Local Response: Monetizing On "Their" Behalf

Image via CrunchBaseNihal Mehta: Being Mysterious About Local Response

My response is based on this TechCrunch post. Looks like in one sweep Nihal Mehta is about to monetize on behalf of all players in the local space. It is quite an audacious move.

TechCrunch: Buzzd Rebrands As Local Response; Debuts Social Customer Management Tool For Businesses: combine the element of the check-in he found intriguing with Buzzd and advertising and marketing elements ..... he calls “a culmination of everything he’s done,” of this is Local Response, a new web-based tool that allows local businesses to respond to the “check-in” on social media sites with marketing campaigns to promote transactions. ...... LocalResponse aggregates real-­‐time social media check-­‐ins from Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, Instagram and dozens of other services to provide a simple interface for local businesses to directly respond to their most influential and valuable customers. What’s compelling about the platform compared to competitors is that it analyzes massive amounts of data in addition to check-ins from the Twitter firehose, photo sharing sites and more to find other forms of check-ins. These could be posting a picture on Instagram of a dish from a restaurant or Tweeting that you are visiting a particular bar. ...... explicitly (i.e. check-ins on Foursquare) and implicitly (by analyzing natural language on Facebook, Twitter, etc.; e.g. “I’m headed to ShakeShack”). Mehta says most check-ins are actual implicit and many social media platforms catered to helping businesses track check-ins miss this key data. ...... Not only does Local Response track all of this data but it allows businesses to respond to these Tweets and messages with a marketing campaign, coupon or advertisement. ...... So Shake Shack could send a Tweet back to someone who had just snapped a photo of a burger with a link to a 10 percent off coupon on the next visit. ...... Local Response has actually creates a number of canned responses which businesses can automatically send. ..... For the past six months, LocalResponse has been running a private beta, with over 2,000 campaigns for local businesses in New York City. The links in the Tweets and messages sent by these local businesses to consumers who “checked-in” to their establishment are averaging a 60 percent click-­‐through rate and 15-­‐20 percent redemption rates. That’s high and impressive. ...... Mehta says that the platform is so highly-focused in its data collection, that it can send highly targeted Tweets to consumers who are interested in the promotions or campaigns. For example he says that Local Response will run two to three hundred search terms across its data for a particular business. Also, the aim of Local Response is not to overwhelm consumers’ stream with advertisements. Users will never receive more than one message in 7 days ...... a platform for brands and agencies is in the works. ...... closed a $1.5 million in funding this past December from Verizon Ventures, Charles River Ventures, and Metamorphic. ...... plans to raise a new, larger round of funding this Summer ..... For now, Local Response is free for businesses. Eventually the startup plans to go the freemium route and will also charge for the brand-focused application. And Local Response is launching with half a million businesses that are already pre-indexed (with search terms). All they have to do is type in the business name, and they can get started using the platform.

A second natural move might be to partner up with the willing players to help them monetize their particular services for cuts, like Google ads help you monetize your particular media site. Because Local Response is not going to have access to the detailed data that those individual services might have.

The FoodSpotting Android App Is Here

Image via CrunchBaseTed Grubb: the man behind the myth.
Spotted Blog: The FoodSpotting Android App Is Here!
Mashable: FoodSpotting Comes To Android
Fred Wilson: Mobile Notifications
TechCrunch: Android Users Get An Official Taste Of Foodspotting Just In Time For SXSW

The iPhone app took FoodSpotting to 600,000 downloads and counting. The recent Instagram integration - Instagram is on its way to overtaking FourSquare and Gowalla combined - is worth at least a million downloads. And this Android app is worth 1.5 million downloads and on.

I say power to the people. Power to the masses.

Now launch a campaign for food trucks that says FoodSpotting Certified!

Wordpress For Mobile App Creation

Image via Wikipedia

ReadWriteWeb: Like WordPress for Mobile App Creation: Cabana is a Service to Watch: Is it possible for a visual drag-and-drop mobile app creation tool to deliver a sophisticated product? ..... Drag and drop addition of features like a camera, check-ins on services like Gowalla or Foursquare, integration of the Instagram photo API and many more things are possible. ..... There is a clear demand for this kind of light app publishing technology

This is the future people. Until the mobile web attains the same levels as the big screen web, we will need apps. And just like every offline business needs its own specific website, the mobile phone app has become the equivalent of the website on the big screen web. And the only way to meet that demand would be through services like this that promise to take the wizardry out of mobile app creation. Anyone who can drag and drop should be able to build an app.

