I’m bummed that I had to bow out of this year’s Where 2.0 conference; I had been slated to speak, and had a list of people to meet and sessions I wanted to hear. One of the most interesting sessions, moderated by Greg Sterling, was on the “monetization of maps and mashups“.

Following a blogger’s coverage of the session, I was really tweaked by one comment, roughly paraphrased by blogger John McKerrell, in attendance. From Skyhook, Jed Rice:

“When we started trying doing more local targeting and being able to insert a lat/lon.We had to flood adsense with a lot of local information to get any information from them at all. We had a click-through rate of 7/8/12% as if you can position ads around a relevant map you get a higher click-through. But there’s a problem that there isn’t enough ads to serve, requires a huge inventory to serve at such a granular level.”

This is a pretty important observation.

Experience is beginning to demonstrate that AdSense does not offer much hyper-local ad inventory.

(more…)

mobile search, maps, local mobile | 1 Comment »

It feels trite to talk to the upside opportunity for mobile device usage, and the derivative search and advertising opportunity. We’ve become numb to the hype, driven by the continued pattern of reality being misaligned with rose-colored powerpoint spin.

The new evidence is actually very noteworthy - this really feels like the first time that real usage on real devices in North America (a laggard mobile market) finally lends real credibility to the upside opportunity. (more…)

mobile search, local mobile | 4 Comments »

The news of FAST being acquired by Microsoft comes as no real surprise. There has been speculation for a couple of years. The search engine company, after a growth tear, stumbled financially last year, and has been operating as a trimmed down company for most of 2007. A 40% price premium had to be too hard for FAST shareholders to turn down.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with FAST as a business partner for ~3 years. It’s a quality company, with a search engine technology and talent pool that is truly world class. The past year has seen the loss of some great talent from the company, but they remain with a strong foundation, and an impressive enterprise and publishing client base.

How should a FAST local media client look at this?

(more…)

search, mobile search, publishing | 1 Comment »

I wanted to find a pic of the Pied Piper to depict Google’s newly minted leadership role for “openness” - last week for social apps, this week for mobile apps. I ran across this image (via the piper’s image search, natch). It just seemed so darn, umm, relevant!

Is this mystical creature just too good to be true? Can’t you just taste the candyland of opportunity just over that rainbow? Can we trust the piper to do good and not evil?

(more…)

mobile search, strategy, OpenSocial | No Comments »

The NY Times today highlighted an emerging issue that can be central to development in mobile local search - in the article “Privacy Lost: These Phones Can Find You“. No big surprises or revelations for those who spend time thinking about GPS-enabled applications, but it highlights the challenges of this dual-edged sword of opportunity and problem. (more…)

mobile search, local mobile | No Comments »

Local search with that promise gets my attention!

That’s a line from BMW’s announcement of (purportedly) the world’s first Google Local Search showing up on a dashboard. You can see photos and more details at Jalopnik, a niche news site for autophiles. Only available in Germany on BMW cars, it’s the next logical step from prior announcements from Google, Yahoo and MS on their “send to car” features. You can get a little orientation on YouTube here.

So, is the dashboard yet another media screen worthy of attention? (more…)

mobile search, strategy, maps, local mobile | 1 Comment »

This post by Henry Blodgett presents evidence and good analysis behind the macro shift in market share from traditional media to online. Summarizing, Blodgett notes:

U.S. advertising revenue at all 19 companies increased 8% year over year in Q2, to $13.8 billion ($55 billion annualized). The online portion of this pie grew from $3 billion to $4.2 billion (23% share to 30% share). The offline portion, meanwhile, shrank from $9.9 billion to $9.6 billion (77% share to 70% share). The online companies, in other words, picked up 7 percentage points of market share in a single year.

The breakdown by media type, was also noteworthy:

…the only traditional media business that grew U.S. advertising year-over-year in Q2 was Outdoor (up 13%). Meanwhile:

. Television (cable/broadcast) shrank 1% ($50M)
. Print (magazines/newspapers) shrank 5% ($170M)
. Radio (terrestrial) shrank 7% ($105M)

A different vein of gold for local media might be sitting inside these stats… (more…)

411, Free DA, mobile search, strategy | No Comments »

Well, we’d all expect it to be variation on HAL, no doubt…

A pretty predictable move to those of us who live in the space, but it’s obviously noteworthy that the ‘plex has pushed their IVR experimentation out as a new beta service. As profiled in SearchEngineLand, Google joins the ranks of entrants as the industry increasingly recognizes that the vast majority of mobile inquiries for local information come via the entrenched information services channel of Directory Assistance.

While the business is most certainly ripe for innovation and commencing a process of re-invention via Free DA and mobile search, there are major challenges in the user experience and content navigation elements of these services. Nothing overly impressive from the get-go from the new service, from my cursory use. However, it’s foolhardy to under-estimate what the merry band in the Googleplex can do from a technology viewpoint.

Much to write ahead on this topic; I’m working on a “series of posts” to instigate the conversation around the connections between voice & internet in the increasingly mainstream mobile economy.

411, Free DA, voice search, mobile search | 5 Comments »