Tag Archives: facebook

LBS, the perfect lab to create the next killer applications

Posted by Cirkana on 18/04/2011 None comments

These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2011 Spring edition. This post is from the Cirkana team, formed by Clara Martin Cubero, Alicia Cañellas, Pau Olivella, Sergi Perez Lerin and Bernat Fabregat.

 

Facebook Places

The increase in internet availability and the level of smartphone adoption, together with the improvement of usability, and the spread of apps, contextual data,  and services offered on-the-go are the main factors that are defining the rise of Location Based-Services (LBS).

LBS groups a set of approaches and applications (i.e. Augmented Reality apps such as Layar, real time check in with FourSquare, venue reviews as in Yelp, social get-together as in Facebook Places, and so on) that leverages the ubiquity of internet connection with the contextual needs of the user. Wherever the users (and smartphones) are, there is a business opportunity…

…but what does the user get from a business LBS app?
We can depict the following main benefits for the user:

  • Obtain reviews and recommendations from other users before making a decision (i.e. search for a Chinese restaurant near a place)
  • Get promotional prizes and discounts for a product or service (i.e. individual or social e-coupons valid for a limited time or location)
  • Reach “social recognition” among other users, even in a competitive way, with potential business benefits (i.e. becoming a FourSquare mayor)

Interesting… but how can companies take advantage of LBS?
So far, the pioneering companies who are experimenting with these technologies are focusing their goals on:

  • Branding: To create an appealing, fun, and entertaining mobile experience that engages the user while empowering brand values and positioning.
  • Loyalty: To offer an innovative and worthy channel of customer service and interaction between the company and their users, as well as among users.
  • Attraction: To present an interesting proposal for potential users, and also, utilizing the social viral effect to spread current customer experiences to reach similar targets.

Ok, that sounds too much like “marketing”… what does it mean in terms of real business?
This is a new method and companies are learning. Currently these goals have been monetized through different business models:

  • Adverting: To display contextual and worthy ads in the user´s phone and get paid applying a “traditional” PPC model.
  • Couponing: To offer a discount (i.e. using a QR code or grouping users) to boost demand on the spot and sell inventory.
  • In-store walk-in: Drive traffic promoting your products by turning mobile visits into real visits and convert them into customers.
  • Pay per use: Even the most common service has either a free or freemium model, some companies (i.e. media) are charging for the app download.

Moreover, the inherent capabilities of measuring every movement, click, and action will help the companies to obtain a new and powerful user profile with real time analytics, user tracks, level of engagement, and a social graph. To unveil, learn, and understand this data will be the building blocks for marketers’ success.

Bear in mind that the next 1 billion online users will access the internet using their mobile devices. LBS will turn this huge potential into real and worthy business opportunities. This will be the biggest lab to create the next killer apps!

DuckDuckGone

Posted by Nathan D. Ryan on 26/03/2011 1 comments

A few days ago, José Cobian sent me and some others an interesting link to an elevator pitch from DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckGo is a search engine that promises to protect your privacy—unlike Google. The pitch begins with Herpes. Not good. Here is my initial reaction, verbatim:

Nothing here is what it seems. DuckDuckGo isn’t the plucky hero. Google isn’t some evil empire. This is not the grand arena.

The picture painted by DuckDuckGo’s story is misleading. Targeted advertising can be a boon as well as a bane. Granted, the anecdotes are valid, but they are mostly one-offs, and their relevancy is bolstered by the fact that big data is only in its infancy. As massive amounts of metadata are collected about everyone, a single person’s online history will be viewed as more mundane in the grand scheme of things, even when leaked to a third party. Ignominious searches will carry less profiling weight as they become less of an anomaly. You embarrassed because that New Year’s Eve photo of you and the neighbor’s dog had 10K YouTube views? Doesn’t matter, because now everyone has a similarly embarrassing collection of bits floating around in public view. If not, you will be *uninteresting*, which will be worse than a silly sounding medical condition. And if there is something *really* bad about you (child molestation comes to mind as the obvious example), you can’t hide that even now, anyway.

We are in the tail end of a culture that values secrets as a guard against embarrassment. In effect, a secret means that we don’t have to ask forgiveness. This attitude is shifting, with the newer tech generations exchanging secrets for measures of implicit forgiveness for the (occasional) understandable indiscretion. Privacy isn’t overrated yet, but it is becoming so, and people who are publicly willing to embrace their failures will have the advantage of authenticity.

If you run a small outfit looking to hire one of two candidates, you’re going to Google each of them (or Blekko each of them, or whatever). Suppose one has zero online presence, and the other has 300 commits on GitHub with some notoriety due to the leaked credentials of a hacked pr0n site. Who are you going to hire, Boring or Tainted? The thresholds are shifting in favor of Tainted, especially as we admit that Tainted comes from a big family.

Besides, I worry about a company that both derides advertising and claims it as their future profitability model. Good thing DuckDuckGo is self-funded at this point, because I seriously doubt their ability to raise capital. Their target audience seems to have and/or desire narrow online exposure, a diminishing group. Whether this is for better or worse is yet to be seen, but it’s the reality.

DuckDuckGo has been around for a bit, since late 2008. This puts them on the bleeding edge of the “Facebook is Evil” meme that gained traction during a Facebook overhaul that included some controversial changes to their ToU. Google was also having their own issues. It’s clear that privacy was on people’s minds. Concern led to the ignorant and unjustified media hysteria that spawned the promising Diaspora in 2010 and its disappointing launch (okay, it was a pre-alpha launch).

The problem is that the protection of online privacy is a billion-way prisoner’s dilemma. Trends away from casual anonymity are inevitable, as people associate value with visibility. You publish or you lose. Maybe everyone will lose bigger in the end as a result, but that remains to be seen. Regardless, people have a growing awareness of their online activity being amassed as part of their respective amorphous, public profiles, which are amalgamated and traded among the power players to be mined by anyone with an interest and a dime. What this means for DuckDuckGo is that people will use Google for searches they want others to see, and they will use DuckDuckGo for searches they don’t want others to see. That does not bode well for revenue growth from ads and affiliate sales.

Luckily, DuckDuckGo has some other tricks up their sleeve. Search relevancy, for one. If the Internet was Baskin-Robbins, complaints about search spam would probably have been the flavor of the month in January. And despite some recent changes by Google, this is still a problem. (Don’t believe me? Try searching for the user manual for a printer.) This is an area open for anyone with the smarts to own it. But DuckDuckGo will lose if they continue to beat the privacy drum.

Tetuan Valley goes to the cinema – Facebook movie

Posted by alex on 17/10/2010 5 comments

As the title suggest, we are going to watch the Facebook movie today (Sunday Oct 17th). We would love to hang around with other Tetuan Valley members and friends so if you want to join us, we’ll go to Kinepolis Madrid (Pozuelo). We’ll meet in front of the Burger King entrance (the one inside) at 7:15 pm (the movie starts at 7:45pm).

The movie info:

Sun Oct 17th – 7:45 pm – La Red Social (VOS) – Sala 13 – Kinépolis Madrid

IMPORTANT: You need to purchase the ticket on your own if you want to come. Our row/seats are: Row 11, Seats 006 – 011, so try to pick the tickets close to us if you want ;)

You can add yourself to the eventuo event here.