FourSquare Has 6,000,000 Users

Image via WikipediaFourSquare has put out a blog post that I urge you click over to. The post displays a cool infographic.

FourSquare has 6,000,000 users. That is awesome. The last I was keeping track they had a million users heading to two million. That is a rapid ascent.

I expect FourSquare to keep that pace. It has been a company to watch. The next five years are looking really good for the mobile web, and there FourSquare competes with itself.

Arugula And Location Patents

Arugula, the aromatic salad green. Also known as rocket, roquette, rugula and rucola, and is popular in Italian cuisine.

Presidential candidate Barack Obama said arugula on the campaign trail and people were left scratching their heads. Arugula who?

Facebook's Location Patent

And now we learn the Einsteins at the patent office have granted not one but two location patents. In this land of plenty. I would not be surprised if Gowalla has the third one. If not why has FourSquare bothered competing with that little nuisance in the first place? Why not simply go ahead and sue like every big company seems to be doing to every other big company back there in Silicon Valley? With the exception of Larry Ellison. Larry is into fist fights. (Putting My Money On Larry Ellison)

TechCrunch: Oops! That Facebook Location Patent Forgot To Mention Crowley’s Earlier Dodgeball Patent
PC Magazine: Skyhook Sues Google in Location Patent, Contract Dispute
The Tech Herald: Motorola targets Apple across 18 patent violations

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StartUp Anxiety For FourSquare?

Image via CrunchBase
I touched upon this topic in a blog post weeks back when Facebook Places just went live.

Facebook Doing Location Is Like Google Doing Social, Almost

In light of this New York Observer article (In Facebook's Crosshairs), I feel the need to elaborate a little.

New York Observer: In Facebook's Crosshairs: He didn't make the trip himself, sending in his stead Foursquare's new VP for mobile and partnerships, a fellow named Holger Luedorf, who spoke at the event for only a few minutes and made clear that Foursquare was not yet sure about the nature of its "partnership" with Facebook. ...... The next day, Mr. Crowley wrote on Twitter that his 86-year-old grandma had called him and remarked that this Facebook thing "sounds like Four-Squared, but without the fun." .... the New York City tech scene, which badly needs a major local success story ..... turning their fledgling service—currently at some three million registered users and growing by about 18,000 new users per day—into the city's first true social media juggernaut. ...... Crowley wants Foursquare to transcend its status as a niche mobile check-in tool, and to become the platform upon which all other check-in tools, whatever they turn out to be, are built. ...... —if you control the infrastructure, you control the market. We see the same thing with Twitter and with Apple." ...... "My personal view is, it's going to be huge—Facebook huge," said Hunch founder Chris Dixon, an investor in Foursquare who is not known for polite optimism. "They'll have a huge brand and a direct relationship with users. ... They absolutely could become the dominant platform upon which all check-in services are built." ........ "your favorite, er, mobile + social + friend finder + social city guide + nightlife game thing" ...... Facebook's apparent desire to become the dominant platform for check-ins did not worry him ...... We're developing this really deep and rich road map for what we're going to do ..... the implementation of Places would be good for Foursquare in the long run because it meant Facebook would be doing the hard work of popularizing the hard-to-grasp concept of check-ins—location-based and otherwise—while the Foursquare crew was left to innovate and figure out new ways to make them useful to people and the businesses that want to sell them things. ........ Where Foursquare has an admired—some might say tricked out —API, Facebook has so far released only a read-only version of theirs, which severely limits what developers can build on top of it.

It is perhaps relevant to mention another company that I blogged about recently: FoodSpotting. That is a bi-coastal startup. But it does have a major New York City presence. So I guess hometown pride is warranted. But perhaps bi-coastal is the future. You get the best of both worlds. And you prove geography is not that relevant.

FoodSpotting does not do bland check ins, it does a very specific type of check ins. Does that mean FourSquare will some day wake up and eat up FoodSpotting for lunch? I don't see that as a possibility. FourSquare just can not do what FoodSpotting does. That same logic for Facebook, FourSquare is even more true. Facebook does not have the option to become an experience for which checking in is your starting point. On the other hand FourSquare could make claim that the FourSquare social graph is much more real than the Facebook social graph. The truth is they are just different.

