Tuesday, June 16. 2009

Podcast: Location-based Advertising...It's Not Working...Here's Why

In the much-hyped, Madison Avenue world of mobile location-based advertising, the Holy Grail seems within the grasp for retailers looking for that one-to-one marketing nirvana oft cited in the early nineties. But in its current model, it’s not working the way it should or can. Today's business model uses "push" advertising to mobile devices. But what if the model should be "pull" thus allowing consumers to determine when, where and how they should receive ads. Editor in chief Joe Francica explores this model and more.

Subscribe to Podcast RSS

Listen Now (to download, right click on the link at left and choose "save target as")

Read the show notes

Missed any podcasts? Want to subscribe via iTunes, Yahoo, etc? Here's the index.

Tuesday, February 24. 2009

Tracking LBS Apps on iPhone, Android

Thursday, February 12. 2009

Field Service Management ROI Numbers

People are always asking us for the size of certain markets. Today at the Map World Forum, Prakash Iyer of Trimble offered these numbers for the Field Services Management (FSM) market based on an Aberdeen Research report, which he said was conducted in 2007. [Directions Magazine published results of a 2006 FSM report from Aberdeen)

FSM is predicted b to be $1.7 B by 2012

Market Drivers – better service; constant cost pressure; increased productivity; vehicle and driver safety; Sarbannes-Oxley compliance

Typical ROI

12% increase in service profitability
13% increase in vehicle utilization
15% reduction in average travel time per job
10% decrease in overtime pay
28% increase in driver compliance

Friday, October 24. 2008

The Economy: What Happened When We Weren't Watching and the Implications for LBS

At the deCarta devCON conference, Jeff Rath of Canaccord Adams, an investment bank specializing in emerging markets, succinctly explained the current market bloodbath and what he forsees as the impact on the location-based services market.

Rath sees an unwinding of some of the macroeconomic dynamics for the first time in a long time. Leading up to this situation was a condition where inflation rates were trending lower and debt was cheap. This yielded an explosion of leverage and people bought a lot of things...much that they couldn't afford, and that is becoming unwound.

"Macro economic dynamics are driving everything; companies are posting good and bad results but all stocks are trading down," said Rath. For much of the early part of the decade, Canaccord Adams' Location Index, an index of publicly-traded location technology companies, outperformed the major market indices. In the last two years, that index has seen a huge decline where it now underperforms the market.

The hedge fund community is incredibly active in trading and represents 30-50% of the trading on any given day in the stock market. "Everyday you are hearing of hedge funds being liquidated en-mass," said Rath.

Thursday, October 23. 2008

deCarta - Sitting Nicely with New Venture Funding

I spoke briefly with Kim Fennell, CEO and Marc Prioleau, VP Marketing of deCarta about their market growth during the devCON '08 event. They feel good that they took the $20 Million is new venture funding as the venture community may be looking a bit more closely at business plans that project revenues too far into the future given today's economic climate. The market for map servers is certainly shifting as Prioleau sees less of an emphasis in supporting web apps than other opportunities in the mobile space. He notes that Apple's App Store now counts 300 applications that are "location-enabled."

Wednesday, September 10. 2008

PND Market To See Early Christmas

From the NAVTEQ Connections conference in San Francisco...NAVTEQ executive VP Jeff Mize revealed some stats about the coming consumer portable navigation device market at Christmas time:
PND Market Growth: The PND is showing strong growth: 20 million units will be sold this year; an 80% growth over last year. 60% of these 20 million units will be priced at less than $200; 90% will be sold from only four manufacturers (Garmin, TomTom have most market share). There is now a very diverse distribution model with PNDs sold in over 35000 retail outlets.

PND market dynamics: Expect aggressive pricing on Black Friday. There will be more emphasis on accessories and add-ons such as map updates, both downloadable and in store, plus text to speech will be a big deal.  Watch for the introduction of private label retailer brands as well as a buzz around connected devices.