Location Based Services, the Good the Bad the Ugly

These are my comments on the WCA conference about location based services. The edited videos can be found here. That way I satisfy my journalistic pretense to the rule facts-versus-opinion. Here is the Good, the Bad, the Ugly of the conferences, IMHO.


First with Livecast, the Good, the Best, the Extraordinary that will change the way you use your mobile phone, again. Mobile video streaming with GPS.

Although I am a fan of Andrew Seybold and therefore not a fan of WiMax, this is the WiMax application that makes me say, "I want it, and I want it now!"

I agree with the WSJ, mobile broadcast is the "Quiet Revolution." Imagine, I would stream the conferences live, instead of taping, Final-Cut-Pro-ing, post-producing, publishing and storing them, as I do now. You can forget the spontaneity, the News, with the big N.

Long life to live broadcast for everyone! Imagine the citizen-journalism revolution it implies...

You receive an alert on your mobile phone, there is an earthquake in LA, your friends are safe, they send you their video directly on your phone and you can see where they are now.

Assuming the network bears the load. See the WCA 4G conferences for more on experts opinion on when we will be "wowed". The speakers were talking about 4G killer apps, here is one, definitely.
LiveCast is said to be available for free for you and I in a few weeks, I can't wait.
Look at their video demo, it's self-explanatory.


I am going to rank GeoSpot in the good as well.

What's opened now?
It's not enough to see where the closest Starbucks is, you want to know if it's open. Plus tons of other inventive custom filters, like drilling down a store inside a mall or finding a dog-friendly store. Now available on all your favorite mobile phones and more.

Already a few major customers, and here is an other hardworking and "awesome" bayarea startup on the road to success (or acquisition). Good luck!

I am not going to bother you long with Google's My Location video, it's a great presentation. What else to say? Creativity at work, free. Useful, free. Working today, free. Accuracy issue and no direction mapping, but hey, it's free.

Interesting model where the location is user-based and cell-based. I've been dreaming of telling Google to add their search engine software directly to the Base Station Controller, from what I know there is a waste of processing power that can be used, but I am sure they will end up there, eventually.



Now the Bad... I am bad.
I've met with one of my voip startup's providers, SkyMail, and did not recognize them. I plead non-guilty, I buy their service from a wholesaler through an anonymous feature ID. They are behind Sprint as well. It's about a voicemail by email, and you attach a map to the email to indicate your location.

Since I offer voice mail by email (for free) to my customers for the last two years, I was not impressed, but I may be jaded. In San Diego, the same service may have a comment like "Wow, that's ridiculous, dude, for real", but here in the bayarea, where a Voice over IP startup is born every week, and everybody's got a caller-id/forward/conference VoIP phone number, the feature was received with a polite "yawn."


In the bad, or maybe it was just before cocktail time and the audience and I did not catch it all....
Lightpole offers some kind of SDP (Service Delivery Platform API).

However, again according to my own experience, first, the operators prefer to do their own proprietary stuff - a question of control. The company I used to work for tried to sell operators an SDP for years, we just managed to get consulting work. Not bad, but still, no SDP product.

Second, the only potentially open source mobile SDP is being done by Google. So... why would you try to do something Google is already working on with much more money than you will ever have?



Now the Ugly. You may have jumped directly to this section, I know you.
Yahoo introduces ZoneTag and Zurfer, or a presentation on how to browse and add a geo-tag to pics on your mobile. And now I am upset. Tags. Put tags on Flicker from your mobile. Great point of view for location services, really. Where is the wow technology we can expect from a prime company?

And even if Flicker is Yahoo's cash cow, it's not a reason to tie it up with everything, especially when you can have a better location technology and your pics on Picassa for free (see Google)!

But as one Yahoo's DG said to me with quite an arrogant attitude, "you can make a lot of money on something that is free elsewhere". All right. I told you this was ugly.

We'll see how long this great busines model lasts, won't we? I bet one day we will remember of Yahoo the same way we recall Altavista to the youngsters, with a bit of nostalgia.

Google will make Yahoo survive the way Apple survived for years, to serve as a reference for anti-trust laws.

the most cost-effective social media strategy for SEO

I like to be an artificially bleached blond, first because it hides my white hair, and second because it makes people talk to me like if I was a kid or, precisely, a bleached blond.

And it's helpful because I hate corporate and buzz words. I learn during my MBA in London that there is always a simple and easy way to talk about things.

One of the buzz words of the day is "social media strategy." I just come back from the SES conference (if you don't know it means Search Engine Strategy, or SEO is Search Engine Optimization, you're really out my friend, stop going out and browse at home).

What does social media strategy means?
- Enhance your Google search ranking.

Good. How do I do that? Well, Google's help pages give you the information for free, you do not have to hire a $10,000 consultant if you can read:
- Have lots of external links referencing your web site.

Good. How do I do that? Again according to Google:
- Have bloggers writing about your web site.

Ok, so: Social Media Strategy = get blogs written.

The problem is, at 99% of the booths I dispatched my blond hair to this morning, none of the great and expensive social media strategists do that. They modify your web site at length, and for an extra fee, they write a blog and a PR release to post on your own web site. On your own web site. How useful is that for external referencing? Zero. Thanks.

Is there any guarantee of results, any proven ROI, after months of efforts from both the management team and the development team? Of course not, you're kidding, it's marketing, you can't talk about ROI...

Sorry but I do not understand, I am blond, you see, and I am also a Sales person, I am used to get paid according to the number of new customers I bring. What can't I pay for SES based on the number of new leads it generates? It's a sales tool, right? Right? No? It's an optimization tool. Ok, I see. Well thanks, really.

The lowest price I could extract from SES sales people was $2,000. I think I am going to pay for bloggers in Eastern Europe, I've heard it's $200 per month to have somebody write 8 hours a day about your product.

That's the way Obama got nominated after all, it should work for blonds too.