FoodSpotting Is The Next FourSquare

Even if Facebook had not done Places, there were no guarantees FourSquare would survive and do well and see an IPO exit - my personal recommendation to the company - but the real news from the Facebook Places launch was it gave FourSquare a visibility that it never had before. How is that depressing? There were more check ins on FourSquare that day than any other day in recorded history.

If I were FourSquare, I'd still be more worried about Gowalla than Facebook, although I'd work extra hard to work out just the right partnership with Facebook.

The FourSquare founders are brimming with ideas they want to execute, features they want to add. The real action for FourSquare is in the front, it is not in the rear view mirror.

I look forward to FourSquare burning up all its 20 million and getting ready to raise its next round. Sooner is better.

It is unrealistic to think Facebook could have stayed away from the location space. It is also unrealistic to think Facebook can become the leader in the location space if checking in is not the starting point of the Facebook experience, which it isn't. Facebook Mobile is mini me. Facebook is a big screen web experience, primarily.

New York Observer: Foursquare’s Happy Growing Pains: Crowley said the space shortage has been not just inconvenient but detrimental to Foursquare's evolution ..... "There are three or four big-ticket items we've been talking about all summer," Mr. Crowley said. "All the specs are written—they're waiting there, like half of the designs are done—but they just haven't been implemented because we don't have an engineer that could work on it full time." ...."Or when the lounge furniture started coming together, it was like, 'Whoa, real conference rooms, with chairs!'"

In The News

VentureBeat: Blog Platform Tumblr’s Soaring Traffic Brings Growing Pains: seeing massive traffic growth ..... skyrocketed over the first half of the year and reached about 1.7 billion page views in the month of August. .... WordPress.com, an older, more established blog platform, recently reported 2.1 billion monthly pageviews ..... Tumblr, which employs about 10 people ..... Six Apart, a blogging pioneer whose TypePad service competes most directly with Automattic’s WordPress.com, recently announced it is folding the simplified blogging service Vox, which never gained firm traction after four years of existence. ..... You can give this to somebody who can barely program a VCR and they can do a blog post in a minute.” .... you can find a whole lot more of value on a Tumblr page potentially than on a Twitter page.

GigaOm: Chris Dixon To VCs: Act More Like Startups: “have fewer meetings” and “have everyone at the firm blog/tweet.” ..... venture firms should act more like the startups they invest in, right down to his suggestion that they “have offices that look and cost like startup offices — or better yet, don’t have offices at all [and] spend your time visiting companies.” ..... VCs should not “talk/tweet/blog about your vineyard, yachting, golfing etc. while you tell your CEOs to work non-stop and be frugal.” ..... “Stop kidding yourself that you add a lot of value beyond recruiting/intros/governance/financing/selling companies.” ..... “Say no to companies. Saying “come back later” feels like a free option to you but actually hurts you and the startup in the long run.”

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Buzzd Party Thursday

Image of Nihal Mehta

“I always say that the person who stuck an online banner on a phone should be shot.”
- Buzzd Co-Founder and CEO Nihal Mehta.

TechCrunch: Buzzd Aggregates Check-Ins From Foursquare, Gowalla And Others In Social City Guide
Adotas: Mehta Has Always Been Buzzd On Mobile Marketing

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“Since ‘01 we’ve been saying ‘Next year is going to be the year of mobile!’ And next year always is — the next year always doubles.”

If The Tweet Is The Atom, What Is Location?

The tweet is to the web what the atom is to the universe. Twitter was hot for the first half of last year. This year the heat/buzz seems to be with the location space people, FourSquare leading. What is location? Location is one of the sub atomic particles: electron, proton, neutron. Begs the question, what are the other sub atomic particles? And where are they? Are they in the works?

The mobile web is growing faster than the regular web, and location is so very fundamental in that space. It is so much easier to check in than to tweet out. When you are on the move, even 140 characters can feel long.

Maybe location is in a league of its own, maybe there are no other sub-atomic particles. Or maybe the tweet is the atom of the regular web and location in the atom of the mobile web. The atom metaphor can only be taken so far.

