iPad 3G Arrives, MSFT & HP Kill Their Tablets

Apple is now shipping the iPad 3G, which should trigger another wave of sales for the now popular device. Meanwhile, curiously, HP has reportedly killed the much-hyped (Flash, “full Internet”) “Slate” tablet previewed by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at CES earlier this year.

My belief was that the HP Slate was destined to fail as simply a netbook without a keyboard. HP’s acquisition of Palm and WebOS was undoubtedly directly related to the decision.

More curious and perhaps more disappointing is Microsoft’s decision to end the Courier tablet project. Engadget quotes a Microsoft representative:

At any given time, across any of our business groups, there are new ideas being investigated, tested, and incubated. It’s in Microsoft’s DNA to continually develop and incubate new technologies to foster productivity and creativity. The “Courier” project is an example of this type of effort and its technologies will be evaluated for use in future Microsoft offerings, but we have no plans to build such a device at this time.

Microsoft had previously denied the existence of the device. It looked “cool” and innovative so it’s too bad it won’t come to market. But there will be numerous other tablets (especially based on Android) coming out later this year.

The netbook market perhaps has “peaked” and tablets will potentially be taking their place (depending on several factors). Android tablets may (emphasis on may) be able to go “head to head” with the iPad on features and UX, but many of these devices will have to compete on price, which several computer OEMs have indicated they’re going to do.

The success of netbooks during the recession has brought the price of laptops down overall. It’s now hard to charge much more than $5oo or $600 for a laptop unless you’re Apple. A bunch of $250 tablets may put additional pressure on the PC market. But Apple will also be forced to lower iPad prices if competitiors are successful with lower-priced tablets.

All that remains to be seen.

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Update: Got a note from someone “in the know” who disputes that HP is killing the Slate. We’ll see.

LivingSocial Gets More Money, Goes ‘Hyperlocal’

On March 11 group buying site LivingSocial announced a $25 million “B” round. Today, a little over a month later, the company is announcing a new $14 million “C” round.

In addition the company is launching in several new markets — Portland, Orange County, Charlotte and Philadelphia – bringing the total in which it operates its daily deal offering to 18.

In Seattle LivingSocial is introducing “hyperlocal,” which in this case is not the neighborhood but sub-DMA-level targeting within the larger metro market. Here’s what the press materials said about this new capability:

Now consumers in areas like Tacoma and Bellevue will start getting deals targeted to their location, in addition to Seattle proper. Hyperlocal deals not only help more consumers explore new things in their city, but these deals also provide merchants with a greater opportunity to reach local audiences on the LivingSocial Deals platform.

I spoke yesterday with LivingSocial CEO and Co-founder Tim O’Shaughnessy about the announcements and a range of issues related to the group buying phenomenon.

O’Shaughnessy told me that “hyperlocal” areas are self-selected by users and that the targeting may become more granular or narrow over time. Seattle is a test market of sorts but the company intends to roll it out more broadly.

I asked O’Shaughnessy about the “noise” in the market, though not yet mainstream, on both the consumer and SMB-advertiser sides. I also asked how LivingSocial was different or would differentiate from other competitors. He told me that the group buying market in his view was an easy market to enter but one in which it is very hard to scale.

He sees LivingSocial and Groupon perhaps as the only ones in the market now doing that. LivingSocial Competitor Groupon just raised a massive ($100+  million round) at a valuation of more than $1 billion. Groupon’s total funding is now reportedly over $170 million.

O’Shaughnessy said that in every market the company has “feet on the street” — at least a couple of reps that can negotiate deals and who know the market well. He felt that this is and would increasingly be a differentiator for the site, for “advertisers” and consumers.

I walked O’Shaughnessy through my “Dark Side” post and we discussed the various issues raised. In particular he said that LivingSocial does allow caps. He also said that businesses that use the service have high satisfaction levels. Indeed, there’s a growing body of anecdotal evidence that these programs work.

The race is on for these sites to get the deals, the scale and to some degree to develop themselves as “brands” that consumers recognize. Right now LivingSocial and Groupon are the two providers that are arguably best positioned from a consumer “brand perspective.” However, because businesses are buying new customers and there’s zero risk — this is not “advertising” in a conventional sense — it’s easier for a new company to sell group buying into the SMB market without a recognized brand.

