SXSW, Location, Mobile App Advertising and WHERE we Stand
by Chris - UX Developer :: on March 19th, 2010 :: in Blog
Last week I had the privilege of attending SXSWi. Once known mainly for its music festival, SXSWi has now become famous for the launches of Twitter and Foursquare. The buzz around what will be the next big thing to come out of SXSW is almost as big as when the Apple camp has an announcement. What’s Twitter’s next move, can Foursquare keep growing, especially with Gowalla on its heels? Or will we see the next Twitter/Foursquare game changer?
The answer(s). Twitter launches @anywhere, and Foursquare and Gowalla hold court in Austin with two very different approaches, but no game changers. That was the theme of many of the panels, “What is next for us in the mobile app world?” We do know that the two big areas are location and advertising. Largely the two go hand in hand. Last year $2.6 billion was spent on mobile advertising, with 5% on mobile display ads (the remainder largely spent on SMS). With more and more GPS enabled devices on the market, relevant location based content can’t be ignored. Consumers are becoming less tolerant of banner ads and more demanding of local, relevant content being delivered to them.
So, WHERE do we stand?
We stand a few steps ahead of the pack. We have WHERE Ads™. However having the answer still leaves the bigger issue, doing it right. Just serving local content is no longer enough. It needs to be personalized to the user. It needs to show immediate value. And it CAN NOT look like an ad. Looking like an ad is more about the user perception than the actually look and feel. Though, still in its infancy, we have received positive feedback not only from users but from publishers in regards to our approach. We know we still have a lot to learn and know that there is no magic formula. The bottom line, make a product/experience people like and people will use it. It may seem obvious but so many apps get it wrong. And keep your eye on WHERE as we forge ahead in this new area.
Resources:
Twitter hash-tags: #app-vertisingtheanswer, #appvert
We launched the new Where.com to help people manage “the past” and plan for “the future”
by Walt Doyle - CEO :: on March 17th, 2010 :: in Blog
A Message from WHERE CEO Walt Doyle
Happy St. Patrick’s Day! In Boston we take St. Patty’s Day very seriously – parades, bands, bars, ballgames (Celtics of course) and much more. It’s a great excuse for everyone to come together and celebrate all aspects of city life. That’s why we chose today to launch the new Where.com and rename our company WHERE, Inc.
Our WHERE mobile product is fantastic at helping people on the go discover places and things to do. However, like all mobile services, it’s not great at helping you plan far in advance or annotate your past. We launched Where.com to help people manage “the past” and plan “the future.” All of the places you discover, rate or review on Where.com automatically synch with WHERE on your phone, making it a snap to keep track of where you have been and where you want to go.
Days like St. Patrick’s Day demonstrate how WHERE can be super useful. Today, everyone wants to grab a green pint at the best local Irish pub, but where was that great place you found last year? Or even better, the one that your friend told you about with the amazing band? If you were using WHERE and had saved these places to your Placebook, you could have easily accessed them from the Web or after you had headed out the door from your phone. Or, you could have discovered a new place with better reviews. Best part, you could have shared the location easily with your friends all at once through Facebook and Twitter.
I hope you will check out Where.com if you haven’t already, and use it to discover, save and share your favorite places. Please send us your feedback and enjoy St. Patty’s Day!!
For more details see our press release.
The Latest WHERE Roundup
by Nicole :: on March 15th, 2010 :: in Blog
The WHERE team has been hard at work creating a series of new enhancements for BlackBerry, iPhone and Android devices. This week you can see all three of our latest releases. Check out what we’ve been up to:
What’s New in WHERE v. 1.6.0 for BlackBerry
- Severe Weather Alerts: Are you in the risk zone for a blizzard? Severe thunderstorm? Or maybe a heat wave? WHERE can now update you whenever crazy weather is approaching.
- Contextually and locally relevant ads along with more valuable recommendations and offers
- Design enhancements to keep WHERE looking up to date
What’s New in WHERE v. 3.4.1 for iPhone
- A customizable dashboard that lets you choose which feeds you want to see
- New Check-in categories
- Useful gas station and movie theater detail pages that let you participate in live discussions
- Location categories in WHERE Reviews and YP.com features
What’s New in WHERE v. 1.8.9 for Android
- A fun new widget that streams information from WHERE right on your Android home screen. Glance at the weather, immediately see where the closest Starbucks is or quickly Check-in to a hot spot as soon as you open your phone.
- New pinpoint search results and categories on your Check-in list
- A fresh settings page that allows you to control and adjust WHERE
- Stronger connections to Twitter and Facebook, so Check-in is fast and easy
Visit Where.com to find out how to download WHERE onto your mobile device
Why our New Ad Network Transforms Local Mobile Advertising
by Walt Doyle - CEO :: on March 9th, 2010 :: in Blog, Uncategorized
Post by Walt Doyle, CEO of WHERE
Today we announced WHERE Ads™, one of the first hyper-local mobile advertising networks available in North America. I wanted to take the opportunity to explain a bit about the WHERE Ads network, and what motivated us to build it.
