Starting the year with a smile:-)

Since mid 2010 I’ve been writing a book about Location Based Services (LBS) applied to the marketing practice. While many people exclusively associate Location Based Marketing (LBM) with check-ins applications, the uses of location in marketing goes far beyond that.
This weekend I began the chapter about check-ins. I wanted to open it exploring the motivation behind checking-in. Why are people sharing their location? Exploring this topic I had a little Fun with F words and this is a fine compilation of my notes.

The F* word

Marketers like to frame concepts in terms of numbers & letters, like the 3 R’s, the 4 P’s, the 4 C’s, or the 5 W’s of marketing.
Looking into check-in applications the first and most important F word is “FIND”, and the rest fit under this vast category. But leaving this at only one “F” is a facile job. I had to F.I.O. four or five main categories.

The Five F’s of Check-ins

Fun

First and foremost many of the check-in based social networks are games. People participate for the fun of it. They fiddle around and compete to achieve virtual status, badges, stickers, pins and many other prizes.

Friends

Finding friends is another significant category. You check in to find-out the “fauna & flora” in your neighborhood. The idea is to facilitate fortuitous face to face encounters with folks and fellows, and filter your frenemies. Furthermore, this includes other activities like flirting and going footloose fooling around (only if you fit-in).

Fancying

Are you a fan of a specific place? If so, you would like to feature this place in your comments, fostering and forming good opinions about it. Others will check-in to learn about favorite sites, and they might visit your preferred food place for your comments, doesn’t matter if it is frozen yogurt, french fries, falafel, fried fish, frappuccinos, or frosted flakes.

Freebies

After the fun fades and you are tired of getting another flamboyant badge, and you find that looking for friends in a new city is a futile task, the FREEBIES are the reason that will keep you checking-in. You will check-in fishing for offers, fetching coupons and free stuff.

Following

Following is my fifth category. And in this one I include following yourself (looking at your traveling history) and following others.

Final thoughts

Much needs to be fixed in the check-in apps. Some of the problems are the (lack of) fairness of the system, and the faux Check-ins. While those are not a felony, fraudulent check-ins detriment the real value of the community.

IMPORTANT: While I made this exercise for the FUN of it, the categories are for real (I’ll elaborate them in my book). This framework will allow marketers the use of check-in apps functionality efficiently. I hope it wasn’t a futile effort and that I pass your critique with flying colors. My fringe benefit is in your comments. I’ll appreciate your F-eedback.

The 7 F’s of Check-in

Thanks for your comments on Twitter and emails.
Here are the last two F’ words that fits under “Why are people checking in”: 6- Fame 7- Flirt
And with that we have the 7 F’s of Checking in.
Updated graph

Check-ins, badges, Mayors, stamps on passports, rewards, and other new concepts from the past are flooding the net as the latest trend in location based services applied to marketing purposes. While looking at those new tools I had a strong sense of déjà vu, and I tried to learn some lessons from the future.

Sub sole nihil novi est

"...There's nothing new under the sun..."

It all started last week when I was watching with my son an episode of Seinfeld, which was originally aired on December 1997. Besides introducing the concept of “Festivus”, one thing caught my attention: Elaine was looking for a reward card from a place called Atomic Subs. She had already eaten 23 bad subs because she wanted to “…become the Submarine Captain and have a free sub…” . Interesting enough, 13 years ago she wanted to have the free sub but ALSO get the title of “Captain”. Sounds familiar?

Looking around other concepts, I found that the idea of stamps was introduced in US around 1896 by S&H Green Stamps. During the 1960s, the company printed three times as many stamps as the U.S. Postal Service. Customers received stamps on retail stores, gas stations, supermarket at the checkout time. Customers collected those stamps to trade them for different prizes.

The above mentioned were Check-outs. A full scale rewards system for Check-ins on the other hand, was introduced by American Airlines in the early 1980s.