As the phenomenon becomes more mainstream how will it evolve? And will it put pressure on other media because of this zero-risk proposition?

This second issue was a question that O’Shaughnessy and I discussed at some length. He believes that in many cases this is new local money coming into the market and not a substitution of group buying for other media. He also said that the WashingtonPost is a partner and saw that as a model for other LivingSocial-traditional media relationships potentially in the future.

O’Shaughnessy also told me that many of the local businesses that work with LivingSocial as clients/customers see it as a “branding play” in addition to being about new customer acquisition. That was interesting and something I hadn’t thought about before.

On the point about new customer acquisition, I raised the “one night stand” metaphor. He emphasized that LivingSocial wants its local business customers to be happy and to utilize their services again. He also  said that he sees opportunities for additional kinds of products in the future to more fully serve the local market.

Yahoo! Lets Users Search for Menu Items

Are you hungry for a “Boston Roll” (as in sushi) but don’t know where to find one? Yahoo! is now letting people search for menu items and specific dishes and find where they’re served locally:

It’s quite useful and has broader implications in terms of how Yahoo might expand beyond restaurant menus. After all, menu items are just “unstructured data.”

I’ve got slightly more discussion over at SEL.

Others Start to Index Facebook ‘Likes’

Real-time search engine “OneRiot” is now indexing Facebook Likes as part of the Open Graph API:

[W]e were very happy to see Facebook opening up public data with the Open Graph API and other products at f8 last week. For example, “Likes” can now be shared across the web in interesting ways. Realtime search engines can now process that “Like” as a social signal to help increase the relevance score of a page in the index.

At OneRiot, we have now started to experiment with this Facebook data.

Until today, we’ve been indexing the links shared on Twitter, MySpace, Digg, Delicious and by our own OneRiot panel to help determine our search results. Now, with the addition of Facebook data, OneRiot delivers search results that reflect the pulse of a much, much wider social web.

That’s very nice — using Likes as a relevance signal for the algorithm — but there’s something more interesting here.

I had previously thought that only Facebook would be able to access all the Like data and wrote about what that might enable in the local segment:

All the local publishers in North America and Europe implement Social Plug-ins, etc. Millions upon millions of businesses are “Liked.” That creates a master data set in the aggregate. Facebook will know:

• The favorite sushi restaurants in every city
• The favorite contractors
• The favorite attorneys
• The favorite  . . . in every category

They’ll know all these things in the aggregate and in terms of my network in particular. Each “Like” is a “vote” in the same way that each link is a “vote” in the SEO world. But a Like vote is much better than a link vote.

In a very short period of time Facebook will have a ton of valuable data. What will do with all this data (courtesy of all the local sites that will implement Social Plug-ins)?

I’m not a developer or engineer so I’m on shaky ground a little bit here. But if, as OneRiot says, all the Like data is available to third parties then they can do what I was suggesting only Facebook would be able to do: create a killer database of local favorites.

You can bet that Google will be thinking about this and tapping into that data if it’s public. Shouldn’t you also?

IAC Earnings Tidbits: CityGrid, ServiceMagic

Here are a couple of interesting tidbits from IAC’s earnings release:

CityGrid added more than 150 new publishers since launching its developer center on January 29th, and added Dex One as a major reseller partner, bringing the total number of reseller partners to 10. ServiceMagic grew domestic service providers 26% year-over-year, including the addition of service providers in new categories such as events and senior care.

IAC doesn’t break out Citysearch revenues sepearately. But ServiceMagic reported $42 million in Q1 2010 revenues vs. $31 million a year ago. That’s a $100 million-plus business now.

I met last week with CEO Jay Herratti who said that CityGrid was really on fire.

Urbanspoon Supersizes for the iPad

Urbanspoon’s new iPad app is the second entry on the new device from IAC/Citysearch. The first was the relatively undistinguished Cityseries app. But the Urbanspoon translation onto the iPad is a success.

While there’s a good deal more that can be done with the larger “real estate,” Urbanspoon has made the leap well and may reap rewards from being early in on the iPad — as it was on the iPhone (Yelp, take note).

