Where?

If Twitter was the social network that answered the seemingly trivial question of “What are you doing” then GPS enabled mobile devices seem poised to script the logical follow-up question: “Where are you doing it?” The first apps out of the gate are Loopt, 4Square and BrightKite. On the surface they allow you to track friends in proximity to you. In dense, urban areas it has an appeal. (How many times in New York have you been a block away from a good friend and just not known it? Plenty.) The benefit that streams from location awareness is called “augmented reality”. Which only means extracting greater value from knowing everything and everyone around you.

The first panel discussion on this subject was on mobile advertising. A recent survey of media analysts pegged advertising on mobile phones to be the #1 most interuptive. (Just so you know, they mean “interuptive” in a good way.) By wedding mobile advertising with a precise knowledge of where the user is, what results is advertising that is location specific. (e.g. you’re in a movie theater and you get an SMS from Kit-kat.) This could mark a shift away from context based advertising of the past (where a google search would yield relevant banners on the right-hand side) to a totally location based model.

It seems invasive and annoying. But there was definitely discussion in all of these forums on “done wrong” vs. “done right”. The difference being a fair exchange of some kind. You might be walking by a Gap. Maybe you like shopping there, so message from this brand would be less invasive. Add to that an SMS from Gap with a 30% off coupon on your iphone screen and suddenly a pestering text becomes a welcome savings. But that’s just the first blush thinking on this. Ultimately creative minds have to engage on how location becomes suprising and entertaining as part of that exchange.

A lot of the fine points have yet to be sorted out. But a few things seem likely:

1) Locations will be bid on. Particularly buildings occupied by multiple business (like a mall). Winning bidders will own that location for some daypart. By splitting it up into dayparts, smaller businesses have a shot at some inventory as well.

2) Path History is everything. Not simply “Where are you now?” but rather “Where have you been all day?” It was pretty widely agreed this information would be highly valuable. GPS phones collect that data.

3) Consumers will be bid on. Knowing where you go routinely, creates the idea of a personal CPM (cost per message). Each of us will have an assigned dollar value based on our path history.

4) The mobile phone as credit card. The itunes music store made itunes a purchasing agent. Soon you will be able to aim your phone at an item and buy it at the location.

5) If you offer some kind of added value, consumers are typically ok with it. Garmin offers a trade-off : Free traffic information for life (something they traditionally charge for) in exchange for some unintrusive, location-based banner ads that don’t pop up while you’re trying to navigate. Very popular.

6) Location targeting will soon be aimed at laptops.

7) Cars are not far away from being able to drive themselves. (No shit!)

8) A company called Moximity is creating a GPS (in beta and only in Austin now) app that will share your path history with a select group of friends as a way of passively socializing purchases. Say, you see one of your friends go to to “Supper” in the East Village twice in one week. You can glean this information from their path history. Maybe it prompts a discussion about the restaurant. Or a visit.

From all of this, powerful privacy issues emerge. I have to say there seems to be a strong age polarity between those concerned with privacy and those who could give a shit. You never see a 22-year old hipster whining about Big Brother in any of these panel discussions. It’s typically someone my age (but heavier, more bearded, sporting Allen Ginsberg’s face on a t-shirt) who seems uber concerned about the conspiracy to enslave humanity that so obviously is behind all this. But there are failsafe’s programmed in by Loopt and others that demonstrate a healthy concern with privacy. Among them

- Always allow the consumer to opt in. They turn it on. They shut it off. Being location visible is a choice.

- Remind the user he/she is visible in case they forget.

- Allow the consumer to program “black holes." Areas that are completely private and not subject to tracking.

- Don’t sell location history.