The intrinsic value of Check-ins and Check-outs

There is a huge difference though between the old check-ins / stamps and the new ones. Note that Checking out at a supermarket or checking-in in an airplane connote an exchange in value, most commonly known as “customers paying for something”. The current rewards, on the other hand, are offered to individuals (not customers yet) that just showed up. At times where online shopping took a great deal of business from brick and mortar stores, I can understand the excitement on bringing the customers back to the door. Nevertheless, while it’s true that the first step to have a sale is having the customer there, rewarding them just for showing up without following up on a sale doesn’t make much sense in the long run.

The real value of Check-ins, stamps, and other incentives should reward more than just physical presence. Moreover, the real question is how you get the customer to the door from the beginning. Can geo-social check-in applications significantly extend the customer reaching radius around retail locations? For that, there are other effective Location Based Marketing solutions – some of them don’t even require a smart phone or GPS, but that is a topic for other discussion.

Using games for serious business is not a game

Loyalty is an emotion-based bond between the customer and a company, and using games to create that relationship is clever. But the ultimate goal for that bond is to create profits, and the question is if we are creating a long term relationships or just short-term impulsive purchase behavior.

The emphasis in Location Based Marketing in general and Geo-Social Marketing apps in particular shouldn’t be on Location or Social, it should be on Marketing. That’s why having a marketing professional involved in the process is so important. While this might sounds obvious to some of the readers, I found many cases where SOME “social media consultants” without formal marketing training or background make an upgrade from social to geo-social and now they become also the face of the Location Based Marketing practice. Location is an extremely useful tool, and geo-social games are only a part of it. Location Based Strategies should be incorporated AS PART of the marketing mix and with the overall marketing strategy in perspective.

Back to the roots

A few years ago I joined a valuable organization called MENG (Marketing Executives Networking Group). If you are a senior marketer, I strongly recommend joining. One of the benefits of MENG is having the opportunity to send questions to a huge membership composed by senior marketers.

Many MENG members created and manage some of the largest loyalty programs for leading brands. Last week I asked them: what are the costliest mistakes you can make when building a loyalty program. I took a few of the many responses and I’ll try to look those through the Location Based Marketing lens.

Across the board they all agree that treating all members equally is a big mistake. Profitable members are not equal to less valuable members. In LBS terms, customers that check-in once a week and buy $150 worth of breakfast for the office colleagues should be more important for the business than the one that checks in every day and buys a coffee for $4.5. Moreover, the business should have an employee policy regarding check-ins, otherwise nobody can “compete” with them as they check in every day.

The second most commented mistake is about lacking data mining and customer purchasing behavior tracking. Understanding, segmenting, and serving customers according to their buying behavior and demographics is key. In LBS terms, it’s not enough to have information about unique visitors, check-ins per day and time. The focus should be on what they purchased and their demographic profile. When and where are more logistic oriented; who, what, and why are the ones you should focus on, and the combination of the five makes a killing solution. At this point I see Facebook Places as the one with the best profiling capabilities, but we still need to see how privacy issues will be resolved.

Loyalty programs should be customer centric, and strive to provide rewards that fit the specific individual. You should engage the customer on a regular basis. In LBS terms, you should incorporate Location to communicate with your customers when they are there, but also use other channels to bring them to the door when they are away.

Location can be expensive and the last mistake I should mention is spending more than is necessary to keep a customer. In LBS terms, over-rewarding customers that would have shown up in your store anyway.

New meet old

New technologies pose new challenges, opportunities, processes, and best practices. Location Based Marketing solutions in general and Geo-Social games and apps in particular can be a powerful addition to your marketing mix, when implemented correctly. Just remember that technology is the mean to reach an end, not the objective itself. Technology can perform tasks in a smart way but that doesn’t make it intelligent. In order to make it work for you, you need a professional marketing team that understands consumers and technology.

I invite you to continue our conversation, or approach the marketing professional closest to you. And this time “closest” doesn’t necessarily have a geographical connotation.

