MLB Gets Location Patent

There are lots of location/local search patents out there — add one more.

According to SAI, Major League Baseball has been awarded a patent for a “system and method for verifying access based on a determined geographic location of a subscriber of a service provided via a computer network.” It’s apparently being used “to determine whether its MLB.TV customers are in areas that have to be blacked out from live-game streaming.” But the patent has broader implications.

Here’s the abstract of the patent:

A system and method relates to limiting the presentation of rules based events based on the geographic location of computer users attempting to view the rules based event via a network. The method includes receiving over a network a request to view a rules based event at a computer, obtaining a first estimate of geographic location of the computer where the first estimate of geographic location includes a first confidence determination, and obtaining a second estimate of geographic location of the computer if the first confidence determination is less than an established confidence level. The first and second estimates of geographic location define a composite estimated geographic location of the computer. The method further includes retrieving information on a geographic location of the rules based event, comparing the retrieved information on the geographic location of the rules based event, with the composite estimated geographic location of the computer, and providing access to the rules based event based on access rules and the comparison of the retrieved information on the geographic location of the rules based event and the estimated geographic location of the computer. The system and method can also apply to promotions, sweepstakes, contests, fantasy games, sale of goods and/or services, and targeted advertising.

Some of these patents are going to have to be resolved/reconciled through litigation.

Yahoo!’s ‘Twitter Clone’?

TechCrunch is reporting that Yahoo! has developed a Twitter clone in Portugal, called Yahoo! Meme:

They seem to be testing this in a market that they thought wouldn’t be that visible — so much for that. But rather than start an entirely new service, why not simply build the functionality into Answers? — a Twitter-like Q&A product that pre-dates Twitter.

Unfortunately Microsoft just shut down its Q&A service. I say “unfortunate” because they could have revamped it in an interesting way for mobile or for the PC along the lines of Twitter or other similar Q&A services.

Can Newspapers Put the Genie Back in Bottle?

MediaNews, Hearst, McClatchy, the NY Times and News Corp. are in stages of mulling or implementing plans to charge consumers for access to their online newspaper content to varying degrees.

Do you think they’ll be able to get audiences to pay and if so, how will these plans affect online advertising revenues (think QuadrantOne, Yahoo NP consortium and other newspaper networks)? The NY Times originally dropped its TimesSelect paid offering because the company calculated that it could make more money with ads and increased traffic.

My belief is that some number of consumers will pay but that number will be relatively small. There’s also less inclination to pay so as long as the same or similar content is available elsewhere for free. Most news is now a commodity and so most readers don’t care where it comes from online. Columns and features are not a commodity.

I believe asking consumers to pay will mirror the historical pattern with newspaper online registration. Whenever I hit a newspaper registration screen, I click away.

I understand why newspapers are doing this because they believe they have few choices and are in crisis. But I don’t think the strategy will drive the kind of revenues they’re hoping for.

Of course execution is critical here. Well executed programs may have greater success than more crudely executed ones. What I mean by that is: careful thought about what to charge for and how to prompt users to pay. In my view, micro-payments won’t work here. There’s also going to have to be a “value add” (#wordkill) to justify the payments. To the extent I’m being asked to pay for what I was getting for free, I’m gone as a user.

Your thoughts?

___

Related: Newspapers Lose $18 Billion In 3-Year Period

Chart: MediaPost, data NAA

See also: Wash. gov OKs tax cut for newspapers

Yell Becomes Google Reseller in UK

UK directory publisher Yell put out a release this morning that it was becoming an AdWords reseller:

Yell, the international directories business, and Google today announce a strategic alliance to provide sophisticated, managed search marketing services to Yell’s base of more than 450,000 UK SMEs. The alliance will involve Yell becoming a Google AdWords Authorised Reseller.

I had thought this was already going on but I suppose I was wrong. The release says that this is only the second deal that Yell has entered to sell traffic beyond its own properties:

The Search Marketing Service for Google AdWords is the second product launch from Yell involving sale of inventory beyond Yell’s own portfolio of Yellow Pages, Yell.com and 118 24 7. Yell has already launched an ad network product, netReach, providing Yell advertisers with access to consumers across a business vertical and geo-targeted network of UK sites. The service has been well received by existing and new customers to Yell.

Yell’s netReach is a contextual ad network — something like AdSense but with true local advertisers. This would be a smart program to emulate for American publishers. And there are even more radical steps along these lines that can be taken by publishers to expand their traffic. 