Whereas the iPhone app is all about the “slot machine” experience, the iPad app is all about the map. The same carousel functionality exists here but it’s more discretely up at the top of the screen.

In general I find more “utility” here than on the iPhone version. And, as I said, there’s more than can be done with things like filters, favorites and neighborhoods.

For those that don’t have an iPad (yet), here’s a video of the new Urbanspoon app in action.

Facebook Offers Its Own Window Decals to SMBs

As I’ve pointed out before, Facebook started out as a local site — a closed network for high school and college students built around schools in particular places. Several years later Facebook is one of the Internet’s dominant companies, with more than 400 million users globally. It is now, according to Compete, Inc., the second most trafficked site on the Internet, possibly on its way to dethroning Google as number one.

In February Facebook said that “more than 1.5 million local businesses have active Pages on Facebook.” That figure was roughly double what had been reported just a few months before. My guess would be then that the 1.5 million is now closer to 2 million.

Several days ago I got a casual email from someone at Facebook saying that there would be something related to local coming out soon and that I should be hearing from another person on the PR team. Yesterday around dinner time I and some others received a note that a unspecified number of small businesses with Facebook Pages were given “Facebook stickers” (window decals).

The parallel to Google’s “Favorite Places” window decal is obvious. The Google window sticker includes a “QR” code. Scanning the Google QR code with your mobile phone takes you to the Place Page for the business (which now has a mobile-friendly version).

Yelp of course has had window decals for some time, though they’re not “interactive.” And before Yelp there were Citysearch and AOL and other window decals for local businesses.

Here’s Facebook’s version:

Beyond the fact of its existence, the interesting angle here is that by texting the short code you become what used to be called a “fan” of the business. Here’s the public page for “The Counter,” a restaurant in Palo Alto, California.

The integration of SMS into these decals, with the practical result that the SMB “acquires” a follower who then will receive status updates (and promotions) on his/her mobile phone, is very smart on several levels. There’s a much more tangible and immediate benefit to the SMB vs. Google’s QR codes: the business builds its “fan” base. Then it can market to those fans through their news feeds. What’s more, Facebook causes more people to link their mobile phones with their accounts (as a secondary benefit).

Heretofore Facebook had been focused on moving SMBs into Facebook Ads, and apparently many have used/tried them. But there are more things related to SMBs and local up Facebook’s proverbial sleeve. These stickers should be seen as “step one” of a new focus and move into the segment.

Facebook Won’t ‘Like’ FTC Inquiry on Privacy

Some people believe that with Social Plug-ins and the “Open Graph,” Facebook  is overreaching. One of those people is now NY Senator Charles Schumer.

For quite some time I’ve been saying and speculating that if “the industry” isn’t careful the regulators will spring into action. Today Senator Schumer called on the FTC to create guidelines and regulate social networking privacy, motivated apparently by Facebook’s Open Graph announcements last week.

Here’s an excerpt from Schumer’s letter:

Today, U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer urged the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to provide guidelines for social networking sites, like Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter on how private information submitted by online users can be used and disseminated. Schumer’s call to the FTC comes on the heels of recent reports that Facebook has decided to provide user data to select third party websites and has begun sharing personal profile information that users previously had the ability to restrict access to. These recent changes by Facebook fundamentally change the relationship between the user and the social networking site. Previously, users had the ability to determine what information they chose to share and what information they wanted to keep private. Recent policy changes are fundamentally changing that relationship and there is little guidance on what social networking sites can and cannot do and what disclosures are necessary to consumers.

Under new policies, users must go through a complicated and confusing opt-out process to keep private information from being shared with third party websites. Additionally, Facebook has also created a new system whereby ‘interests’ listed by users on their personal profiles are automatically aggregated and shared as massive web pages. Users used to have the ability to keep this information private if they chose. These new common interest pages are a gold mine of marketing data that could use by used for spam and potentially scammers, intent on peddling their wares.

Schumer and his staff may or may not fully understand what Facebook is trying to do or the benefits the company asserts it’s providing to users and publishers. But this should be taken seriously and could be the beginning of a long-anticipated move into online privacy regulation by the feds.