“2010 will be the year of LBS”. Well it’s about the end of November and we can start changing the song to “2011 will be the year of LBS”. And as if Location wasn’t enough we added Indoor LBS to the mix. Everybody speaks about Indoor Navigation, and most of them refer to a completely different concept

The business opportunities

Most of the Interactive Maps apps are primarily themed for Malls.

From the marketing perspective and looking at the “mall potential users” we see that only 17% of the population has a smartphone, and close to 31% of mobile internet services users are female. That means only 5.27% of the population are females using mobile internet services. From the total of female smartphone users only around 21.5% use some kind of location services. That leaves us with target market of 1.1% of the mobile phone owners. Mall demographics show that females outnumber males 2:1, and in most cases they shop in places that are familiar to them. That means that about 1 out of 100 customers entering a mall is a POTENTIAL user, and if you consider that these apps are only available for certain phones, the target market is even smaller. Can you imagine a customer that visits the same mall every week, turns on the wi-fi to navigate to a store he/she knows?

From a mall application I would expect more. I would like to be able to enter a specific product, and have the app connected to the stores’ actual inventories. Look for prices, show me the places where I can have it now, and even offer alternatives. It’s not about finding a store; it is about helping the users to find their way to the products they want.

At this point of time, Indoor Navigation shouldn’t be the focus. Positioning interactive maps as such is a much better strategy, as the users receive what they have been told, and a small commercial ecosystem can be built around that concept.

Interactive maps can better serve other indoor venues. A clear example is trade shows, where there is a larger concentration of Smartphone users, there is a need to locate places in a venue that is totally unfamiliar, and the opportunities for advertising are larger.

The Boy Who Cried “Navigation”

I was recently putting in order my library and I found a very old book with Aesop fables. It was one of my favorites as a kid. Here is an adapted version of one of them:

“…There once was a developer boy who sat on his Mac, sipping a latte and watching the village customers pass by. To grab their attention he took a great breath and sang out, “Indoor Navigation! Indoor Navigation! We have Indoor Navigation!” The villagers came running and installed the app. But when they arrived to the mall, they found there were interactive maps only. Later, other developer girl sang out again, “Indoor Navigation! Indoor Navigation! We have Indoor Navigation!” To her delight, she watched the villagers installing the app again. When the villagers, familiarized with their TomToms and Garmins, saw they have turn by turn directions but not the same customer experience sternly said, “Save your happy song for when there is really navigation, like in our cars!” Later, a third one released an app that worked exactly like the GPS in our cars. Excited, he leaped to his feet and sang out as loudly as he could, “Indoor Navigation! Indoor Navigation! We have Indoor Navigation!” But the villagers thought they will not receive what they expect, and so they didn’t install the app at all. The End.”

Let me be clear at this point. I have seen amazing apps coming to the market during the last year, with huge investment, lot of work behind, and some of them with a real value proposition. My point is that we need to create a common language that will allows us approach the market without confusing the users and the customers, and in a way “killing the golden goose” (as Aesop would say)

Can we agree on the definitions?

What do I expect to receive from a basic Indoor Navigation app? 1) An app that automatically identifies where I am and shows me an updated layout 2) After determining my destination the device will find the best route 3) While moving towards my destination the map will show my movements without my intervention 4) If I take the wrong route, the device will notify me and create a new path 5) The device will notify me when I arrived to destination.

If your car GPS device would require from you to input where are you, move the map manually, figure out if you are in the right path, guess if you arrive to destination, etc. we would agree that by today’s standards, we will not call that navigation. So why call that user experience “navigation” indoors?

The best way to describe what we have today is “Interactive Maps”. Interactive maps include all the features you can find in apps today. Search and discover, turn by turn directions, locate products and services, identify facilities, ATMs, and other POIs. Look for an exhibitor in a trade show. Find your gate in the airport, and the eateries in your way there. Trigger promotions to consumers when they enter the vicinity of a store, and many more. In a stretch you can call it “Indoor Location Services”, just don’t call it “Navigation”.

