built in – suck as location info, time of day, access type, subscriber type, handover status, device type etc. All of this info can enable redirection of traffic based on higher layer application data. Operators could use the session intelligence to improve the user experience, insert data etc.
Personally I think check-in is a utility that is foundational but should be a system feature driven by the user's personal sharing rules, not a service in itself. From a monetization value viewpoint, the “best marketing value” is not achieved when you check in, it's when you are open to choices and/or making plans. The “just before” time is fundamentally more valuable than the “real-time” moment.
Plenty of geo related recommendation data already exists online. You don't need location aware devices to publish location relevant recommendations – in fact, it's a drag to publish from mobile devices. It's the presentation, aggregation, and distribution of this recommendation data where the action is. Foursquare is aggregating via bizdev. Services like PlacePop and Buzzd are aggregating via API. Yelp's challenge is to present long form reviews as condensed tips.
I don't think any mobile / geo app can win the the recommendation layer without a sizable web presence, or aggregation via bizdev / api.
Do you think longer term venue layer will be valuable?
Seems to me that the good inputs are likely to come from opt in apps a la 4sq versus “header info” type stuff like device type etc.
I think what you are getting at which is always a crucial question for any stack is which layers will be controlled by separate companies versus integrated. I talk about this issue a lot e.g.
http://cdixon.org/2010/01/28/should-apple-be-mo...
I think your comment is important to the long term development of the business side of the stack. I don't think we quite understand how people interact with environments, and without the data you are talking about, we can't get crunching on what we are able to monetize in the non-chris sense versus what turns into a commodity items.
Yeah, seems like a notion of “pre check in” could be valuable (sort of like what plancast is doing?)
I think if you'd need a lot more sophisticated recommendation system that the pretty simple ones you see now. E.g. would be useful if you were at a restaurant and could quickly find out what the favorite dishes of people with similar tastes as you.
Chris, great article. Matt from SimpleGeo here…and we've got a pretty great view of everything going on in the space, since we're one of the “enablers” in the market.
I definitely think that the price of venue data (much like the prices of apps in general) is going to be a very quick race to the bottom. There are very few “big” players in this space: InfoUSA, Acxiom, Localeze, Navteq and a few more. Each of these big guys charge an unbelievable amount of money (at least when it comes to getting developers to use it).
Where Gowalla and Foursquare got it REALLY right was using their users as their way into the location data. They're on the ground, moving around and contribute the location data back to their servers for free (and sometimes even more accurate than you can find at the various data clearinghouses).
The truth is, anyone that has a slightly more crowdsourced (including Google) approach to this will get inherently better data. This coupled with the fact that the data itself might be free in the next few years spells potential doom for the “big guys”.
There will be value in the user contributed venue data, though the value might not necessarily be monetary.
Could be a combo – whatever can provide better contextual information for
more effective targeting of content can be monetized.
The SP angle is to have APIs which give app developers access to location
and end-user preferences, etc from the network perspective. Perhaps another
layer of data to augment 4sq data.
claim is that it will allow developers to write differentiated apps which
work across SP networks in conjunction w/ APIs at the app level. Of course
SP pipes are getting commoditized quickly so this is their only answer to
traffic/revenue decoupling.
Could be a combo – whatever can provide better contextual information for
more effective targeting of content can be monetized.
The SP angle is to have APIs which give app developers access to location
and end-user preferences, etc from the network perspective. Perhaps another
layer of data to augment 4sq data.
claim is that it will allow developers to write differentiated apps which
work across SP networks in conjunction w/ APIs at the app level. Of course
SP pipes are getting commoditized quickly so this is their only answer to
traffic/revenue decoupling.
I'm surprised more stores haven't tried to bridge the online / in-person divide, particularly when someone is in their store. Everyone at StarBucks has mobiles these days, and doing rewards/etc based on giving a mobile number / email could be relatively simple. (The Apple Stores are one of a few examples where I've seen it really pushed.)
With local services, part of transitioning to the “Normals” is also making something useful for those who don't live in NYC/SF. Much of the kind of serendipity that foursquare promotes likely has much less value outside cities.
I'm surprised more stores haven't tried to bridge the online / in-person divide, particularly when someone is in their store. Everyone at StarBucks has mobiles these days, and doing rewards/etc based on giving a mobile number / email could be relatively simple. (The Apple Stores are one of a few examples where I've seen it really pushed.)