One question is whether Yell’s program will have greater success (retention) than some of the other resellers who see very high churn rates. This is a fundamental problem in these programs.

‘Integrated’ Search Marketing for Local Dealers

MediaPost profiles a Performics search-marketing campaign for US Southeast Toyota Distributors. It’s an integrated national and local campaign that appears to be pretty sophisticated (or heading in that direction):

As budgets grow for local campaigns, Performics hopes to take Southeast Toyota Distributors’ program and expand it past search and into display . . . [T]oday, budgets at local dealerships are small — between $1,200 and $2,000.

Search engine marketing not only helps Toyota dealers reach more qualified prospects, it also helps capture interest generated through other marketing channels. Performics’ integrated search marketing services aim to help Southeast Toyota and its dealers capitalize on this search demand.

Two things are interesting here — the combined national-local approach and the consciousness of the impact of other media on search and corresponding keyword strategy:

Performics aligns bids for keywords that it believes will drive more demand in other media. “If we think Tundra is being pushed aggressively in the southwest through radio, print and TV, we know there will be more search demand for keywords,” [Performics CEO Nick Beil] says.

Traditional media often drives search behavior. Anyway, it’s good to see people executing on localized campaigns with the bigger picture in mind.

Performics has traditionally also used IYPs as part of its geotargeting strategies. Now they just need to get mobile into the mix. If you go to VW.com on the iPhone’s Safari browser you see what a great job VW has done optimizing the site for that handset.

More Prominent Ads in Google News

Over at SEL I argued that Google should probably be sharing most of its ad revenue from Google News with the publishers whose sites it indexes there.

One of my news alerts is for “local search” and this morning I saw this:

This is the first time I’ve seen an ad “at the top” of news results like this:

Twitter Becoming the Leading ‘News’ Site?

Many people use Twitter like a news reader of sorts — to follow sources they consider important:

(n=59)

In that context, PaidContent points out that Twitter’s traffic has now surpassed the NYT and WSJ. I did a chart that compares Twitter, the NYT and MSNBC:

Twitter is the orange line trending upward.

The NY Times is the top newspaper site in terms of traffic and page views. If you consider Twitter a “news site” then it’s quickly on its way to becoming number one.

End of the Staycation?

Travel search engine Kayak put out some PR this morning to promote some new site features but it leads with internal user survey data that suggests people are going to be taking more trips than they did last summer. Is this a leading indicator (among others) that the recession is starting to ease? At least there’s the perception of improvement, which can lead to actual improvement because perception influences behavior. 

From the press release:

Despite the economy, 95 percent of the more than 4,100 people who participated in KAYAK’s Annual Summer Travel Survey plan to travel this summer. More than 41 percent said the recession did not affect their summer plans in any way — which is double the number from KAYAK’s 2008 survey.

Though “frivolous” in a way, it’s encouraging as a sign of increasing consumer confidence.

Microsoft Revamps MSN City Guides

I haven’t had time to really dig into this at any level of depth, but I wanted to acknowledge that Microsoft has upgraded and redesigned MSN City Guides.

The sites are much richer now and there’s been a bunch of work on the “back end,” including integration of Live Search, Virtual Earth Maps and Facebook sharing. Without doing lots of searches and checking out all the new functionality it appears to be a big improvement. Local ads are from Yellowpages.com and events information comes from Zvents. There are also reviews from Yelp prominently featured on profile pages. 

Can ‘Newspaper 2.0′ Get Here in Time?

Here’s an interesting video that shows how the NY Times is trying to work with a range of e-reader devices (out and yet to come to market) to see how the “paper” renders on these devices and understand the range of user interactions with them.

This is all “cool” stuff. But one gets the sense that these devices will take several years to hit the mainstream — the Kindles are too expensive right now to do it — and that will be too late to make any meaningful difference to the current economics of the newspaper industry.

Related newspaper stories:

• Who will control the New York Times?
• Did Google Really Consider Buying a Piece of the NY Times?
• Eric Schmidt on Google’s New Plan for the News
• Lack of Vision To Blame for Newspaper Woes (Howard Kurtz asks the key question: Why did no establishment media company create a Craigslist, a Huffington Post, a Google News, a Twitter, or other sites that have altered the boundaries of news and information? In February, 2007 I wrote: What Can Techmeme Teach Newspapers? This was just one of many posts in which I argued in favor of newspapers becoming news aggregators)

On the phone yesterday with someone it occurred to me that print newspapers are now like the dinosaurs in the aftermath of the fabled asteroid hitting the earth — not such a novel comparison, but appropriate perhaps.  They’re still alive but the environment that used to support them is radically altered. The recession combined with a thousand cuts inflicted by years of the Internet are going to bring all but the most resourceful to the brink of extinction.