Crossing the chasm to real indoor navigation

Are we ready today to provide indoor navigation? Technically maybe. Practically?… I doubt it. For real indoor navigation, as defined above, you must have certain hardware infrastructure. In order to approach a mass market, there will be a need to create a hardware infrastructure for each site, which will most probably be based on Bluetooth.
You need to identify the right venues, analyze if users will have a compelling reason and benefit from the use of indoor navigation, and create a business model that will maximize the profits.
The third component is accuracy. If I’m looking for an exhibitor in a tradeshow, I need at least 10 foot accuracy.
The most viable way to make this happen is having companies like Google, Motorola, Cisco, Nokia, etc. take the lead on developing and providing the required infrastructure. Companies like AT&T, Verizon, etc. may take the installation and maintenance of the infrastructure. There resides the real market opportunity. When this happens, the interactive map applications will get an additional layer of relevancy. Most probably at that point of time the companies that develop, install, and maintain that infrastructure will claim the larger share of the benefits

Last Aesop reference

If Location Based Marketing is in its infancy, Indoor Navigation is in the gestation stage. We don’t know what it will look like, or who the leading players will be. We know not what the standards will be or who will determine them. What I know is that today we have high-quality interactive maps and we can enjoy them in many places. Those apps, while presented and sold correctly, can provide a very good income stream.
At the end of the day, to make Indoor Navigation possible and profitable, we need to create an environment with a compelling reason for users to adopt this technology i.e. users that receive a real benefit; it should 1. Be targeted to a mass market; 2. Provide a product that is comparable to our standards for outdoor navigation, and without a doubt 3. Be based on some kind of external infrastructure. Those that claim you don’t need any of these may fall in the category of “sour grapes” (and that was my last Aesop reference).

Location-enabled social networks are not new. As a matter of fact, there are more than 100 companies providing some type of social networking with location features. Some of them have been integrated with Facebook for a long time. So why are these changes important for marketers and business developers?

What

During the last six months, I’ve had the opportunity to speak at many forums and conferences about Location-Based Services in Mobile Marketing. I try to keep my presentations updated to new developments in the industry, but sometimes it’s a challenge. On the use of location in social networks and business intelligence, I have to change my presentation every 10 days.
Why? During the first weeks of March, USA Today published an article on how geo-location applications would be the hottest tech trend at South by Southwest. ReadWriteWeb featured a blog about Google patenting location-based advertising. During the last weeks we read about FourSquare passing the 2 million users, and Facebook acquired Hot Potato mobile check-in startup and released Facebook Places aiming to bring Location Based Services to the masses. Twitter officially became a location-enabled application last November.

“…Mobile advertising is only one part of your marketing mix. Mobile marketing is broader and includes not only delivering ads or coupons to the customer, but also other activities like collecting information that will feed your strategic marketing decisions…”

Why

If we look at the raw numbers, there are around 1.3 billion phone lines in the world. The number of TV sets and personal computers is higher, around 1.5 billion of each. On the other hand, the number of mobile phones has surpassed 4.6 billion globally. Look around you during the day — on a bus, at a restaurant, walking on the street, or sitting in your office — and try to answer the question: If I want to reach that person right now, what should I use? A telemarketer, a TV ad, direct mail, or a notice to her phone?

“…WHERE is an inherent question in your mobile marketing strategy, and location-based information is a key component of your solution…”

Where, That is the question

It’s important to know the difference between mobile marketing and mobile advertising. Mobile advertising is only one part of your marketing mix. Mobile marketing is broader and includes not only delivering ads or coupons to the customer, but also other activities like collecting information that will feed your strategic marketing decisions. As a marketer, you may need to answer these questions:

• Where do my customers live, and where do they buy?
• Where are my competitors?
• Where are my marketing efforts invested?
• Where are my opportunities? i.e. Where should I put my next Point of Sale?
• Where are my sales representatives?
• To what advertising medium do my customers respond? Billboards? Mobile coupons? Where were they when exposed to my campaign?
• Are products sold better in particular zones? Where and why?

