The Archives

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When Aesop downloaded an app and tried to navigate indoors…

Tuesday, November 23rd, 2010

“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?

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Indoor Navigation: The new Gold rush? Part-2 – Ecosystem and opportunities.

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

Is Indoor navigation a viable business? What are the main business factors that will determine the broad adoption and success of indoor navigation solutions?

A few months ago I wrote an introduction about the opportunities in indoor navigation. Please read the comments as every single one adds an additional piece to the puzzle. My question today focuses more on the business perspective and less on the technical solutions. Who can make it happen? What can we learn from the evolution of Location Based Services in general and Personal Navigation in particular? Read More

How location will enable milking more money from Social Networks

Tuesday, April 20th, 2010

Why is location changing the business of social networking? Because it is the missing link between virtual societies and the real world. Once I can identify the location of each member of my community, I can easily find ways to make money from it.

The value of Location

Location will open the door to a new level of hyper-targeting. Not only can I target customers who answer to a certain demographic profile, but I can do it based on their location, and I can predict their behavior based on past locations. I can be confident in sending an invitation to a football fan who is close to a sports bar, because I know he likes sports, there is a game and he is not at the stadium. I’ll also extend that invitation to the usual friends he meets on game days. Everyone wins — My users enjoy the opportunity to meet in a place and receive a discount; my customer (the bar) will pay me for having my users coming to their establishment. Read More