The Global Venture

Titanic part 1: The love boat post was an exercise of analysis, but it was certainly a bit naïve or at least incomplete. There, I devised something like a magic marketing recipe based on The Democratic Web and the Undemocratic Mobile concepts, discussing about viral marketing.

As a reaction to the post, Andres Ribera from Hipoqih commented something that I found very true. I quote:

    "There are no magic recipes, no case of success is the same to another. I don't know whether hipoqih will succeed, but if so I don't think it will resemble other success stories"

And on viral marketing, he added:

    "Viral marketing existed before the Web 2.0 and in other places outside the social networks. Things that have expanded virally include google search engine, windows OS, the eMule software –P2P networks-, mobile phones…

    What we really need to develop is a useful product, something we would like to use. If you use it and you like it, you will recommend it, and that is precisely what we are looking for, that recommendation."


Bottom line: The idea of Democratic Web + Putting a feet in the door of Undemocratic Mobile might be a good one, we'll have to try it out and see what happens, but not forgetting the good old fashioned mouth to ear whispering.

Mouth to mouth might be useful as well, you never know.

This idea is just an extension or a particularization of the location based rss feed (like a location based digg).

The idea is quite simple. You can associate existing web pages to points on a Google map. For attach the wikipedia page of the Guggenheim museum of Bilbao to the location of the museum in the map. When a mobile users is in the museum, he will have this wiki on his RSS feed on the screen of his mobile phone.

You can also localize online newspaper articles, blog posts, twitter pots.

The main problem of this approach is that a most content of the web is aimed to be topic specific but geographically universal.

Where would you localize Martin Varsawsky's blog?  Even you may be able to localize some posts. This blog about entrepreneurship is intended for everybody no matter where.

 "The man over there" sent me the other day a very impressive email in Spanish. I read it on my mobile phone (by using Gmail mobile. It is so cool!). and love it so much that I rushed to beg him to translate it into English and post it in globthink. The article is here.

After discussion with "The man over there" and the problems of mobile post-it and have matured my idea and made it evolve to something that might be described as "location based rss feed", which may be desktop or mobile.

What is this? To answer this question I will go through the problems of mobile post-it one by one.

Mobile post-it is intrusive. I would never use it

The concept is the same as mobile post-it with the difference that you do not get a message or a beep every time that you are close to something. You just have an RSS feed with the comments (post-its) that are more relevant to your location. If you want you can go to the web page to see the feed but if you do not want nobody will disturb you with beeps or alerts.  These resolves the problem of the intrusiveness of mobile post-it.

Mobile is not democratic

Web (in PC) is democratic and viral but Mobile Web (even most mobile services) are "less democratic" and "less viral". (of course, this can be discussed and different people will have different ideas).

Based on this principle (which may be wrong), it is more sensible to create a Web service (PC) that can be extended to mobile than a mobile service that can be extended to Web.

Mobile post-it is a mobile service but you can create a web extension by making facebook gadgets, igoogle gadgets, netvibes gadgets or even by providing a web page to see post-its sent by mobile phones

However, for me, location based RSS feed is, above all, a web 2.0 service, which can be extended for mobile use.

• Web use: I imagine a Google maps mash up in which you can post or read messages (text, image, video, gadgets) in a certain geographical point. Localization may be manual (the uses clicks on the point where he is interested) By the way google maps allows localization by using your IP address.

• Mobile use: due to the screen and use limitations, the best choice may be not to use Google maps but just provide a very simple page with an RSS feed of the top posts in that location. In this case using a localization method like hipoqih plug-in for GPS is required

The idea is really attracting users first on the web and then provide them a mobile tool. I think new 2.0 applications have to be web (gadget, facebook...) and mobile at the same time. In one word, they have to be global.  But there are not clear methods for success.

There will be a lot of spam in mobile post-it

My idea is that the content presented to the user should be only the most relevant one. To do this, there are several techniques:

• Users vote which content is more relevant in each location. Most votes posts will have more weigh in the ranking. This will be a kind of location based digg. (By the way mobile digg already exists).

  • Comment: By the way, there is an incredible story about content validation in hot or not, a site where you can vote if the guy / girl on the picture is hot or not. Obviously many users submit adult material, which is not allowed. Instead of expending thousands of dollars on staff to review all pictures, they have manged to get the content validated by the community.

• According to the user profile, more relevant posts should have more weigh. This is a very complicate topic and is related to semantic web but in a first approach it may be implemented with tags.

• According to geographical proximity,  the weigh of a topic (even if we are not sure of how relevant it is) grows exponentially with the proximity.

Mobile post-it is a huge topic. We need to focus on something more concrete

It is true that the location based RSS feed is also a huge topic. It is possible to chose an specific kind of topic or messages or content and focus on this. I will try to refine it with the time.

Business Model

This deserves a post of its own

A Real Problem: a lot of content

Users need to see that there is content on a platform. Otherwise they will never be interested in using it.

"Location based rss feeds" (ugly name) will require much more content than digg to get the same impression on the user because content is localized. You may have a lot of posts in New York but a user in Beijing cannot see them. This does not happen with digg