WHERE is an inherent question in your mobile marketing strategy, and location-based information is a key component of your solution.

The hidden power of location information

Location plays a role in every critical area of your business — marketing, distribution, logistics, sales, finance, customer care, and more.
Twitter added location capabilities to their platform late last year, meaning that if your customers or target market opt-in, every single message will come geo-coded with the location from where that message was delivered.
Imagine you are in the shoes of one of the most famous customer service managers in the U.S., Comcast’s Frank Eliason, and now you can map the location of every single tweet. Very soon, you will be able to elucidate where the most troubled areas of your network are located, where you should invest in improving your infrastructure or where should you focus in an image improvement campaign. Now extrapolate that idea to a politician or rock band. Wouldn’t you want to know where to focus your political campaign according to “mood maps”? Wouldn’t you want to know where your fans are and organize your concerts to maximize your revenues?

Facebook added location to their platform, so what?

Not long ago, my login page on Facebook changed. A mobile phone is displayed and a title asks me “Heading out? Stay connected – Visit facebook.com on your mobile phone.” Over 100 million users access Facebook through their mobile devices. Facebook now start using location information, but it seems they are collecting it for a long time. In the privacy policies section, you see this: “When you access Facebook from a … mobile phone … we may collect information from that device about your … location…”– no opt-in, no opt-out.
Let’s take a look at the power of ad targeting inside Facebook. Today you are allowed to create a marketing campaign and create segmentation by location (where you live), demographics (age, sex, sex interest, type of relationship, languages), likes and interests, education, work, etc. Imagine if you could add the ACTUAL location of your target market.
If this option is available, you could create a marketing campaign targeted not only by a certain demographic but also to customers that at the time of ad delivery are close to your business, or close to a competitor, or located in a certain place at a certain time. During the football season you could offer discount tickets to fans who are close to the stadium minutes before the game. You could send a beer coupon to New Orleans Saints’ fan page members who are located at the stadium every time the team scores a touchdown. And after the game, you could send to more than 500,000 of those fan page members a coupon with an address and map to their closest TGI Friday’s.

“…We live a mobile lifestyle in which immediate contact is important. Place and time matter. Location makes the occasion, and in the occasion lays the opportunity. Are you ready to seize it?…”

Where occasion meets location

The availability of your customer location allows you to create powerful tools. Companies like Foursquare and Gowalla are redefining what it means to be a “regular/patron;” others like SenseNetworks provide you with tools to dissect location information and give you human predictive analysis. Companies like Waze offer users free navigation and redefine the concept of “driving” customers to your business, and there are those pioneering location-based mobile marketing, advertising and content management like 1020 Placecast.
We live a mobile lifestyle in which immediate contact is important. Place and time matter. Location makes the occasion, and in the occasion lays the opportunity. Are you ready to seize it?

LBS LATAM – The First Location Based Services Conference for Latin America in Miami – 09/17 Miami, FL
Metaplaces – How to Monetize Location Data and Services 09/22-23 San Jose CA

Almost a year ago in my first post, I wrote that Location Based Services are the company’s effort to transform geographical positioning information into valuable and relevant data for a customer, to make a profit. Since then I had the opportunity to talk, work and advise leading companies in the industry regarding new products and services in the LBS arena.

LBS are very similar to other businesses in the sense that in order to succeed you need a solid revenue model and a clear value proposition. Sounds simple; but when approaching the LBS market and trying to understand the dynamics of its Value Chain the troubles begin. Many companies are getting this right and are already making profits. Others try to migrate WEB2.0 applications to the mobile world and discover later that in this environment “Free” is an expensive term. No wonder VCs usually look at maps as a feature and not something to build a whole application around.