Check in is a basic feature. FourSquare has to try to own it, it has to extend that feature to other web properties. Google took over the web with Google ads. My blog and your blog could run Google ads. Facebook took over with Facebook Connect. FourSquare needs to do something similar. There is a much lesser incentive for my check in to exist on the FourSquare website than it is for my social graph to primarily reside on Facebook.com. You want to be able to take your check in with you to many other places.

I made this point in a comment I left at the official FourSquare blog when the Please Rob Me controversy was raging. (Location! Location! Location!)

More recently I came across a blog post by Robert Scoble that was another aha moment for me as far as FourSquare is concerned.

Only a few days before that Robert had put out a blog post that was rather hostile to FourSquare and the location space in general: Malleable Social Graphs And Mini-Mobs: Why Facebook Could Destroy Foursquare And Gowalla With One Check In.

Basically what he was saying was Facebook was going to offer location, and that was going to kill FourSquare. I left a comment saying Robert, dude, you are so missing out. A few days later he put out a blog post that blew my mind: Are Location Geeks At Where 2.0 Off The Path To Real Money?

In this post he was saying he wanted to check in into future locations. He wanted to be able to say where he was going to check in a week or a month from now, and that that check in was more monetizable. I agree. I wonder how FourSquare will respond to that.

Craig Newmark, Dennis Crowley, Jennifer 8 Lee: Koreatown

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The Foursquare Rap: Badges Like Us

Lyrics:
Mr. Silvas in da building
Checkins by the hundreds, thousands, trillionz

Ayo I know its my first stop
Look at that leaderboard and see me at the top

Bouncin to new places, adding em quick
I know all the TO-DOs and I got all the tips

Show up at the Bar and I check in Right Away
Sent it to my Twitter cuz Im here to stay

Looks like you got ousted welcome to the game
This is Foursquare bitch! Gowalla aint the same!!

Now that Im the mayor, now that Im here
Gimme my free breadsticks AND my cold beer!!

La la la la
How it feel to wake up and be the mayor of the city!
La la la la
Tryina get that Crunked badge, drinkin like P Diddy

[Chorus]

Got a rock like this
Cant use an iPhone, AT&Ts a piece of shhh

No one on the corner had an app on this
So I used my mobile web, wasnt very quick

You can learn where to eat just by checking my feed
Checkin checkin my feed checkin checkin my feed

Follow my lead its the road to success
Never need a reservation, they always say YES

But I cant teach you my swag
You can pay for a coffee but you cant buy a badge

School of social media Imma grad
I hope this hits techcrunch or else Ill be sad

Its Newby
Checkin w/ the groupies eating lotsa sushi

Newwwbyy
Bet you didnt know we could flow like thiiiiis

[Chorus]

Lets talk about the knockoffs, they just imitating
They cant even compare and no were not even hating

Copyin foursquare cuz you lack innovation
How could you turn down Googles valuation?

So let me say it now, let me be clear
Foursquare is the app that all you should fear

Hockey stick growth, all star investors
Lots of passionate users, all beta testers

I add lots of value, Im a superuser
You cant spell your top venues, super abuser

Dont checkin to your house, thats just really lame
Ill snatch up all your badges, call me David Blaine

Your checkins are fake, theres no way those are true
20 stops in one night? IM GONNA CATCH YOU!!

And whats up with all these randos trying to friend me?
Im checked in off the grid like TIGER WOODS B!!!!!













TechCrunch: Badges Like Us: FourSquare Gets Its Rap Song
Location! Location! Location!

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Location! Location! Location!

Social Media Week: The Best NY Tech MeetUp Ever

I take hometown pride in FourSquare. Twitter is in California, but FourSquare is in New York. I have met the two founders in person, Dennis (@dens) and Naveen (@naveen), although I am not Facebook friends with either yet.

Craig Newmark, Dennis Crowley, Jennifer 8 Lee: Koreatown
Dennis Crowley: I Underestimated Him

Make no mistake, FourSquare is on the cutting edge. Location liberates the web. Time magazine's person of the year one of these past years - You - would like to share where he/she is. There is a funny video on YouTube from last year that shows the successor company to Twitter will disallow vowels and hence make messages shorter even. Ends up, we were not going in that direction after all. 140 characters are a good size for the atom. But we were instead going for something simpler and more fundamental.