Turing YP Sites into Recommendations Engines

I wrote very briefly yesterday that CityVoter’s redesign and new direction was ahead of an emerging trend toward real time recommendations for local. Previously, I said the following about Twitter and Google:

Online I can go to Yelp or Citysearch and look at consensus views and ratings. But in my vision of Twitter’s future I simply query my Twitter network and I get a bunch of responses to the lunch recommendation question. And I get them more or less instantaneously — or in “real time” if you prefer.

There’s also this earlier post, Twitter, Vark & ‘Real-Time’ Local Search:

Not all these services are the same, but conceptually the idea is to leverage human beings to respond to specific questions or queries either in real time or in a near real-time way.  Social search, review sites (e.g., Yelp) and Q&A (e.g., Yahoo Answers, Askville, LinkedIn Q&A) are all versions of offline word-of-mouth recommendations.

The promise of “human-powered search” has been around for several years. However none of the sites promoting that concept have really been successful. We’re just starting to see something more viable crystalize and emerge, in all these sites, which may well represent a successor to traditional search — or perhaps a companion to it.

And in October of 2007 over at Local Mobile Search, I wrote about a service called Mosio (as part of a category we were calling “social directory assistance”):

It can be viewed more broadly as the prototype for the sort of social/mobile/search service destined to be the foundation of a range of local search-based businesses.

Sebastien Provencher yesterday wrote a post introducing Praized’s “newsfeed, real-time search and conversation platform.” It appears to bring together a range of social media tools to YP companies, resulting in a buzz/news feed and Q&A functionality. Yellow Pages Group has apparently implemented part of this in the form of “Yellow Pages Answers“:

Here’s how Sebastien describes how the service works:

Answers (a “local” Question & Answer service, including a social network broadcast mechanism). Consumers can ask questions to the community and to their Facebook/Twitter friends and all answers come back to a unique page. Merchants can even join the conversation!

Inspired by Facebook and Twitter, it appears that Praized has found a very strong new direction for itself. This is quite powerful, but let’s step back for a moment and look at this functionality in a broader context.

The ability to ask questions of a group on local sites is nothing new. Both InsiderPages and Judy’s Book offered Q&A functionality from near inception (in 2007). It’s no longer on InsiderPages, now owned by IAC. And Judy’s Book has been sold and relaunched. Yelp has had questions and answers for several years as well (though not well integrated into the experience). Trulia and Zillow have very robust communities and Q&A tools in which local real estate agents can participate in conversations or provide answers to consumer questions. Beyond these there are a wide range of pre-existing services, Yahoo! Answers, Amazon’s AskVille, LinkedIn and several others, that also offer Q&A — though not in “real time.”

So what’s new:

• The “real-time” (near real time) dimension of Twitter and now Facebook Status updates. (BTW: IM could have done something like this years ago but didn’t)
• The ability to tap into multiple networks simultaneously because of APIs
• Perhaps most importantly, Twitter has captured people’s imaginations and helped put a name/label on this phenomenon (“real time” search)

The underlying consumer behavior is simply asking for word of mouth recommendations and is as “old as the hills.” But the ability to efficiently ask many people for advice or a local business referral at once online is new. Reviews were step one; the combination of quasi-real time answers and social networks is an evolution of that phenomenon.

The injection of merchants into the conversation is useful and potentially powerful but something that Trulia, Zillow and Yelp were doing already and which Yelp is now doing more directly. There are other examples out there as well.

Implicit in Sebastien’s post are some very interesting suggestions for the future of yellow pages, which is part of a much longer discussion than I want to get into now. Make no mistake, the integration of Q&A into yellow pages and the ability to tap into other networks are great product enhancements. Conceptually, however, none of these things are truly new, just the packaging and presentation.

Google Does TV for Chrome

As Search Engine Land and others are reporting, Google is now doing TV advertising on behalf of its browser Chrome:

Danny Sullivan doesn’t like the ad (or doesn’t think it’s effective). I kind of like it from a creative standpoint. To the extent it creates curiosity and then awareness it could be effective. The question: how big is the media buy and where is it running?

This is a big step for Google in terms of consumer marketing. Until now it has experimented and done several things but nothing quite as visible and splashy as TV advertising.

Does this say to you: Google considers Chrome to be a critical product? (Remember Chrome has Wifi/cell tower triangulation built into it.)