With local services, part of transitioning to the “Normals” is also making something useful for those who don't live in NYC/SF. Much of the kind of serendipity that foursquare promotes likely has much less value outside cities.
There must be an organisation, many different organisations of location based information streams like images, rent prizes, shoppong times, historic info, dating possibilities, order request for the local fruit bazar, these streams could become real life support streams and become itself real life. I love Gowalla and Foursquare but it becomes a little bit boring with only checking in, especially in places with almost zero userbase. Venues could offer free stuff for checking in, even they could pay you with real cash with ideas of a service like flattr.com which is maybe “the” solution for payments. Great post. Btw do you know flook.com, I like the idea of letting the user create photo cards with tipps which are dropped on a certain geo location. Quite a lot cool ideas coming recently from Great Britain…
On top of that the insight/analytics layer, datamining, patterns recognition etc.
Also, tourism industry seems like the best segment in terms of margins: less people than “everybody” but a real concrete need for GEO info, a lot more than in your local area. For a tourist GEO is a “must have”, for a local it's “nice to have”. The whole tourist guides industry can be easily disrupted.
have you seen the secret london group success on FB (theres copycats now including secretnyc fyi)? http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/02/07/startup-to-...
I'm not sure if this is the right way to go about it, BUT there has to be some way to collectively organize everyone's hidden local tips/spots for a city.
it also feels like the time where your geo-patterning is a ripe area of innovation. We're a lot more creatures of habit than we realize! I like to use the term “my personal polygon” (ok, I'm not much of a marketer), think of a living location + time density heat map against which offers are placed…
I shared the video from your panel on this with my professor at Wharton, who's also an advisor of Milo. We're actually doing a small project on them for his class.
I think Milo can play a crucial role not only in tracking conversion from online discovery to offline purchase, but also in the top value-added layer of the stack. What I mean is that Milo has enough real-time inventory data mapped to certain brick and mortar stores that could serve as a great utility. For example, I may have a to-do list of errands I need to run when I'm out. Whenever I'm closest to one of the stores carrying an item on the list, I can receive a ping that says “the toaster you needed to pick up is available 3 blocks away at retailer X.” I like the perspective of “geotility”– the idea that I place a higher value on information, goods, and services when they're useful to me in the right place at the right time.
That reminds me of an old project I was really into called “Yellow Arrow” where a small group of “urban explorers” would post stickers with a unique identifier to send to an SMS shortcode. There was a whole layer of comments on top of various landmarks, venues, items, etc. waiting to be discovered.
http://yellowarrow.net/v3/
As has been mentioned, 4sq initially seeded their venue data and then relied on UGC.
I think another layer of the geo/local stack is Real-time Activity. What is going on there (“formal” Events or “informal” happenings/vibe). This is an area we've done work in at Going where the main point of our mobile app is not just checking in but contributing a real-time rating, photo and comment on what is going on at the place. Buzzd and SocialGreat are doing work in this area as well (and I think Hashceratops is a great idea although as a former NLP'er the namespace issues are very challenging).
[...] Some thoughts on the “geo stack” [...]
Chris, that's a really great way of looking at this space and breaking it down. I recently wrote about the emergence of “geo stack” and the concept of location becoming a form of currency.
http://www.paddlinglikemad.com/general/on-locat...
[...] » Some thoughts on the geo stack [...]
Yeah, I think making these apps appeal beyond big cities and 20/30 somethings is the big challenge.
Good points. Analytics will probably be an interesting layer as it is in most areas with lots of users/data.
Also, tourism does seem like a very good early app for geo apps.
I agree. I think there are tons of more interesting things service like Milo can do that map the online to the offline world.
Great thoughts, I think your slicing is quite apt.
I think the “serendipitous meeting with friends” thing is absolutely what will make location based socnets appeal to Normals. When Foursquare first came to Paris, I had been clamoring for it on Twitter, nobody else had heard of it. During the first week, the Paris leaderboard was just my friends. And after my *very first check-in* I realized a friend of mine was in the same bar as me, on a different floor. That's powerful stuff. And I don't see how it doesn't apply to Normals.
I also think game mechanics could be huge for spurring broader adoption. It's a bit striking to me that you don't think this can be appealing to the general population, as this is something that Hunch does a lot. Also games are, I think, the biggest category in the app store. The normals love gaming, especially on mobile, and especially with friends. Foursquare is right at the sweet spot of this.
