January 2010
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Month January 2010

Entries 4 Total

Street by street, block by block

Jan 8, ’10 7:37 AM

Back in the early days of grad school, when questions about the future of online advertising came up, I was bullish about the future of location-based mobile advertising that would by contextually relevant to the content you were viewing and the place you were sitting.

I was wrong about a big piece of how this would work: I envisioned free wireless access blanketing the world, so that you could be sitting on a bench in downtown Santa Cruz with your laptop and find out, while reading a story in the Santa Cruz Sentinel’s food section, that Lulu Carpenter’s had a deal on day-old pastries right now.

This was pre-iPhone, and the most “super” mobile device I had at hand was a bottom of the line half-sausage sized thing from Verizon.

Now, that next step for local advertisers looking to capture walk-in business from real live human beings in their neighborhood is becoming far more clear.

Foursquare and Gowalla, location-based services you should be well aware of by now, are already getting into this business, opening up the market.

Here’s the “anatomy of a Foursquare special” as broken down by Cory Bergman at Lost Remote:

“Clicking over to the special reveals a useful offer for a free drink with a $20 purchase — if you show that you’ve checked in from the restaurant.”

Keep in mind, a note about a “nearby special” shows up in Foursquare next to the name of the business when you’re casually browsing nearby places, or checking in at the competition across the street.

Over at VentureBeat, a look at iPromote, a company building a mobile ad network to allow local businesses to advertise to anyone who happens to walk by:

“For a minimum of $5 per day, iPromote will serve ads to mobile phones near an advertiser’s place of business. The company serves both display ads, for which clicks aren’t counted, and cost-per-click ads where the advertiser only pays when a user clicks through an ad to their site.”

Sounds like a healthy model.

Of course, there’s a disruptive elephant-sized gorilla in the room named Google.

YouTube Preview Image

Push a button on your phone and Google tells you what’s nearby. As in, local businesses, restaurants, etc. How long before they start selling featured listings based on geography? Want to be the featured one-dollar-sign, four-star restaurant within a fixed square mile? That’ll cost ya…

Here’s the short list of location-based mobile apps on my iPhone right now:

  • Foursquare – Mostly using this these days when I’m at a restaurant or otherwise non-routine location. Especially useful when I was in New York City over New Year’s.
  • Gowalla – Trying it out. It’s cuter than Foursquare, but I don’t see how it’s any more or less useful yet.
  • Yelp – I still use Yelp on my phone whenever I’m in a strange city and just want to know where the nearest Thai, Vegetarian, or Burrito  joint can be found.
  • UrbanSpoon – Cute slot machine interface, but nothing special.
  • Brightkite – I used to check in here socially, as I way to declare when I arrived in a new town for a conference. More for social check-ins than local business action, and I haven’t checked it in months.
  • EveryBlock – Might be fun to check the restaurant inspections, Flickr photos, or crime reports here while walking down a block, but I haven’t.
  • Honorable mentions on my phone for Redfin and Zillow — both real estate apps extremely useful when househunting, especially when you just want to know what’s for sale near your current location, while you’re cruising around checking out neighborhoods.

Have any favorite location apps that I’m missing? Are any local news organizations selling their own location-based mobile ads, or just buying into larger networks?

If Shakespeare wrote The Big Lebowski

Jan 7, ’10 2:42 PM

Full script included.

If Shakespeare wrote The Big Lebowski

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We are all technologists now

Jan 7, ’10 7:29 AM

A company launches a new phone, or is rumored to likely be planning to launch a fancy tablet computer, or a new browser, or upgrading its mobile data network, and thousands (millions?) of us have something to say about it.

Really?

What do we know about technology, business, strategy, and the machinations of multinational corporations?

A lot, apparently, judging by our visceral reactions, emotions, and excitement about every new shiny object released into the technosphere.

Over at Media Decoder, David Carr says “We are all gadget nerds now,” focusing on the way technology has driven the production of culture in recent years:

“Longtime players in the media space have been struggling to come to grips with an era in which the consumers serve as their own programmers. And now, the rapid rate of hardware innovation is metastasizing the trend, putting smaller, more powerful tools in their hands, leaving producers of all manner of software — not just the coded kind, but movies, novels, pop songs, magazine articles — struggling to format their content in way that pleases consumers and still provides a way to make a living.”

And he’s right, but I’d like to see some analysis of, say, the evolution of personal technology from 1984 to 2009, with the intention of identifying the key moments where it leapt not just into our everyday lives as users, but into our everyday conversations as amateur pundits.

Of course, I suppose when fire was discovered, early humans were pretty psyched about that, too, and said so.

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About that resolution

Jan 6, ’10 7:34 AM

Funny thing about writing is that it used to be much easier.

Somewhere around 1991, I became one of those kids who didn’t have their textbook with them in class, but always had a spiral-bound notebook with all sorts of strange numbers and notations on the covers, and nothing but my guts spilled inside, in free verse or prose or illogical proofs, or somehow critically important diagrams that outlined everything my teenage self knew about life.

And the notebooks piled up over the next 10 years, because it was so simple to write, for myself, by myself, in one form factor or another.

But now… Oh, now…

Here’s a short list of things I did before I finally started writing this post:

  1. Started thinking about writing more.
  2. Tweeted New Year’s Resolution about writing more.
  3. Considered Posterous, Tumblr, or a new WordPress blog as possible vessels for “writing more,” which has now earned quotes for itself as it becomes a concept off in the distance instead of a concrete thing I might actually do.
  4. Considered writing a blog post here along the lines of “hey, I might start writing more here about other stuff and less about journalism, because really, I think there’s just about enough of that going around.”
  5. Considered redesigning blog first.
  6. Thought better of it.
  7. Got up this morning, made coffee, etc., fiddled with my superphone checking email, Twitter, Google Reader, Facebook.
  8. Opened the laptop, checked more email, found the above tweet, took a screenshot, got annoyed with laptop, restarted it.
  9. Software Update.
  10. Your MacBook must be connected to a power source to continue.
  11. Opened up WordPress. Distracted by unusually high traffic to this blog’s homepage yesterday.
  12. Fruitless, half-assed investigation of traffic.
  13. Upgraded plugins.
  14. Upgraded WordPress.
  15. Started writing.

Just 15 steps.

Writing more is easy!

Probably related: Go listen to Merlin Mann talk about the perils of getting hung up on getting started. Wait a minute, maybe you shouldn’t click on that link. Maybe you should just… y’know… Start.