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

Xconomy

March 18, 2009 — Okay, bad joke in the headline. But there’s some real news behind it. The Boston startup formerly called uLocate, long known mainly as the creator of the GPS-based Where local search app for mobile phones, announced yesterday that it has taken the app’s name as its own.

The change “creates a more coherent message for the marketplace about who we are,” says Walt Doyle, Where’s CEO. “Where is our entire business, so it was time to have alignment between the consumer-facing product and our corporate identity.”

It’s just the latest in a long series of transformations for the startup, which was founded in 2003 by a group of alumni from the online news network CNET. First came child-tracking software for GPS phones, then fleet-tracking software, a pet finder, and friend-finder apps for Mapquest and the now-defunct cellular carrier Helio. After a company relaunch in 2007, uLocate came up with a platform designed to help developers build GPS-enabled “widgets” or mini-apps for multiple mobile operating systems and networks.

Finally, after raising some $16 million in venture funding from the likes of Venrock, GrandBanks Capital, and Kodiak Venture Partners, the company located its true niche. Building on the widget platform, it created the free, advertising-supported Where app, which works on almost all mobile platforms and includes many of the location-based widgets originally built as exemplars by the company’s own engineers.

Those widgets enable searches for local news, movies, weather, traffic, restaurant and business reviews, concert and sports event listings, and gas prices, as well as Starbucks and Zipcar locations. Where also features social-media tools, such as Foursquare-style check-ins and a Facebook-style community wall. It’s available for iPhones, Android phones, BlackBerry devices, Palm phones, and works on the AT&T, Boost, MetroPCS, Sprint-Nextel, T-Mobile, and Verizon networks.

And starting this week, the company has linked up the newly revamped Where.com website with the mobile app, via a personalized “placebook” that functions like an electronic clipboard. A user with a Where accounts can search Where.com for restaurants, events, or other information and save the results to his Web placebook, which automatically synchs with the placebook inside the Where app on his phone.

In other words, Where wants its site and its app to function together as a one-stop shop for all location-related activities. “We saw tremendous value creating the opportunity to connect the past, the present, and the future in terms of how people relate to places,” explains Doyle. “More specifically, the mobile phone is a fantastic tool for the present but it’s very bad for the future. You don’t use a mobile phone for research when you’re trying to find places of interest that you might want to go to in the future. With Where.com, you can discover, save, and share places that are automatically synched with your phone.”

March 17, 2010 — The local search and recommendation service Where announced today that it’s finally bringing its substantial search offering to the web at Where.com. Users will also be able to synchronize saved items across the web and Where’s mobile apps.

Where’s claim to fame is its immensely useful mobile application which goes by the same name. The app allows you to search for restaurants, entertainment, news, and more based on your location. It’s currently available for iPhone, Android, Palm WebOS, and Blackberry platforms.

Where’s new website marks the first time the company has brought its service outside of mobile devices. It also makes Where a more direct competitor to Yelp — which also offers a robust web and mobile presence, along with synchronization across both. Where recently launched Check-In support as well, something which was made popular by services like Foursquare, and is another feature shared by Yelp.

As a fan of Where’s mobile offering, I think it’s about time that the company has brought its service to the web. It’s likely that Where’s mobile apps will continue to be the most popular aspect of its service, but the web presence will still be useful to familiarize new users with the brand, and will offer additional functionality for existing users.

Where recently launched its own mobile advertising service with Where Ads. There’s no telling if there will be some integration with Where Ads and Where.com. It’s unlikely since Where Ads is mobile-focused, but I could also see some use for the discounts featured in Where Ads on Where.com.

Where launched as a service of Boston-based uLocate Communications, but the company has just announced that it’s officially changing its name to Where Inc. The company has received funding from Kodiak Venture Partners, GrandBanks Capital, and Venrock.

People can now Discover, Save and Share Places and Events on the Web and Automatically Synch them with their Phones

BOSTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–WHERE, Inc. North America’s leading local search and recommendation service in mobile, today announced that the WHERE® experience is available on the web at Where.com. People can now use WHERE to discover the restaurants, businesses, events, and special offers in their local area while sitting at their computers, save the information to their Placebook, and have it automatically synch with their phones. Placebook also allows users to keep track of their favorite places and reviews, and easily share these places with friends in their existing social networks.