Here are 11 short films about Chrome. At least some of these videos are the next commercials “on deck.” The first commercial (above) came from this group (I’m showing the “short film” above, not the actual TV commercial, which is slightly different).

CityVoter’s New Strategic Direction

I always like talking to Josh Walker, CEO of CityVoter. He’s smart but he’s also a former Forrester analyst who made good (maybe one day I will too). Being an analyst is a little like being a movie critic — or at least that’s how I think about it.

But whether because he’s smart or because he was an analyst Josh is good at seeing where the market is heading. The newly redesigned CityVoter is heading squarely in that direction with an emphasis on connecting people and “real-time” (or quasi real-time) recommendations.

CityVoter has a bunch of local media partners and that won’t change, but over time the look and feel of those partner sites will match the central CityVoter “hub.” The vision is to enable people to connect with personal favorites and lists, branded “best of” lists, as well as Q&A around local and travel-related queries. It’s a big strategic shift or perhaps a bigger commitment to a direction CityVoter was already heading to a degree.

Though it remains a local search site (you can still search),  the changes remove CityVoter from the “pack” of local sites that it had formerly been in. What CityVoter is doing is generally consistent with some of my speculation about Twitter and local over the past few months. I think it’s a pretty bold move and very interesting.

There’s also an iPhone app coming that will connect all this to mobile in a more direct way.

Whole Foods Smartly Working Twitter

Ever since Whole Foods CEO John Mackey was caught using a fake identity to defame a competitor online I haven’t been able to think of the supermarket chain in quite the same way.  But I gotta say they’re really working Twitter well with local store feeds:

The company also set up a demographically targeted audience feed for Northern California moms:

This is smart both from a branding and direct response standpoint.

EconSM Next Thurs: Social + Mobile

Next Thursday (May 14) in SF the EconSM show takes place. It’s focused on how social and mobile intersect and interact. It should be quite a good event, with lots of interesting speakers — including from the all powerful Twitter.

I’ll be there moderating:

Panel: Geo-Location Services: Pinpointing Opportunities
3:40 – 4:30 p.m.

Geo-location services have grown in popularity as some social media users seek to inform their networks of their every move and more parents try to keep a digital eye on their kids and their whereabouts. As a result, more and more companies—including Google—have gotten into the game. What differentiates these services and who’s using them? What are the revenue opportunities and are they being achieved? How are they helping friends and family members keep track of each other and share information while having their privacy concerns addressed? How are these services preparing to compete against the likes of Facebook and Twitter as they incorporate the service into their networks?

Panelists:
Marc Davis, Chief Scientist of Yahoo! Mobile and VP of Early Stage Products
Sal Dhanani, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Marketing, TeleNav
Keith Ippel, President and COO, Lat49
Greg McAdoo, Venture Capitalist, Sequoia Capital

Moderator: Greg Sterling, Senior Analyst, Opus Research’s Internet2Go; Founder, Sterling Market Intelligence

EconSM is being held at the very nice Mission Bay Conference Center and is followed by an evening mixer. You can register with the code “LMS” and save 15% off the $450 registration fee.

Webcast on Local Advertising Today

Put together by Placecast, I’m moderating a discussion this morning on location based advertising at 10 Pacific/1 ET. Here are the details:

• Call-in Number: 1-712-429-0689
• Access Code: 610749

Or access the conference on the Web at http://snipurl.com/placecast.

It features:

• Scott Dunlap, CEO of NearbyNow
• Alistair Goodman, CEO of 1020 Placecast
• Derek Leedy, media director, MediaSmith

Toward the end you can tweet questions to me @gsterling.

Photosynth Integrating into Virtual Earth

Photosyth is a great product and under-appreciated I believe. Less well recognized than the integration of images and user photos into Google Maps, Microsoft has offered Photosynth collections/synths in Live Search Maps for some time. However the company is now integrating Photosyth more fully into the Virtual Earth platform (B2B):

Microsoft Corp. today announced updates to its Photosynth technology that enable commercial use through integration with Microsoft Virtual Earth. The Photosynth integration into Virtual Earth signifies the first release designed to enable businesses to use Photosynth in commercial applications.

Photosynth software analyzes digital photographs and generates a 3-D model by “stitching” the photos together. These models, or “synths,” can now be viewed using Silverlight technology across multiple platforms. Virtual Earth brings together features, functionality and content that help consumers, businesses, citizens and governments bring location to life. It helps businesses and governments share location-based information, build better connections with consumers or citizens, and helps organizations make better operational decisions. With the integration of Photosynth into Virtual Earth customers will be able to create detailed 3-D views of anything from places to products and from hotels to homes.

