The Focus on Locus: Symposium on Location Based Services - Columbia University

The Symposium on LBS at Columbia University on July 11th was a great one-day event.

Director of the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information, Professor Eli Noam opened the day with 3 questions:

* If LBS is so hot and up and coming, why don’t we have it on Cable and from ISP’s ?
* Is the DB we have today in all these separate companies ( Localeze, etc) complete?
* How will the privacy issues be resolved?
And he challenged the whole group to “Show us” and not “Promise” anymore.

Chair of the Computer Science Department Henning Schulzrinne (one of the inventors of SIP - basis for VOIP)
followed up with a great presentation about IETF’s work on LBS privacy issues: GEOPRIV (Geographic Location/Privacy) and PIDF-LO, a data format that carries with it flags about privacy levels and how long the data can be retained. Privacy levels denote who can access the data (everyone, friends, noone).

Ted Morgan from SkyHook Wireless talked about GPS vs other solutions they provide, namely Wifi positioning and Cell tower triangulation. GPS doesn’t work indoors. GPS requires some time for a fix (getting the latitude/longitude of a location). And GPS drains batteries. He showed technical support pages from Nokia, and some other phone companies where customers are urged to go outside and not move around for upto 5 minutes to get a fix. He also gave a tip for iPhone users: when you hold your iPhone horizontally, the GPS reception degrades a lot. So, to get a fix, keep it vertical at all times. His point mainly was, SkyHook’s Wifi and Cell tower based techniques are a MUST if you want to get a quick fix without draining your batteries.

Evan Neufelf from M:Metrics gave lots of useful numbers in his presentation:
* USA smart phone penetration: 7%.
* USA mobile subscribers: 226M ( France: 46M, Germany: 49M, Italy: 47M, Spain: 34M, UK: 47M, China: 37M - while all US and European markets are saturated, China is such a huge market waiting to explode. Phone companies will need to find new ways to expand their businesses in Europe and USA, while in China, they can still expand their business by getting new customers.

It was also mentioned that when customers were asked what the top factors would be for them to accept location-based advertising, the top response was “It has to be permission-based”, while “It has to be relevant” scored low.

Blair Swedeen from PlaceCast mentioned that customizing the creative for location-based ads ( depending on the location, the customer, the time of day etc) is a big factor in increasing CTR’s. Internet currently is at 0.1-0.2 CTR. They have created campaigns where each customer was given a direct link to the nearest dealership for a car company and a customizable creative ( You are 1.4 miles from a test drive ) where the campaign had very high CTR’s. These advertisers will surely go back to location-based advertising next time they have a campaign.

Ben Ezrick from Ogilvy Interactive has shown a video from MIT about Near Field Communications. He also mentioned that some of the time, they are trying to reach the biggest audience in the cheapest way for their global customers. Reaching people efficiently is a problem. For these campaigns, location-based advertising which provides highly-targeted but more expensive advertising would not make sense. Location-based advertising has to find the right advertiser-audience for itself. And at the same time, for now, this audience is mostly local-businesses. But selling to this audience requires a salesforce, which doesn’t scale. You need a salesforce for every city you want to operate in. So, obviously there are lots of open issues with LB-advertising that will improve in time. There are currently 22M local businesses in the USA. On average they spend $3000 for marketing annually. So this is a huge market. And of course, even though online sales are growing rapidly, in-store sales still account for 95% of sales. Using location-based advertising to drive more consumers into stores represent a huge opportunity for the industry.

Also there are differences between desktop and mobile phone internet surfing. There are no cookies and still no fine-grained tracking of ads on mobile phones. These represent the technical problems that can be solved on the server side.

Overall it was a great day of presentations and brain-storming and I am looking forward to more events like this in NYC.