Agree that monetization is not necessarily its own layer. There are also two aspects of monetization: advertising and payments. Location-based/hyperlocal advertising has been an unreachable holy grail for a long time but you also have payments via mobile phones. Square is part of this, so are the “mobile PayPals” a la Zong/Boku.
As you once said yourself, trends that happen in Japan/Korea happen in the West after a while, and people there have been able to pay for stuff at the cash register with their phones for a while now. The iPhone has Bluetooth; you don't even have to go through iTunes or AT&T, you can imagine an app that directly links your credit cards or bank accounts.
I think anyone who got all the big cities and all the 20/30-somethings would be really, really happy.
Also, this is what they said about Facebook and Twitter (and even Google once) and they're all trending older, less tech-savvy, etc.
It's one thing to not being able to cross over from the Techies to the Normals (aka the FriendFeed Syndrome), but I think crossing over from young/urban/educated/blah to the broader population is a lot more trivial once you get to a certain size. Young people talk to their parents and to their bosses. They get the New York Times hot and bothered about their latest toy. Etc.
Seems to me that there is little chance of operators taking the only approach that would allow this to succeed – making these APIs fully open and free. More likely, another failed attempt to be more than dumb pipes.
Does there have to be a separation between real time rewards and recommendations? If I see my friend take advantage of a nearby offer, that will be the most powerful incentive.
Add geotagged tweets, Google Buzz posts and even geotagged photos to this – they have some geo relevance usually, but are not quite as strong signals for the recommendation layers to take advantage of.
Chris/Matt. I have licensed most all of the datasets (currently using Localeze) in a start-up. I'm not as convinced as Matt that pricing is a barrier. Prob shouldn't share deal price/structure, but it's expensive but nowhere near prohibitive.
To me, the problem in crowd sourcing of data that links to a specific business or place is that totally unstructured data is very difficult to aggregate, use in analytics or apply inference against.
Applications that sit on top of utility sets can drive MUCH more value than “starting from scratch”. As to how valuable the venue layer will be in the long term? I'm skeptical, if Google opens up its Place Pages into it's API, it flattens the upside for venue database providers. Will it be a key enabler, definitely, will it carry a lot of revenue value, I'm not so convinced.
Salut Pascal. You're quite right that the *benefits* of checking in broadly speaking should appeal to Normals/everyone.
However, unlike Techies, Normals really care about the *costs* of the cost-benefit equation:
- “Am I going to look weird or uncool doing this?”
- “Will my information be safe? Can creepy guys/stalkers see my info somehow? Will they be like FB and start making my stuff public in a sneaky way?”
- “What if they say it's free and try to trick me later and charge for it?”
- “What if some of my friends who are annoying start showing up where I am? I might feel bad defriending them.”
These are just a few of the questions that many people will care about. I am not saying that checking in won't have enough momentum and value overall but anytime you are changing social behaviors it's by no means a given.
(BTW, you clearly get these issues given your great Tumblr vs. Posterous analysis
Good point, and even if FourSquare, for example, was never adopted outside of a dozen U.S. cities, it could still be very popular & profitable.
Partially I'm just excited for vast improvements to the “local web” everywhere. I'm amazed how few local businesses (plumbers, barbers, non-restaurants, etc) have much of a web presence that allows them to be found via Google and have basic, current info about services. I think there is a business opportunity there, but not sure how do to the sales to reach local, small businesses who haven't historically seen the value of the web.
Hey — Thanks. Hope you keep reading my blog.
Re: will creepy guys/stalkers see this, that's an excellent point. My wife
(who uses Foursquare even more than I do) thinks this is a problem for
Foursquare adoption vis-à-vis women — women are understandably much more
wary of broadcasting their location than men. I pester her to write a post
about this on my blog.
As far as Facebook is concerned, maybe I'm wrong, but I think the only
people who've cared about their privacy settings changes are us techies. At
least, it doesn't seem to have dented their growth/engagement significantly.
In any case, you're absolutely right that we have to look at the cost as
well as the benefit side of the equation. But I was responding to Chris's
contention that gaming elements and such probably won't appeal to Normals,
which I disagree with.