There are many commercial as well as purely “artistic” or educational applications of Photosynth (per the press release):

• Real estate. Showing homebuyers the inside and outside of properties with interactive views
• Tourism and hospitality. Giving an early 3-D and interactive view of hotels, resorts or cities
• Retail. Enabling customers to see the insides of branches and stores, and browse products in great detail
• Media and entertainment. Allowing media companies to create and share visual projects in a controlled environment, and build compelling campaigns and programs with new media
• Public sector. Giving citizens rich detail on public services, buildings, land use and more
• Internal business use. Using unlisted synths for location-based information, such as insurance risk assessment and claim processing

Indeed, real estate is one of the most obvious:

Game Changer: ‘Local Transaction’ Percentage

I just got a question in email about what percentage of searches use a geomodifier. As I was writing a response it occurred to me that a “game changer” in this whole tiresome discussion — how much of search is local or has a local intent? — is the following slightly different formulation:

What percent of search results in a local transaction?

This would shift the entire discussion to what really matters — the place where the money is spent: offline. I have been trying to argue for over three years that local is really about consumer behavior and the point of sale. Lots of people still neglect to see this connection, between a search online and an offline transaction.

If we take the question or formulation above — What percent of search results in a local transaction? — seriously then the answer goes from the 12% or 13% number that comScore uses to 90% or 95%. Looking at geomodifiers or even the more expansive “local intent” concept largely misses the big picture.

Those 90%+ figures start to change the nature of the discussion and start to very concretely show advertisers, especially larger marketers and national brands, that they need to focus on or at least complement their online advertising efforts with messages that lead people to local stores/shops/retailers/dealers in particular markets.

In my view (obviously) this is the right way to frame the discussion going forward: What percent of search results in a local transaction?

Thoughts?

Update: Should qualify all of the above in terms of commercial queries.

Range of Local/YP Financial Results

A bunch of Q1 results in the local segment came out yesterday or this a.m.:

• Local.com
• Marchex
• RHD
• Yellow Pages Group (Canada)

YPG is holding its own, while RHD saw a tough quarter reflecting both “cyclical and secular” trends affecting directories.

HelpHive Aims to be ‘Yelp for Home Services’

That’s not their description, it’s mine. But it captures the way in which the new home services vertical is trying to provide more depth and community tools to both local consumers and vendors.

Beyond the yellow pages, Angie’s List, Kudzu, InsiderPages and Yelp itself (among still others), there is ServiceMagic, the 900 pound gorilla in the home improvement/repair segment. However the user experience at ServiceMagic leaves a fair amount to be desired.Trulia and Zillow are also adjacent to this segment and could easily try to enter it. Zillow has taken some baby steps in that direction and can be expected to eventually do something more complete.

More immediately, there have also been two recent site launches that I’m aware of: ServiceLive (from Sears) and LocalPrice, which is in Atlanta only. And now HelpHive:

HelpHive founders Dave Richards and Karim Meghji are trying to bring much more depth and content to the user experience than they feel currently exists on other sites (though this idea exists among other publishers/entrepreneurs in the segment as well). Here’s their story and philosophy. At launch, the company has “6,500 home services businesses covering more than 45 categories.” Wisely they’re focused on a single market for the time being but will eventually roll out to other cities.

In addition to trying to generate more content for users, Richards and Meghji have created a wide range of tools for businesses that allow them to provide lots of detail about their work and projects, as well as specify how they should be contacted. Indeed, they believe a HelpHive presence would/could/should be a viable substitute for a website for those vendors/contractors that don’t have them or that have awkward or under-performing sites.

Most interesting to me about the business tools is a message center that allows consumers and businesses to communicate through the site using voice. (Startup Search to Phone does something similar but in a somewhat different context.). Here’s a screenshot of the business-facing message center:

Finally, HelpHive seeks to tap social media to extend distribution and reach. Here’s the site’s Facebook fan page:

Clearly HelpHive is a smartly designed site and its founders are very thoughtful about the space. It’s just that the segment is very crowded. Yet, curiously, there really are no consumer “brands” per se among the home services specific sites — save perhaps Angie’s List, which requires a consumer subscription. (Angie’s List is much broader now than home services, but that’s still the primary association.)

If you were a VC and saw a deck that pitched HelpHive and made some of the claims the founders are making, would you invest?