I never thought Google might kill Facebook or that Facebook might kill Twitter. If anything the dawn kills the night, it is not the other way round. FourSquare will not get killed by Twitter or Facebook, and it is far ahead of its competition Gowalla. Did I spell that right?

Location is going to be the starting point for many things you might want to do. And because FourSquare does location, although late to the game, FourSquare I think is poised to beat Twitter itself in the monetization department. Are you telling me my customer just checked into my establishment? How can you not monetize that?

It is official, we are now an urban species. Homo Sapiens Urbano. I took to FourSquare gingerly. I avoided it. Then I started texting in my check ins. Now I realize it is such an essential tool if you are trying to turbo charge your social networking. Roaming the tech and biz circles in the city is like going to all the top schools in the country at once. NYC is cream of the crop. You want to feast on people as you move out and about.

FourSquare makes it fun to explore a "dense" - Dennis' word, you can tell, the guy really likes his God given name - city like New York City. Big cities are popping all over the world. Actually it is impossible to explore without.

I never integrated my Twitter account to my Facebook account. But I have integrated FourSquare to both Twitter and Facebook. Most of my Facebook friends are not in New York. Heck, I went to high school in Kathmandu. My Facebook page is public - anyone can visit all corners, so I don't have to feel bad about not accepting friend requests - and it has more than 10,000 pictures of NYC. I plan to add tens of thousands more over the years. I do that for my non New York friends. NYC is magic all over the world. My FourSquare check ins allow me to share some of NYC with my far away friends.

I remember looking down upon Twitter starting out. I only jumped onto the bandwagon in February 2009, thanks to @jobsworth. What am I doing? I am staring at the computer screen. What do you think I am doing? 140 characters, that must be for the lazy bones. I write full blown blog posts. What do you think I am doing?

My skepticism with FourSquare was not as pronounced, but I have taken to it rather gingerly. I was not at all excited when they did their demo at the NY Tech MeetUp, I believe last March. Many startups fail. Not all that do not fail are on the cutting edge. FourSquare is on the cutting edge. It is rightly called the next Twitter, although it might take a year or two to scale out to Twitter size. I am patiently waiting.

Last night I checked into five locations on or near Bleecker St just to make a point. Go FourSquare.

Dennis (@dens) and Naveen (@naveen) are not Charles Darwin, not even close, heck, if they are Evan Williams, and Jack Dorsey, or Biz Stone, they have not proven that yet, but they might, I think they will, and I would not put the two as being in the same league as the Google founders, not now, not five or 10 years from now. But this Please Rob Me talk reminds me of a heckler taking Charles Darwin to task: So if you are suggesting we descended from monkeys, may I ask which side of your family would that be for you, did you descend from the monkeys from your mother's side or your father's side?

I don't accept friend requests on FourSquare from random people. Knowing you might not be enough down the line. And some day I might disconnect my FourSquare with my Twitter and Facebook, but that day might be a few years away. FourSquare allows you to share location, but it does not force you to share it with everybody. You can choose not to share that widely. It's your choice.

Considering how easy it has been for me to become Mayor of two places, one thing is for sure, if you are on FourSquare and checking in, you are easily a member of the tech elite. And if you have not been visited by burglars yet, it must be because there are not that many burglars among the tech elite.

If you are sophisticated enough to play with FourSquare, you are sophisticated enough to know what your privacy options on it are. And if you are sophisticated enough to code Please Rob Me, you surely know you are messing with the facts. That is dishonest.

Fractals: Apple, Windows 95, Netscape, Google, Facebook, Twitter

For long TechCrunch has been my favorite blog, but I am beginning to have my doubts. I think ReadWriteWeb might be better, although with less traffic. TechCrunch pulled a cheap stunt on Farmville, and now they are trying to do the same with FourSquare. You don't report on the cutting edge if your first instinct is to demonize the cutting edge. Maybe you can't be trusted with the cutting edge.

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I Just Became Friends With Anu Shukla

TechCrunch: Please Rob Me Makes FourSquare Super Useful For Burglars
TechCrunch: FourSquare Reponds To Please Rob Me: Please Shut Up
Mashable: How Robbers Did Their Dirty Deeds Before FourSquare
Gawker: How Not To Be A FourSquare Jackass
FourSquare: On FourSquare, Location And Privacy

The message I left at the various blogs: The  real culprit is the construction industry. They have not applied invisible paint on our houses.

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