The IAB (and Facebook itself) should head this off at the pass with voluntary moves and clearer disclosures.

More on Facebook, Privacy & Data Mining

Here are two unrelated pieces on Facebook that I ran across nearly simultaneously:

• An Online Alias Keeps Colleges Off Their Trail
• Facebook VP: Why We Want Marketers to Like “Like”

The first is from the NY Times, about how high-school students and college applicants are trying to make it harder for colleges to find them on Facebook (using aliases), for fear of the adverse consequences of institutions knowing too much about them:

For high school students concerned with college acceptance, Facebook presents a challenge. It encourages making public every thought and every photo, an opportunity for posturing and bravado nearly irresistible to teenagers. But this impulse for display clashes with the need to appear circumspect and presentable to college admissions agents, who some high school guidance counselors have warned are likely vetting applicants by trolling the Web.

Whether admissions officers really do plumb Facebook is up for debate, said Dr. Frank C. Leana, a prominent independent college counselor in New York City whose services cost $1,000 (for a one-time consultation) to $9,000 (for ongoing counsel throughout the college process). His students believe they are being watched, he said, but “it’s really hard to know how accurate their suspicions are.”

One of the big pitches for the Open Graph is “making the Web less anonymous,” more transparent. But Facebook being the de facto identity management platform across the Internet is not so desirable to everyone, as the above article suggests. And young people do care about privacy it would appear — or at least that third parties not be able to access their information.

Real and open identity is good as an abstract matter until the “big brother effect” kicks in and others are passing judgment and denying jobs or college admissions, potentially because of one-too-many drunken party images on Facebook. While there’s no documentation of the latter, the fear is clearly present.

The second article, an interview of sales VP Mike Murphy by eMarketer, reveals some of Facebook’s ambitions surrounding data mining and ad targeting vis-a-vis the “Like” button. Here’s eMarketer’s summary conclusion of Murphy’s comments:

Whenever a person clicks to “like” something they see on the Web, that information will go into their Facebook profile and marketers will be able to use the information to target advertising within Facebook.

This is a key point: all off-site “Like” activity will factor into targeting on Facebook. In other words, Facebook is mining actions across the Internet for targeting on its site. Brilliant and/or creepy? A little of both I think.

What many (most) people don’t realize also is that “Liking” something across the Internet will enable marketers or publishers to push content and “publish into [users'] news feeds.” This requires prior approval but it may not be clear that people are signing up for an ongoing stream of information or marketing messages.

Milo Pushing into SMB Inventory

Late last week I spoke with Milo CEO Jack Abraham. He and I discussed the company’s efforts to move beyond major retailers and big boxes into SMB inventory. He acknowledged that this was a very long-term play and fraught with complexity because of differing inventory systems — or their complete absence — at the SMB level.

Earlier I had this same conversation with the folks at Clarinova.

Abraham said that the company currently had slightly more than 100 small retailers that it was working with in a variety of ways to get the data. He declined to elaborate on specifics. On the company’s site a “paw” icon represents a small retailer:

Other firms that provide local inventory data to varying degrees of comprehensiveness include Krillion and NearbyNow (still in the game).

Google of course recently announced that it would be working with retailers directly to provide this information to consumers online and on the go. A few years ago Google was working with StepUp (now part of Intuit) and ShopLocal to provide similar information but abandoned the effort because the data were uneven. Google’s effort can only boost the value of Milo and Krillion, as other e-commerce sites try to add local inventory information.

Milo has said also that it will be syndicating its data to third party sites.

Google Certifications Musical Chairs

In light of the closure of the Google AdWords Reseller program I wanted to point out some of the changes that are going on in the Google certification world. Apparently Google is shuttering the “Google Advertising Professionals” program, which some saw as the alternative to Reseller.

It’s being replaced by a new Google AdWords Certification program. Search Engine Land has more detail; and so does Google.

One question I have is: how much do SMB advertisers (or other clients) care about these designations?

AR on Google Maps: Part Deux

Google started playing with “augmented reality” — I’m using the term here loosely — in the PC version of Street View several months ago, but now appears to be rolling it out more extensively. Local business listings now appear as small icons connected to their buildings in the Street View image.

The rest of this short post is on SEL.