That’s why I was glad to know about the TheWhereBusiness initiative to organize Metaplaces. I spoke with one of the main persons behind this effort, Thomas Hallauer, who mentioned that MetaPlaces will be the key place for the enablers of the Location market where key thinkers and players swap strategies to make location pay. MetaPlaces is the first conference to focus on the next wave of innovation and revenue generation for mobile and web-based LBS.

When I asked Thomas who is coming and what are their expectations he said “…over 150 location business developers are coming to MetaPlaces to analyze the changing dynamics and revenue models of the LBS market now that the worlds of location content, interactive advertising, Geo enabled web services, and traditional carrier-driven mobile LBS solutions have collided…”

As part of my contribution to their efforts I’ll be moderating the Location Based Social Networks panel composed by Abaqus, Alcatel-Lucent, Loopt, Skout, and Socialight. We’ll have the opportunity to talk about topics like: revenue business models, how to build a community from scratch, how to use existing ones, and how brands can monetize their mobile extension. What would YOU ask those companies? I urge you to add your questions here as comments – I promise to bring back some answers.

The second conference is LBS LATAM in Miami. For many years I worked in the telecommunications market in Latin America and when the Frecuencia Group asked me to chair this event it put together my past and my present in something I see as the future.

Not many people know that the penetration of mobiles phones in Latin America is around 80% and in some countries in the territory over 100%. America Movil (Telmex) and Telefonica Movistar share around 65% of market, meaning almost 10% market share of the whole world mobile market! Besides the traditional fleet management and AVL applications, we start seeing Location Based Services made in CALA i.e. Location Based Social Networks, Friend Finders, Bus routes notifications, and others. However, this is a completely different market with particular value chains and different user profiles in terms of usage and consuming behavior in each country.

I was surprised by the response in terms of registration from the region and vendors interested in this market. You can see companies like Telefonica, Globalstar, Nextel, Ancel, Tele Atlas, OpenWave, AnyData, Position Logic, Xtify, and many others coming to meet their prospect Latin American partners.

Two busy weeks, two chances to meet key executives in different regions, two coasts, and two events with many opportunities to talk business. That’s why you can’t miss them.

I have the privilege of belonging to MENG, the Marketing Executive Networking Group. MENG is a national network of top-level marketing executives.
Last week I asked four senior marketing executives from the network how Location Based Services and Technologies will affect their practices.
Without more introduction, here are their shots.
…

Buckley Brinkman – Change Catalyst

These platforms and the technology behind them make the entire world much more visible. Experts will still be valuable, but expertise will become more widespread. The holes in our knowledge will become much clearer. My Dad calls this understanding the periphery of our ignorance. Clarity both makes our individual weaknesses much more visible and collaboration much more important. The ability to embrace the tools and become comfortable with our own personal shortcomings will be the difference between success and failure in the emerging economy.
I believe one of the keys to success is understanding what translates from platform to platform and how each platform works. One advantage for us is that there are no experts. There is a mismatch between management perspective and knowledge of the technology. Younger people generally know the technology and what it can do, but do not have the experience to apply it effectively. Senior managers understand business and have the C-level perspective, but don’t understand all the implications of the new technology. There are no experts. They are being developed day-by-day as we all learn.

Buckley Brinkman

…

Peter Kemp – Managing Partner

“The funny thing about mobile marketing is that the technology that makes it interesting also makes it irrelevant. Mobile marketing is a bit of an answer looking for a question. The web has generally made physical location irrelevant for everything but the most basic functions – and ones you are unlikely to need unless you are traveling out of an area you live or work in and already. I think it is a big idea as a marketing tool for travelers (business and leisure), but it may only be a very tactical tool, but then it is really only valuable for businesses for which I already know the quality – starbucks, pizza hut, kinkos – or I need someway to evaluate the quality (telling me there is a chinese restaurant around the corner is almost useless to me unless I know the quality of it. On the other hand, combine it with facebook, twitter, or even Match.com and it suddenly becomes an interesting social networking tool…or a creepy big brother stalking tool. Overall, I think it will be another tool, but not a game-changer.”