You're absolutely right that this is a problem/opportunity. I think the
reason why it hasn't been tackled yet is that it would require a huge and
costly sales push — convincing artisans and such, one by one, of the
benefits of an online presence (with a high strike out rate) — for what
return? Getting 50 bucks a month per each to maintain an online presence?
That doesn't pay for itself.
Furthermore, there are diminishing returns to this. Being the first plumber
in your neighborhood with a strong online presence will almost certainly
give your business a big boost. Being the 12th — not so much.
chris – great dissection. monetization is ultimately key to fund long term innovation in the space and therefore a critical piece for each stack, though I am very skeptical that SMBs will join just for the marketing/pr momentum. Dry Cleaners have to deal with pressers not showing up, customers, lost items, etc. – no time to learn latest internet marketing concepts.
The missing piece is an organized market – one of the greatest opportunities in local monetization.
For your comment regarding expensive call center overhead to connect with SMBs, the only way to build long term, trusted relationships with local business owners is a local approach, not a remote boiler room.
We have started to break down the barriers for local, small businesses in the third party gift card distribution, empowering them to sell their gift cards and discount cards in national retailers in those retail stores nearby their business. We could not have done it without a local presence.
Our next frontier is to enable “flow” in the online distribution for SMBs and we utilize our local presence in each market to gather the content and freely have it distributed by developers, publishers and LBS through our “Deal API”.
The Buzz default to mail was a debacle indeed but gosh if you could opt in to that and geo-energize the people you mail and leverage the content in mail . . .
[...] In one of our favorite Valentine’s Day posts of all time, Chris Dixon posted about the “geo stack” – a model for how to think about the various layers of the geolocation ecosystem. [...]
This is a great time to have this “geo stack” discussion, as so many people continue to pile into the space. (Including my PublicEarth play.)
Personally I think we are moving from vertical to horizontal for two reasons: (1) vertical geo offers with all the layers Chris describes above are actually technically difficult to do (more on this another time); and (2) the existing geo business models don't yet work unless you're at very large scale.
Add to this the dynamics that Google, the largest scale player, purposefully runs their geo business at a loss and is actively destroying other geo revenue models (e.g. Citysearch & Garmin).
It takes a lot of firepower to build something non-trivial when revenues really don't happen until you are huge.
soon people are going to implant a chip in their body so the whole world knows where they are, and what they are thinking…. I'm not sure if this will actually add to the human experience.
I wrote a detailed analysis on the topic just now – inspired by chris' post and your comments – http://stevecheney.posterous.com/twenty-four-co...
Chris – very timely post and I like your notion of “stacks.” I cover some of the same ground in a report on Location-based Innovation (just published by GigaOM Pro; Overview at http://bit.ly/9ugm2M). One of the frameworks that I introduce describes the 3D's – individuals using mobile devices to Detect, Discover, and Disclose (see slide 10). I'm not sure if it qualifies as a stack, but another “interface” that I think has enormous importance contains the technologies and interfaces that connect individuals to “things” (people, objects, images, etc.) in places (e.g., locations). These include Image Recognition (e.g., Visual Search) and their specialized variants, such as QR codes; sensor-based technologies that detect presence (and perhaps other information); and apps that manage “Location Disclosure” (whether, when and what gets disclosed, to whom, based on settings the user has authorized).
Here are a few observations that I think relate to this “stack”:
(1) Mobile phones are morphing into devices that connect users to places, other individuals and location-specific content in new and compelling ways…enabling a whole new class of location-centered services, many of which rely on visual capabilities.
(2) The ability to scan bar codes – both 1D and 2d versions, such as QR codes – with camera phones will revolutionize the way in which individuals obtain information, shop and more generally experience places.
(3) Geotagging is becoming increasingly automated, increasing the amount and accessibility of posts, images and other user-generated content. Automatic geotagging will (i) rapidly increase the frequency with which users add “location” to their social data; (ii) dramatically expand the volume of location-specific information produced; and (iii) intensify the need and create significant new opportunities for solutions that help individuals filter, find, access and leverage timely, location-specific content.
(4) User-generated content, particularly when geotagged and searchable by location, represents an enormous, largely untapped asset, which is why Twitter, Facebook and other social media companies are investing heavily to make UGC accessible. As geotagging of content becomes easier and more common, more “locally relevant” content will be available. As more content is geotagged more precisely, the accuracy of “nearby results” is also likely to improve, further reinforcing and boosting usage. Proximity searching and filtering results by location will prove indispensable.