WSJ Hooks up with Foursquare

The Wall Street Journal is another big media company to tie up with Foursquare in an effort to market itself on the go and boost its hip quotient

These are WSJ-centric badges and there’s a WSJ, Twitter-like follow page on Foursquare (same as other partners) that offer local tips:

The WSJ-Foursquare relationship is very much like similar partnership deals with the History Channel, Bravo TV, Canada’s Metro News. It’s now a kind of “template” — and it’s smart for everyone involved.

Like Twitter in the past, however, it’s not clear that Foursquare gets any direct monetary value out of corporate use of the site and brand association. For now that may be just fine. This adds to Foursquare’s credibility, visibility and brand. And it helps the site differentiate from others seeking to do similar things (e.g., Gowalla).

Craigslist Sex Ads Worth $36 Million?

In discussing the advertising of prostitution on Craigslist, The NY Times cites an unspecified source for the proposition that these ads alone will generate $36 million in income this year:

The ads, many of which blatantly advertise prostitution, are expected to bring $36 million this year, according to a new projection of Craigslist’s income.

I wonder how much “escorts” generates for the print yellow pages by comparison. Anybody know?

It has got to be a good deal more than $36 million in the aggregate I would imagine.

Could the iPad Get Better PR than This?

This is apparently now going viral, evidenced by me putting it up here in part. The video below features a 100 year old woman named Virginia who bought her first computer: an iPad. . .

No I don’t think the association of the centenarian with the iPad will scare away younger users.

Here’s the related article.

Google Highlights In-Store Photography

As part of its “Places” announcement the other day, Google said it would come to your store, location or shop and take a bunch of interior photos — for free. Now the company has devoted a post to explaining this new initiative:

The photographs are shot by Google photographers who work directly with the business owner to arrange a time to do the photo shoot. Along with taking pictures of layout, facilities, and merchandise, we’ll also photograph displays on the storefront, like hours, rating decals, accessibility information, credit cards accepted, and posted menus — and all of this will be done at no cost to the business owner. These photos will also appear alongside the others on a business’ Place Page, and can help customers (and potential customers) get a better sense of what a business has to offer and what sets it apart from others.

As previously discussed European Directories has been doing this in Europe for some time. And Everyscape, which will soon announce interior and StreetView-like imagery with a bunch of partners, has been doing interior photography for several years. However Everyscape’s business model is based on charging for interior images. That will put some pressure on the company to find a hedge should Google Store View (not the official name) prove very popular.

This free, Google interior photography is going to be quite popular I’ll predict, and will serve to reinforce the value of Place Pages for businesses and consumers.

Buzz on Maps, Suggest Gets More Local

Google Buzz has been available on Maps for mobile devices, but now Google has made it possible to access Buzz on Maps for the PC. In addition Google is rolling out localized Search Suggest for Maps in more places around the world.

You access the “Buzz layer” on Maps by selecting more, which reveals the various places people are posting about:

The rest of this post is at Search Engine Land.

With Golden Data Will Facebook Push Local?

Earlier this year at the Borrell local conference Yellowbook executive Pat Marshall made the remarkable statement that the site was getting more traffic from Facebook than from Google. I never was able to get complete clarity there or unpack the remark to fully understand it and the underlying data. But it’s symbolic of the growing importance of Facebook in the local ecosystem.

Now with the advent of the Like button and Open Graph local publishers will race to integrate these tools. Indeed, they’ll make local sites more social and personal by showing friends’ activities and so on. They also provide a simple way for local businesses and the publishers to gain greater exposure to networks via Facebook. This was already true to varying degrees with Connect; the new tools merely amplify the effect.

The potential “dark side” of all this is the fact that all the data that emerges from all the Like button clicking will be in Facebook’s hands. Other third parties in the network will be able to access some of that data with permission but no single party in the “Open Graph” ecosystem being created will have the entire data set — except Facebook.

Facebook has given no indication that it will do anything like what I’m suggesting here, but let’s play out a scenario.