The WHERE mobile application is known for enabling users to discover places, events and great offers around them. The new website, Where.com, makes it possible for users to plan their future as well as annotate their past. Using WHERE on either a mobile device or the web, users can identify and provide reviews of places they’ve visited, check-in to places they’re currently visiting, and discover places they want to go in the future.

“We view a user’s location graph in the dynamic of where I’ve been, where I am, and where I want to go,” said Walt Doyle, CEO, WHERE. “We’ve received high praise from our users for helping them decide what to do while they are out, but always felt that there was more to the equation. Now, at Where.com anyone can see where they have been, plan where they want to go, and take it with them on their mobile phone.”

On Where.com users will be able to discover, save and share their favorite places through the following:

- Keep track of all the places they’ve been to in the past, those they want to go to in the future, and their reviews with Placebook

- Record their current location with Check-in

- Share their WHERE activity with their social network via Facebook and Twitter

- Search, discover and review local restaurants, businesses and services

- View nearby concerts, sports games and other events

The company has also formally changed its name from uLocate Communications, Inc. to WHERE, Inc. This change reinforces the company’s efforts to focus on its portfolio of WHERE consumer local search, recommendation and advertising services.

To check out the WHERE experience on the web first-hand, please visit www.where.com.

About WHERE

WHERE® is a leading local search and recommendation service in mobile and the web. With WHERE, users can discover and save local places, and easily share their location graph with their existing social networks. WHERE puts the best local information at users’ fingertips with real-time reviews and special offers from local merchants. The WHERE mobile application is available on over one hundred mobile devices and a top application on all major smartphone platforms and carriers. WHERE Ads™ is an innovative hyper-local ad network, connecting consumers with local merchants. For more information, please visit www.where.com.

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.

Three new updates you have to see! Get all the BlackBerry, iPhone and Android details here

Post by Walt Doyle, CEO of WHERE

Read more about WHERE Ads™, one of the first hyper-local mobile advertising networks available in North America.

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

MocoNews

March 9, 2010 – Like many other developers, uLocate works closely with ad networks to monetize WHERE, its free mobile app that is available on a number of carrier networks and Android, iPhone and Palm (NSDQ: PALM).

But WHERE often struggled to keep its fill rates high, and when campaigns ran out, it had to use less desirable banner ads pushing ringtones and wallpapers, said uLocate’s VP of Marketing Dan Gilmartin. Today, the Boston-based company is launching an ad network that it created internally to remedy the problem and has been using since December. The ad network, which it calls the WHERE Ads hyper-local advertising network, is now available outside the company, and is being used by various publishers, including Geocade, Jambase, MocoSpace and Superpages.com.

The problem WHERE is solving is a common one that many mobile application developers and publishers are encountering as they generate audiences and millions of page views faster than brands adopt mobile as a potential advertising platform. Gilmartin said it continues to use Quattro Wireless, which was recently acquired by Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), but new sources of local ads dramatically increased click-through rates and CPMs.

How is WHERE doing it?: Gilmartin was a bit reluctant to give away all of its secrets, but said they are working with about a half a dozen local ad providers that work in other mediums, such as directory services, coupons, event sources, and other aggregation services. They provide local offers and ads that can be matched to users who search in the WHERE app for activities or nearby restaurants.

The reaction: Gilmartin said they were able to start replacing ringtone ads for ads that were relevant based on what a consumer was looking for…if they were searching for a nearby restaurant, an Italian restaurant may have popped up. Customers’ reactions were surprising and thanked WHERE ‘for removing the ads,’ Gilmartin said. “It’s contextually relevant to what the consumer is doing, and it’s locally relevant to where they are, and it’s designed to look good in the app, so it’s not an obnoxious banner.”

How things have changed: He said now instead of getting paid per click, often the ads are paid for based on performance, a person may have to visit to website, a menu, or click to call. Then, when a user clicks, they are redirected to a mobile landing page that Where’s made, and can deliver local information to the consumer.

How it is different: All mobile ad networks aspire to provide local ads in their network, but inventories are often low. Results can also vary based on how locally targeted the ad is—is it based on the person’s country, state, city, or neighborhood level? Obviously, the neighborhood ad will be more relevant, but often time is the hardest one to get.