Curious how these technologies/interfaces fit into your notion of stacks?
Phil Hendrix, http://www.immr.org
Matt – I agree. In Location-based Innovation (http://bit.ly/9ugm2M), I draw a similar conclusion. “Incumbent providers are losing their grip on geodata and digital maps. Recent shifts are making geodata “free,” improving the level of detail and accuracy, and enhancing the variety, richness and usefulness… OpenStreetMap and [other crowd sourcing] efforts are also increasing accuracy, detail and fidelity.”
I also note that “SimpleGeo and Mixer Labs are pursuing what sounds like the Holy Grail — providing a one-stop shop that makes it much easier for developers to access and integrate a wide range of location building blocks into their mobile apps.”
Did I get the 2nd point right?
Phil Hendrix, immr
Chris, I think the post by Elad Gil (founder of Mixer Labs) is very relevant to your notion of stacks. In “Geo-location APIs: What Are the Differences?” (http://bit.ly/bgYsOU), Gil argues… “There are 5 major components to a fully featured Location API – forward geocoding, reverse geocoding, POI database, writable layer, and media layers” and “although all of the APIs that have launched recently have different aspects of location involved, they all differ pretty dramatically in the feature set offered and the types of information that can be accessed for each.”
Phil Hendrix, immr
The stack metaphor is powerful, but I am not sure geo is the same magnitude as the PC and the Internet.
I used to be the product manager on Amazon's Personalized Recommendations team (“Because you bought this book, Amazon recommends…”), so my 2 cents on recommendations:
Many recs initiatives fail because they either (1) try to build relationships between users instead of static objects or (2) try to build relationships between static objects that don't show strong enough intent. Amazon's recs work because it's algorithm ties products to other products based on purchases, a very strong signal of intent. The problem with (1) is that cold start takes too long – you force users to answer dozens of questions before they get any results, a less than ideal user experience. The problem with (2) is that using data derived from views, clicks, ratings, etc is very noisy, which causes you to have low quality recommendations. Many of the times Amazon has been chastised for poor recommendations have been a result of “Customers who viewed this also viewed”, which are only shown as a last resort.
Geo companies who require manual check-in have great intent — someone took the time to check in. So as long as your dataset is sufficiently dense, you can start to create “customers who check-in here also checked-in to” relationships, and from there building personalized recommendations: “Because you checked-in here, foursquare recommends: “. Since your relationships are between check-ins and not users, as soon as a new user checks in any where, you can immediately recommend them similar check-in locations, avoiding forcing them to answer dozens of questions and train a system.
All to say, I think geo is the first platform since e-commerce that can actually do recommendations really well. Exciting!
When Location Matters…
Wow, what a few months. A wedding, a trip to Africa, and a tumultuous return to work that included a last-minute invitation to sit on a panel at the semantic web conference.Unrelated to all of this I’……
Nice thought.
Thanks
While the example is using “Geo-Stack” analysis through the business lens, the strategic thinking in this post is useful across many other tech platforms. I think the train of thought is applicable to how traditional embedded platforms are going to see a shift in their capability to monetize hardware – in other words – they (and I think including the semiconductor vendors) will have to go up the stack. Case in point – Intel trying to introduce an Application SDK !
So, Blippy (or, hell, even Amex) might have a shot at becoming the next interesting location-based data service provider…
That's pretty interesting
Totally agree that it's right to approach it as a stack, and I would argue that the value of parts of this stack has been collapsing – and in some cases going free – just as it is going mainstream. My firm is an investor in Skyhook Wireless, which has largely replaced (or you might say complemented), the GPS component with software that establishes position based on WiFi signal. I can tell you that the price of GPS chips has been falling steadily; look at what happened to SiRF Technologies, the leader in this space that lost 90% of its market capitalization. Likewise, I agree with you that the venue database component will commoditize quickly. I believe that Nokia has hinted publicly that they will give away a lot of the map data that they got when they acquired Navteq for $8B and Google is already giving away turn-by-turn navigation (which used to be the whole reason for buying a Garmin personal navigation device). This doesn't leave much in the way of new spaces in the location stack. I do believe some interesting opportunities will emerge from overlaying social graph data and location; yes, maybe those are the people I want to meet at a bar!
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