Peter Kemp
Managing Partner, Old greenwich partners
www.oldgreenwichpartners.com

…

Jonathan Paisner – Founder and President

As our tours appeal as much to locals as they do to tourists, location based social networking has increasingly gained our attention. To date we have had the most success among bloggers with our Rock and Roll Tour of Manhattan, reaching out to those who show an affinity for rock music and history. We will continue to foster relationships with subject matter pundits and thought-leaders, particularly as we reach out into new geographies with our tours. Locally focused community sites are a great way for us to build word of mouth and to look to share the enthusiasm that our customers have for the products. This is less a matter of buying media and more a matter of fostering a dialogue and relationship with opinion makers in local regions. Beyond marketing, we will look to these new networks of customers to help us identify new product opportunities and to engage them in spontaneous events that can add a new dimension to our user experience.

Jonathan Paisner
Founder and President – CityListen Audio Tours
www.citylisten.com

…

Mike Wittenstein – Consulting Chief Experience Officer

“In my opinion 90% of marketing dollars are wasted. Why? Because we have to communicate to people who have no interest in a particular product or service when it is mentioned to them. Location Based Services may save marketers more than half the wasted effort and expense by using “where-you-are-and-where-you’re-going” information as context to interpolate interests and intent. So, the right information goes to the right person with a need to know in the right format at the right time. It’s the way advertising should be!”

Mike Wittenstein
Consulting Chief Experience Officer
www.mikewittenstein.com

Back in business school, we learned about “The Marketing Concept” as the total company effort to satisfy customer needs at a profit.

Location based services are booming and as marketing professionals, we have real challenges on how to integrate these new technologies to our tool set together with Wikis, Blogs, Social Networks, Podcasts, etc. Are you ready for new ideas like Location Based Advertising?

From a business perspective, I would define the “Location Based Service concept” as the company’s effort to transform geographical positioning information into valuable and relevant data for a customer, to make a profit.

The Location Based Service concept, like the marketing concept has 3 components

1- Get Geographical positioning information. This can be accomplished in many ways. The obvious way is a GPS device through cellular network, IP address mapping, user input, etc. (will address this in future posts)

2- Transform this data into valuable information. Your kids are calling for a pickup at midnight; would you consider the same situation knowing they are at a friend house or wandering

around downtown? Suddenly the geographic layer of information changed the urgency of the pickup completely. What if you try to locate your grandmother suffering from Alzheimer or if you want to know where is your task force at any given moment. What if instead having the pizza place telling you “…another 5 minutes…” you can go to the web and receive a service “Where is my pizza”!! (No doubt this is a nice application, particularly if your teen son came with friends from a soccer game and they are starving…)
The number of possible applications is limited to the extent of your imagination (and of course some technical limitations…), but the idea is to generate value for somebody and get paid for that service.

3- Make a profit. It’s amazing how many companies/developers forget that the ultimate reason of putting a business together is TO MAKE A PROFIT. Location Based Services is an expensive business. Usually your current location needs to be relayed to certain application server and most of the time this is accomplished through cellular networks; hence somebody must pay the bill. When you buy a personal locator device – PLD (like zoombak, Leipac, and others) they have a cellular device included, usually with a SIM Card, to communicate your location – and that service is expensive.

The number of LBS applications is growing exponentially. Just in the last few months I’ve seen dozens of free Location Based Social Networking sites come alive. The question is how many of those will be alive next year. For me the answer is simple, only those with a solid revenue model and clear value proposition will last. Some are betting on valid strategies based on collective user value, wikonomic “prosumers”, “fremium” services, etc. In that case, the keys to success are a) make sure somebody else pays the communication costs and b) be sure your customers generate real aggregated value you can capitalize.

First post! I will talk about those services and business models, including GeoTagging, WEB 2.0 applications, Location Based Social Networking, Location Based Advertising, Privacy Issues, and many other.

YOUR OPINIONS are welcomed and desired.

THANK YOU!