Archive for September, 2007

Our next app… and the mobile biz

Published by alan on September 19, 2007 in Mobile Marketing and Research. 1 Comment

Well, now that Techstars is over we’re pretty busy with our product roadmap. In the last post we talked a little bit about the Brightkite platform. There’s really nothing else like it out there and we think it’ll be a big hit with developers who want to create their own location based services. But that doesn’t mean we’re not building our own services. In fact, we’ve already built a few. Over the summer we worked on a few projects including 1) a location-based chat application that works via SMS, 2) a text-to-screen application (we call it placestreaming) and 3) a small app for Facebook called “Where are you”.

Those were all pretty useful apps but they were always meant as proof of concepts. Basically, what we learned is “yep, there’s a good reason to have a platform that lets you use multiple applications.”

Our next app is really the heart of it all. I won’t say too much about it right now but lets just say it’s a way to “tie it all together”. I know that’s pretty vague but we’ll talk a lot more about it soon.

In the meantime, you might want to check out some of the stuff that’s been happening in the mobile space. So much this past week!

Back in 1999 - 2001 I worked for a small startup called Indiqu. It was one of the first mobile content services companies and I got to see how dealing with big carriers can be both highly lucrative or disastrous for a small company. Back then there was a lot of excitement around the business deals and products being launched but very little consumer adoption. The result? Another bubble.

It’s amazing to see the space starting to heat up again, and this time I think there’s some really smart minds and money indicating that it’s for real this time.

In case you missed Techcrunch’s post on the Holy Grail for Mobile Social Networks, have a read. Arrington basically says location is the missing component from making these apps really amazing. It also looks like Mig33 and Mocospace combined have over 8 million users… that’s great to see.

There’s also been a lot of news this past week regarding Mobile Marketing. First off Google just announced AdSense is now available for mobile apps. This is huge news for those companies developing apps for mobile devices because it means they can start making money without having to establish advertising deals themselves.

If you haven’t been keeping up with Nokia, they’ve been making some pretty big changes. They’ve been aggressively shifting their focus from just being a hardware company to becoming a mobile services play as well. Along those lines they just acquired Enpocket, a mobile advertising firm. This is another indicator that mobile advertising is indeed growing.

Finally, the Kelsey Group just published a U.S. Mobile Marketing Forecast 2006-20012. If you can get your hands on it, there’s a lot of great data there. The main takeaway points I had were that 1) the mobile advertising market in the US will grow to $1.4 Billion by 2012 and that 2) there are concrete factors that they believe are strong indicators that the growth is for real this time.

And that’s just in the US… As far as worldwide mobile marketing goes, ABI Research sees the space already worth $3 Billion now and growing to $19 Billion by 2011.

We love being in this space right now…

“Where Are You?” - The Brightkite Platform.

Published by Brady Becker on September 5, 2007 in Uncategorized. 4 Comments

It is ironic that after years using the Internet to access information from around the globe, the next frontier is to access information from around the corner. Finding local information is made possible thanks to location-based services that know a user’s location. Currently there are many interesting location based services in the market such as friend finders, geo-tagging apps, as well as services that let you find local businesses.

The problem is that these services have no unified way of answering the question “Where are you?”. The method is currently service dependent, whether it be sending an e-mail, sending a text message, or using a mobile app. Additionally it has to be done for each service individually.

This is where Brightkite comes in.

Brightkite simplifies what is currently a complex landscape of user-locating methods by making it easy for consumers to answer the question “Where are you?”. In turn Brightkite shares a users given location across multiple location-based applications. Consumers benefit because it eliminates the need to remember different locating methods for each service. Users can pick the method that works best for them and share their location information with the applications of their choice.

location_api1.png

At the beginning of TechStars our team was gung-ho about creating location dependent applications such as a location blogger and a proximity friend finder. We soon discovered with each application we were forced to answer the same fundamental question of “Where is the user?”. Not necessarily an easy question to answer semantically or technologically. Instead of solving the problem of “Where are you?” over and over again for each application, it was clear that we needed a location platform that allowed multiple apps to query, and update a users given location. On the user experience side, we knew it needed to be as easy as possible for users to tell Brightkite their location. The Brightkite Location Platform solves our user location problem by answering the question “Where are you?”. Now that we have an effective way to answer this question, we can focus our efforts on what our team is passionate about, applications that leverage a users location.

This is a very high level description of the Brightkite Location Platform. Of course what good is a platform that has no applications? Since the location applications were the impetus for the platform we definitely have some compelling apps in the works. Thats not all, in the coming weeks we will announce more details on the platform and something that developers interested in creating their own LBS applications will be excited about.