All the local publishers in North America and Europe implement Social Plug-ins, etc. Millions upon millions of businesses are “Liked.” That creates a master data set in the aggregate. Facebook will know:

• The favorite sushi restaurants in every city
• The favorite contractors
• The favorite attorneys
• The favorite  . . . in every category

They’ll know all these things in the aggregate and in terms of my network in particular. Each “Like” is a “vote” in the same way that each link is a “vote” in the SEO world. But a Like vote is much better than a link vote.

In a very short period of time Facebook will have a ton of valuable data. What will do with all this data (courtesy of all the local sites that will implement Social Plug-ins)?

It could do nothing in particular or it could build the single most effective local directory and search site that exists. This data will be more valuable than anything Google has or any individual local publisher-partner possesses. That includes Yelp, YPG or anyone else that joins the Open Graph and implements these new Facebook platform tools.

Now let’s think back to Google a few years ago.

Google was originally regarded mostly a source of SEO traffic to local sites. It had maps but it wasn’t considered the local competitor it is today. Over time Google continued to improve its local offering and started showing maps + local listings increasingly. It’s to the point now where local SEO is a very limited option. The need for alternative traffic is fueling the rise of CityGrid, the anti-Google.

The story could well be the same with Facebook, should the company decide that local information is important to its users and/or that it wants to make local search a bigger part of the Facebook experience.

One could also imagine a mobile app, “Facebook Likes,” that provides recommendations from my network and from Facebook users in the aggregate. The “coverage” on such an app would be unmatched because of the data that Facebook will be capturing — data that nobody else will have.

Just like SEO in the past local publishers probably cannot afford not to participate in the Open Graph program. For them the benefits are clear and immediate. But in the long term the benefits to Facebook could be far greater.

The question and uncertain thing is the degree to which Facebook wants to offer its own “local search” results or apps. No one at Facebook has given me any indication that they’re going to do something like this. It just popped into my head yesterday at the F8 event. And Facebook wouldn’t do anything for at least a year or two at the very earliest.

However given the goldmine of data that will be coming from the Like button it will be very tempting to do something at some point.

YPG ‘Likes’ Facebook’s Social Plug-ins

While lots of local publishers are using Facebook Connect as a sign in, to transmit user reviews and other actions back to the Facebook news feed, Canada’s YPG appears to be the first that has integrated the new social plug-ins and “Like” button in particular. (I wrote a long piece at SEL about the new social plug-ins and Open Graph announced by Facebook yesterday.)

Every profile on Yellowpages.ca now has a “Like” button. And when I show up at the site (if I’m signed in to Facebook) I’ll see the activity on the site from my Facebook friends (for “instant personalization”).

Here’s how it looks. First without the FB log in:

And now with me logged in to Facebook and “Liking” a business:

My Like goes off to my FB news feed (and later a dedicated area on my profile page). My friends’ recent activities on the site are immediately shown to me:

Some of this was already going on with Facebook Connect but the new tools and capabilities that Facebook announced yesterday go well beyond that. For example, by “Liking” a business you’ve become a Fan (in the old Facebook Fan sense), which means that if you’ve permitted it with  your privacy settings every time there’s an update associated with that “Liked” business you’ll get a feed notification, including potentially an email if that’s the way the site is set up. The equivalent things would have happened if you had become a Fan of a company or business on Facebook itself. In other words, the Like button makes any profile or website into a Facebook Fan page.

In the case above I’ve effectively become a fan/follower of the sushi restaurant. And it’s a kind of “stealth CRM” vehicle for sites and businesses that choose to exploit that potential.

Every single local publisher will undoubtedly become part of this system, which is now much easier to implement than the old FB Connect.

YPG Launches ‘Urbanizer’ Mobile App

Yellow Pages Group yesterday introduced a nouveau iPhone app called “Urbanizer.” It’s highly social, focused solely on restaurants and very nicely designed. Yellow pages branding is almost non-existent. The app is intended to appeal to a young, urban demographic that might not associate the yellow pages with “cool” restaurants and entertainment.

The app incorporates data from YPG’s CanadaPlus cityguide as well as recent acquisition Restaurantica. It utilizes Facebook Connect to build the social graph into the app as well as to broadcast information back through the Facebook news feed. One of the novel dimensions of the app is the ability to make restaurant choices by “mood.”

The rest of this post is at Internet2Go.