Prioleau Advisors

com-mod-i-ty: noun: a mass produced unspecialized product

During the cocktail hour at last week’s Where 2012 conference I had a conversation that I hear a lot these days:  Maps are just a commodity now. Google’s move to charge for maps has sparked an well publicized exodus to mapping alternatives; many, but not all based on OpenStreetMap. The statement always bothers me…granted there are many open source alternatives out there now, but has it really gotten that easy, that reproducible, that “unspecialized” that it can be bought and sold with the same lack of differentiation as wheat futures and pork bellies? Continue reading →

Recent patent battles in mobile have raised the value of controlling a war chest of IP to secure one’s position among the super-powers in tech’s version of the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).  With news that Apple has recently secured the vaunted “Killer Patent” for location services, there is new speculation about a new round of patent wars in the location space and specifically, the social location market. With so many expectations resting on “SoLoMo”, any hammer lock on Intellectual Property (IP) in this area is likely to get the tech media into full on hyperventilation mode.

I am not a patent expert and can’t comment on the validity or strength of the Apple (or any other) patent.  But I know this: The Apple patent comes from the Dot.Com v1 era (1999-2001)…and there is more where that came from. If SoLoMo is the next hot market, the next rush may be to buy patents and IP in this area. Continue reading →

Not this type of platform...

As part of the keynote address at the AppUp Elements Conference, Intel announced that they had agreed to acquire Telmap, the Israel-based location platform that has supplied navigation and mapping to many wireless carriers including O2, Vodafone, Orange and others. The reported price was $300M or so. If true, that’s a great result for Telmap. They’re good guys and have been at it for a while, so congratulations.

Update Oct 8, 2011:  There is a lot of skepticism about this number. Telmap had reported revenue of $30M, which makes a $300M acquisition seem unlikely. For comparison, NIM was bought at closer to 2-3X revenues). Continue reading →

Ludovic Privat of GPS Business News interviewed me for a podcast about M&A trends in the Location Business. Unfortunately, it is in the subscription section of the site so it’s a little hard to get at, but I guess I should be flattered to be considered “Premium Content”! We cover a range of topics, including recent acquisitions of Where.com by eBay, Pelago by Groupon and Navigon by Garmin plus some related topics such as general trends in the market, Nokia’s consolidation of NAVTEQ into their Location Services group, etc. If you can get to it, I think it’s worth a listen. If you can’t, ping me and we can talk about it.

Michael Vakulenko writes an interesting post on the gap in mobile services between the handset OEM’s and the big Internet Platforms such as Google and Microsoft.  This has been pretty widely known but he does a nice job of outlining where the gaps are by competitor (see chart below).

Continue reading →

In the previous post, I speculated that, despite the current infatuation with Pull-style location based apps, ultimately Push-based apps will have more appeal to enterprises wanting to connect with their customer base.  My premise is that they won’t have a choice.  While they may experiment with games, check-ins or what ever comes next, ultimately they will want to leverage their rich CRM data and they will want to own the customer connection. Working through a third party app won’t give them that.  Developing their own app won’t get mind share.  So they will look at ways to talk directly to the customer at the time and place of their choosing.  And that will be through push.

I’d further speculate that we will see three phases: Continue reading →

The Push for Pull

Most of the discussion in location to date has been about some variant of pull-based engagement: the user takes a phone out and does something, be that a check-in, a location-tagged tweet, a game, or a search for something nearby.  As discussed in the previous post, these variants are popping up and down, falling in and out of favor and spawning on-going discussions over who will win. All assume an active user and a reactive cloud: the cloud responds to the user action in some rewarding manner. Continue reading →

It’s Noisy Out There

This week’s SXSW event did nothing to lessen the din around social location services. The first six months of 2010 was “The Year of the Check-In”. The last half was the “Year of Why it isn’t Check-Ins”. The last six months was also the “Year of the Geo-Fence” and the “Year of the Local Deal”. And this week we hear it’s the “Year of Local Group Chat”. New location models are coming and going like the plastic rodents in a Whack-a-Mole game.   We can’t even dedicate a full twelve months to our “Year of the _____” meme.  If it’s confusing for the Geo-Crowd, it must be incomprehensible for the advertisers who don’t have time to take aim at one trend before it disappears and another pops up. And that is NOT GOOD since it results in desultory experiments with location rather than concerted efforts. Continue reading →

Marissa Mayer, head of Google Local gave a generally neglected overview of Google Maps at SXSW.  She reported some new stats (150M users of mobile app, 2B driving miles on Google Navigation), but this was mostly lost in the chatter about new group chat apps or where to get good breakfast tacos.

Google maps has been raising the bar so often that their latest innovations rarely make big news. Continue reading →

GPS Business News did an extended interview with me and broadcast it as a podcast.  It’s kind of long but hopefully interesting for those interesting in maps and geo.  We talk about trends in location, location platforms, maps and M&A in the location market, roughly in that order.