WHERE has been in market for over two years and now has millions of active users. Like many mobile publishers we have been working hard on two fronts – building a great experience for our audience while simultaneously integrating tools to monetize our audience’s engagement. WHERE Ads is focused on the monetization part.
Like many others, we work with mobile ad networks. Our closest partner has been Quattro. Quattro has been delivering high quality branded campaigns to the WHERE audience for over two years. They’ve done a great job and are a best-in-class partner. However, given the vast amount of mobile inventory available, we struggled to keep our fill rates high. When we had a high quality campaign running, everything looked great. However, when those campaigns ended we were forced to fill the inventory from a mediated group of sources and encountered content quality issues. We needed a better solution.
In our discussions with numerous other publishers we found that they shared this same issue. Some of them were big media companies with an owned/operated sales force that would sell a small percentage of their inventory and then fill from a mediated network of sources. The mediated content often conflicted with their o/o inventory, performed at a sub-par yield, and provided an unflattering experience to their audience. We recognized that if we built something for ourselves, there would be an opportunity to provide it on a network level as well.
The three big questions we needed to answer before getting started were:
1) What would we build that could provide value to our audience and make money?
2) How would we differentiate our offering in the market?
3) How would we design to scale?
Providing Value. We had witnessed a much higher yield from advertising offers, discounts and coupons delivered at a local level. We experimented in the past with various third party solutions, and while our audience responded to the content, the solutions didn’t scale. They required heavy SDK integration, didn’t work on certain platforms, and generally lacked a comprehensive DB of content. We wanted something better. As a company, we are very good at aggregating third party content at the platform level. We pull over seventy different content feeds and dynamically push that content to our users based on preferences, location, profiles, etc. In short – we already had a lot of the platform components in place to deliver a solution – we just needed the right content on the back-end.
We went to work, and now have a comprehensive DB of third party content, much of which is new to mobile. We are constantly adding new content into the database and will continue to improve on optimizing not just breadth, but also context.
Differentiated Delivery. Location is a funny thing – there are many flavors about how to acquire the location of a handset. As a company that has been operating in the mobile LBS space for four years, we use just about all of them. When thinking through optimal delivery of hyper-local ads, we were fortunate to have some unique assets. Specifically, we have access to network-based location from most of the North American operators. Technically speaking, network-based location allows you to see the location of a handset (once consumer permission is granted) without having to have a client on the handset and regardless of whether or not it is a handset with a GPS chip inside. You utilize the network itself. This is very useful for improving what’s called the “time to first fix,” indoor location issues, as well as “pushing” content to the handset. We have been using network-based location to improve the WHERE product experience, and are now also utilizing it for the optimized delivery of WHERE Ads across all phones.
Designing to Scale. Scale means many things depending upon the context – for us it was about reach. In order to scale WHERE we needed the solution to work across ALL phones and operating systems. RIM, WEB OS, Android, iPhone, HTML5, BREW, J2ME, WAP, etc. This wasn’t easy, but it was absolutely necessary. When looking to scale WHERE Ads, we recognized the physical constraints of limiting the reach to only the WHERE audience. The more precisely we targeted our delivery, the faster we would target ourselves right out of an audience! We needed to grow our audience beyond our own walls if we wanted to deliver an audience of scale to the local advertiser. This is why we have opened WHERE Ads to third party publishers. The often mentioned, but rarely realized opportunity in local is about delivering a local audience into the local merchant in real-time. Opening our platform to third parties will allow us to achieve the scale necessary to make this a reality even faster.
It’s early days and we are tremendously pleased with the results thus far. Thank you for listening and check back in soon!
Walt
Fan Report: Why I Love WHERE…
by Nicole :: on March 5th, 2010 :: in Blog
A special post from our featured fan of the day – Kristina
In the beginning of my journey with a smart phone (how did phones get so smart, and why can’t we have smart people along with the promise of new technology?) I had become an Apps Queen, downloading, giving them a test run, but sadly falling short. WHERE definitely stands alone!!
Where has become my daily connection with the clouds. On a business level, I travel to different parts of the state so using the WHERE Weather gadget I’m able to, with great ease, type in a destination city and get an hourly and weekly forecast.
Secondly, when I’m out of town, unfamiliar with my surroundings, searching for restaurants or a place to unwind with a drink, the interface makes it incredibly simple to search, which in turn compliments Google maps!!
On a personal level, going to the movies is a cinch, with all the theaters in my area, and showtimes, trailers etc.
When a program (app) works exactly like the developer promises, and all the time, all I can say is WOW!! Updates are interesting. I consider the program perfect, but then the developer updates features or adds new ones, in ways I never saw coming.
I don’t understand the logic in a great app offered to the public free of charge. In this case, twisted logic (how my mind works) makes my day!!!
Sincerely,
Kristina
(If you’re also a fan, let us know why you like WHERE. Send us a note at nicole@where.com to join our fan user panel!)
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