Tag: mobile

  • Most of Facebook’s valuation is driven by 0.15% of Mobile Gamers

    As you read the breathless reviews of Facebook’s Q2 2014 results, remember that the entire App economy depends on a tiny group of whales who spend hundreds of dollars a month on in-App purchases.

    This is terrifying.

    Facebook’s stock price is the second derivative of in-app purchase revenue. Things are highly geared, and incredibly risky. Which isn’t to say that you can’t keep making money on $FB; just know the risks you’re running.

    It’s only a matter of time before Tim Cook makes a move to capture some of the App advertising market for himself.

    All that said, well done Facebook!

  • Location 2012

    • users are smart and motivated enough to figure this out, and don’t mind sharing all of their location data, all the time, with everyone — this is consistent with Scoble’s belief in the end of privacy
    • carriers will sit back and just let this happen; carriers have been screwing up location based services since the dawn of the mobile web — they could easily interfere and botch this, too, by pushing their own solutions and making it difficult for users to use alternatives
    • device manufacturers and users will continue to let all of the logic move to the cloud; phones are incredibly powerful computers, and will get even more so — why not have my handset decide when to disclose my location, for whom and why?
    Nevertheless, this is the most complete description of the future that I’ve seen to date, and is worth a read.
  • When Location Matters

    Wow, what a few months. A wedding, a trip to Africa, and a tumultuous return to work that included a last-minute invitation to sit on a panel at the semantic web conference.

    Unrelated to all of this I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about location-specific mobile applications. Foursquare, Gowalla, MyTown, Yelp! and other apps have people checking in, buying places, and generating a lot of structured data tied to location and community. Having this data – and the basic services, like check-in, that you need to collect it – is only the first step. Owning a collection of users with locations, friends, and interests gives you the foundation of a useful, location-based mobile service. The exciting question is what gets built on that foundation. (Chris Dixon dubbed all of this the geo stack.)

    To make a real business you’ve got to build something on top that someone – a consumer, advertiser, or both – will actually pay for. There are a few different approaches already in use:

    • The Listings Business (Yelp and others)
    • The Local Coupon Business (foursquare, Yelp, Aloqa…)
    • The Search Ads Business (Google Local Search, Yahoo!…)
    • Virtual Currency / In-Game Items (myTown)
    • Premium Services (Skout)
    • Subscription Services (Traffic.com, Inrix, and others)

    What’s interesting is that we’re seeing innovation in both the free to consumer and pay-per-use models. Unlike the wired web, mobile web is taking off after users are already used to paying for services used on their phones – even if they’re just buying ringtones. Apple and Google (and, arguably, Microsoft with Zune) have removed a lot of the friction by setting up online payment platforms and providing strong incentives to get users connected. So all you have to do is tap buy.

    That said, relatively few of these applications are really enabled by the mobile context. Local search, most mobile games, and traffic information is almost as useful on a PC as it is on a phone. The most interesting apps – like Skout – make immediate use of your location to provide something of value. They’re still limited by hardware – for example, you can’t do location-based notification on an iPhone – but you can see where things are going.

  • foursquare – Like twitter, but Useful 🙂

    foursquare launched their API yesterday (Mashable, Techcrunch). With it, developers can:

    • identify what city the user is in
    • read/write user and friends’ check-in data
    • look up information for a particular location
    • make/send friend requests
    • retrieve venue data
    • perform a local search that includes information from your friends’ check-ins
    • add venues, tips, and to-dos

    This enables some pretty cool applications. For example, what about an AR app that shows me where all of my friends are? Or a navigation app that automatically checks in when I arrive at a location? It also opens up some interesting possibilities for advertisers. Want to create a location-aware application that can target relevant local offers – build a foursquare-aware version of Urbanspoon.

    You could also use it to push foursquare data out of their own user base and to the public at large. For example, I could build an uber-app that would allow me to tell my family that I’m running late for Thanksgiving dinner, bundle in some traffic data to estimate an ETA, and push notifications out to foursquare, twitter, or even plain old SMS.

    The comparisons to twitter are obvious but understated. Unlike twitter, foursquare has a historical record of high-value, targetable, structured data. It’s hard to make sense of a single twitter stream, let alone millions of them. But location data has structure – it can easily be parsed and sorted; relationships can be identified between people, locations, times – and that can be used to target advertising, tailor mobile services or even implement discretionary pricing.

    Unlike twitter, an open foursquare solves a user, carrier, and advertiser problem with ready, revenue generating implications. As much as I hate to admit it, maybe Scoble was right – foursquare will be bigger than twitter.

  • Location, location, location

    I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at local, mobile applications and how they fit into gaming and local commerce. Michael Arrington biopsied the social gaming economy and found it to be quite ill. Marginal advertisers (and I use even that term loosely) are filling these companies’ coffers with cash from shady lead-gen deals.

    In other news Facebook announced an updated advertising policy which, amongst other things, will allow them to target users based on the geotags of content that they post.

    Facebook also announced plans for their Open Graph API which would allow any web page to behave like a Facebook “Page.” This is a big deal. What if I could “friend,” “favorite,” or “fan” every page or story on the internet instead of “sharing” it. What would that mean? Would it have the same semantic meaning as “follow?” Would it be easier for consumers to grasp? People have great difficulty understanding the difference between saving a single item versus saving a stream of items. That’s why more users use bookmarks than RSS readers – or even twitter. If Facebook could somehow use the social graph to help users cross that bridge – or to make it irrelevant – then this could be huge.