It took a while for me to get this post up, but better late than never.

I want to start out by congratulating Mark and the Mobile Monday DC crew for holding another very relevant and informative meeting. The turnout was awesome! The room was to capacity - and the audience was involved and enthusiastic.

You can check out my very raw freeform notes below, but I wanted to touch on something that bothered me and many other attendees that night. It has to do with the LBS representative from Verizon. I’ll leave out his full name so I don’t completely trash his SEO, but he was the Associate Director for LBS on Verizon.

Everyone was excited to see Verizon send someone to represent their LBS initiatives to an LBS meeting for the community. There were people in the audience with great ideas - some of which quite developed - trying desperately to get traction in the marketplace. Their experience with Verizon has been cumbersome, slow, and discouraging, so they saw this as a way to gain insight on how to fit into Vzw’s process.

Disappointingly, his description of the process was that Vzw selects applications that they know will make them money. That’s about as deep as his hints got. But even worse, his overall, his casual, joking, almost carefree attitude belittled the many attendees who have been attempting to get LBS approved or even reviewed by Verizon and other carriers.

The best quote of the night:

Question: “What do you think about presence apps?”
His Answer: “I love presents. Especially on Christmas. No really.. I don’t see the point of it.”

Are you kidding me?

To his credit, this guy was working with three people on the LBS team total. This just shows Vzw’s lack of focus in brining community apps to the platform. But if Verizon was going to send a rep out - especially one that claims that all three people in the LBS program are “drinking from the firehose” (apparently meaning that they’re listening to the community) - they need to send one out that will take the community’s struggles a little more to heart, honestly listen to them, and at least not make light of what they’re going through.

I don’t think this guy came out to squash dreams, but it happened, and put a face on the uncaring corporate behemoth everyone thought Verizon to be.

Here’s some tips to grow on:

The community is the source of long-tail revenue. You need to give them shots at brining amazing apps to life, even if it’s sandboxed a bit. It will pay off in the end - just look at Facebook.

You can segment the privacy-crazed people out by making LBS apps opt-in at the account level. It’s not a hard problem and ensures parents will not have their kids broadcasting their location. Don’t use privacy concerns as an excuse.

Your $686 million for LBS revenue prediction is based on Vzw continuing to nickel and dime people. Your open platform will get GPS-enabled devices pretty quickly that bypass your LBS infrastructure and use freely-available software you don’t control. Poof - there goes your revenue, and you could have captured it if you let the community play on your primary platform.

OK, enough of that. Let’s get to the notes.

Gregg Smith, CEO, Acuity Mobile
Mobile marketing. Tying to users locations and interests
Working with navteq
Use gps to send offers to gps devices
Don’t create mobile spam.
Verizon doesnt know where you are until you dial 911
Stole one of cellfire’s top sales guys
Working with U Maryland to get targeting down to ~3ft to do specific
offer targeting.
VCs say no to LBS now. Might get a B but not an A
Carriers are understaffed. Lots of churn. Tough to sell into.
70% of all long haul trucks have tracking now
Taxi drivers in ny went on strike because of tracking. And they lost.
Thank god google drove open access for 700mhz auction.

Dale *******, Associate Director, LBS Platform, Verizon Wireless
3 people on verizon lbs dev program
5 of the top 20 mobile apps are lbs - Telephia q2 study
Vzw navigator is #1
Turn by turn nav will be 686mil by 2011. Child tracking 423m
90% vzw phones lbs enabled.
Knows that vzw will have to go to ad supported.
Open access. Don’t know internally what it is yet. Knows the nickel
and dime model won’t last.
Brew is our best friend and our worst enemy. Closed system helps
quality and make sure it makes money. But you have to pay the qualcom
tax.
Monthly rev share model now. Will move to ad supported.
Must have a solid business model to get approved.
How do we do LBS roaming? No good way now.
Will open up to gps as fallback.
Your app should store and forward capabilities.
Selling to enterprise must be carrier agnostic.
Cost of chips dropping to $3 or so

Tom Stroup, CEO, SquareLoop
VCs are jaded. Want to see traction. Will want to see at least 1 major
carrier deal.
Squareloop
Push to geographic area
No tracking
Uses existing infrastructure
Secure messages
Combine geo with info and send to phone. Phone decides if it’s relevant.
On sprint and at&t
Emergency alerts. Public safety
Uses carrier infrastrucutre to decide which data to send. Or phone can
send an initial market signal.
Healthcare
Universities
Sponsored content
Multiple technologies. Carrier bureaucracies.

