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 Beyond Location Whack-a-Mole (Part 1) →

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 Google Maps raises the bar…again →

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.

I believe that all mobile strategies will soon have a location component.  When that happens, “location” appended to “mobile” will become redundant, like saying an electric computer.

But we’re not there yet. In the meantime, I talk to a lot of people who want to develop differentiating location-based capabilities in their mobile strategy.  Many of those people find the array of names and sub-categories of technologies confusing.

In trying to explain the ecosystem one morning, I drew it out on the placemat at the University Cafe in Palo Alto (I know…typical!).  It seemed helpful so I redid it as a presentation.  I have subsequently shown it to several folks in the mobile and location world.  While it is simplistic, it is a good starting point to categorize the various players.  I added a few examples and caveats and posted it in Slideshare.  Continue reading Now that ought to clear it up… →

(Note: Originally published on 7/28/10 at http://marcprioleau.blogspot.com/)

I’ve been hearing about an underground discussion among the tech crowd called the Billie Ray Valentine Contest. I am not the originator of the contest but since it seems only to be passed on in the crowded hallways of tech conferences, I thought I’d explain it here.

Who is Billie Ray Valentine?

Continue reading The Billie Ray Valentine Contest →

Note: Originally published on 11/30/10 at http://marcprioleau.blogspot.com/)

Last week’s announcement that Steve Coast, the founder of OpenStreetMap, had been hired by Microsoft’s Bing Map group was the latest move in the high-stakes play to own and control the digital map, and the underlying location-based services. In four years, the industry has moved from the seemingly unbreakable duopoly of NAVTEQ and Tele Atlas to a place where most of the major players want to control their destiny through proprietary map data, or, failing that, an open, free data set.

Continue reading Got Maps? →