Wednesday, November 12. 2008

TechCrunch: Loopt Looks for Sale/Investment

Loopt is perhaps the best known of the "friend finder"/location-based social networking apps that run on cell phones. TechCrunch reports the company hired the investment band Allen & Co. to find a potential sale or investment partner.

VentureBeat suggests a sale is unlikely considering what it considers and insane valuation: $500 million. The article also notes that Loopt is up in the top apps in the Apple AppStore. Why? It's featured in iPhone TV commercials!

New NPR President Confident about Hyperlocal

PaidContent got an interview with newly appointed president and CEO of National Public Radio, Vivian Schiller. She comes from the New York Times and has no radio experience. The geotidbit of note:

-- Hyperlocal: Schiller has watched start-ups and big media alike fail to crack the hyperlocal conundrum. She thinks NPR is well-positioned to actually do it. “So many companies have started and folded trying to win in local hubs. Big news organizations spend hours wondering how do I create the hyperlocal presence, you don’t have the infrastructure. NPR can do it. It already has the trust and the infrastructure in every town and campus in America. I want to find a way to create indispensable local media hubs.”

Telecoms.com on PND vs. Smartphone

Telecoms.com delves into the convergence of PNDs and cellphone nav offerings. There are some great quotes here including:

His [Orem Neilson of Telmap's] enthusiasm is not shared by Steve Crammond, a partner at PA Consulting. Crammond believes that the PND suppliers, led by US firm Garmin and Dutch vendor TomTom, are not under threat from the mobile sector. "The PND manufacturers supply something that people need. It does something useful, it sells well, it's got a good price and it doesn't seek to replicate anybody else's services or facilities. It's not broken and it doesn't need fixing. What is broken is the mobile sector's ambition to create vast amounts of service revenue out of LBS on phones," he says.

Perhaps, but there is another competitor - pre-installed in-dash solutions from the auto manufacturers. But, there is a lag on that...

Mark Gretton is TomTom's engineering director: "We proved that there was a real market need, which was to get people from A to B when they didn't know where B was. We're beyond that point now and we've realised that the number of times you drive to B when you don't know where B is, is actually not that often, unless you're a professional driver."

Right, thus PND providers must offer more - including a connected solution - with search, music etc. That leads to monthly fees, something most PND buyers are not yet fully ready to embrace, per the article.

TomTom's Mark Gretton sums it up: "The only thing you can say today is that navigation is a real market; a service for which people are prepared to pay. All that other stuff, all those other applications, it's just speculation. We don't know whether or not it will prove valuable to people."

That's to say, navigation people will pay for - at least as a one off payment for a device. Now, can the same be said for LBS with the same amount of confidence?

Which areas voted for prop 8 in California?

With a majority voting for the proposition (that would ban gay marriage overriding a State Supreme Court ruling) there's lots of finger pointing in the gay community. But, there are also maps of which areas voted for and against.

The Sacremento Bee reports that areas with many domestic partnerships (via state records) voted against, and provides a map.

The LA Times provides maps with no interpretation. It also offers a bubble map of funding.

KCRA provides a green and red map of the results. (I thought those were not high on the cartographer palette because of color blindness issues. See for example Cynthia Brewer's work cited here.)