… death is one of the few things that can be done just as easily lying down. — Woody Allen (1935 - )

It’s too bad blogger ire can’t be harnessed as a source of power, because Russ would have himself a free energy machine - there’s your startup!

The good thing that came out of Russ’ exclamation that the mobile web is dead is that real metrics and numbers have been brought out of the closet for easy finding and comparing. Like…

Mobile Ad Spending

Greater Usability = Greater Usage

and many more!

Plus you can attend a MoMoNY event that will focus on metrics.

Here’s my small bit to add. I work with a lot of premium content (talking major media properties here) who get solid desktop web numbers. Their mobile numbers are ridiculously lackluster (I’m keeping vague here because I can’t disclose the actual numbers). But at the same time they’re getting somewhere in the neighborhood of $12 CPMs, and because of that, they’re going to do their damndest to try to increase that traffic. Wherever there’s money like that, there’s going to be effort to throw content at it to try to get people to stick.

On the formatting side, people want solid, rich experiences in their browsing. They want to feel like what they’re looking at was built for consumption, not just stripped down or transcoded quickly so people could have access on the go. Bespoke web applications for iPhone have driven this fact home, and now that people have seen what can be done on mobile devices, they’re not going to want to look at the basic WML/XHTML-MP stuff that has come before.

The mobile web is not dead, it’s figuring out how to come into its own. Transcoding is dead.

Mobile will converge with desktop to a degree, and you’ll see different strategies for mobile content adaption. Instead of Mowser-type services, you’ll start to see Javascript toolkits like Prototype and Script.aculo.us incorporate behaviors that gracefully degrade or migrate to specific device needs. When we base all webs on Javascript standards, we can start to do much more interesting things for device adaption than blind transcoding.

I wish Russ and Mike the best. Somehow I don’t think they’ll be hurting for opportunities.

Japanese company, Cross Borders Inc. made a cool way to create your own QR code.

Type in a URL and an army of small robots comes to build the code for you.

If you haven’t seen a QR code before, I’m not surprised. They’re much more popular outside the US, especially in Japan where they’re getting ubiquitous. They’re basically a 2D barcode, encoding a string (in this case a URL), with some error correction built in. They can be optically recognized, and are most frequently captured by snapping a picture from a mobile device The device can take action using the encoded string, like launching the web browser and heading to a URL.

So you can do things like run billboard ads with QR codes that take people directly to a mobile ad or coupon.

I found this via Asiajin - and check out the reference to Winksite there too! My opinion is that Winksite is the best example of QR codes being integrated into a mobile web product right now.

Last week I went to the Washington Capitals game, and was surprised to see an SMS voting campaign run through the Jumbotron.

It was simple enough - text some unintuitive text to a 5 digit shortcode to vote for the next song you want played. From the gross way the percentages were adjusting, you could tell that the sample set was pretty small, and I couldn’t help but think it was due to how cumbersome the process was.

Text campaigns work - asynchronously at least. In situations where you have time to fiddle with the shortcode and text, it’s a solid way of conveying intent. But for ad-hoc, immediate, rapid-fire type situations like voting on the next song in a crowded, crazy arena, it’s suboptimal.

We need contextual interfaces.

Remember BlueCasting? They were all the rage in 2005, but it seems like they dropped out of scope in the US. Does anyone have some insight into how they’re doing in Europe? I think they’d be a perfect fit here - although instead of bluecasting media to devices, they need to bluecast lightweight apps.

Sure, the tech isn’t there now - it would be wildly insecure. But there has to be a way to create a protected sandbox where a small applet could be sent to a handset with a branded, contextual voting screen. Once you overcome the bootstrapping problem and it’s present on a majority of handsets, so many possibilities pop up. Museums, concerts, school lectures… These places have people that are synchronous with the events happening, and SMS is too asynchronous to work well.

There must be someone trying to do this. It’s just too obvious.