Today I have found some similar initiatives:

1 ) GeoURL

"GeoURL.org is a location-to-URL reverse directory. This will allow you to find URLs by their proximity to a given location. Find your neighbor's blog, perhaps, or the web page of the restaurants near you. GeoURL is listing 1,681,046 sites". On the image you can see the red points representing blogs in the world. So many points!

2) A2B

A2B.cc is much more elaborated than GeoURL

A2B provides a location based search engine which allows you finding the nearest web sites to your location.

A2B.cc also allows mobile searching and works with free GPS software (See our post on GPS software)

It seems to me it does not work very well because I am in Shanghai and the first site I get is about a the weather at a UK base in Antarctica!!!

3) Local.com

Local.com is another location based engine with a more refined aspect. However, it does not even support IP geolocation. You have to write the city where you are.

I tried to find restaurants here in Shanghai but the search engine says it does not know where Shanghai is (???).

But they are working hard on this because they have just been granted a US patent for "indexing and retrieving web-related information by geographical location". Local search is a patent-mined field!: Google, Local.com, Verizon, Geomas (this is another competitor but it seems to me taht their business model is more like selling software, not really web2.0) and much more

5) Loki.com

Loki.com is a location based search and navigation toolbar. But you have to download it and I am too lazy for this!

6) Google

What to say? Read it in this blog

I will try to find more information about this. Probably in pages related to the Where 2.0 Conference in California

The idea about location based Internet is not bad! but these implementations don't seem too me very attractive. I wouldn't be a user of any of these applications.

I bet there must be another way of doing it

I would like to make a summary of a very long article (but very intreresting) written by Mike Mace in his blog MobileOpportunity.

The article is called:

Will flat-rate pricing make mobile data take off?

No. It's a nice start, but the operators need to take several other steps as well.

Recently flat-rate pricing for wireless data service has become a big issue in Europe and some other parts of the world. Data service to mobile phones there has often been metered, with users paying by the megabyte. This led to some frightening stories on the Internet of people accidentally ending up with 800-Euro monthly phone bills for browsing too much. Needless to say, this has made many people very cautious about using mobile data.

Recently T-Mobile in Europe offered a flat-rate data service, in which the user pays a single fixed monthly fee for virtually all the data access they want (the limit is about a gigabyte a month, which is a lot for a mobile phone). Then on November 16, Hutchison Whampoa, the owner of the "Three" wireless network in Europe and Asia, announced its own flat-rate plan (more details below).

The Mobile One network in Singapore just cut its unlimited 3G data price by about 2/3, to around $13 a month, in order to compete with fixed broadband services. And on December 1, the CEO of Vodafone went even further, predicting that within a few years we'll have flat-rate billing for all mobile services, including both voice and data.[...]

Has Hutchison revolutionized the mobile Internet?

I don't think so. Unfortunately, just offering flat-rate pricing is not enough to make mobile data take off. This is one area in which the US mobile phone market has been a leader, believe it or not. The top four mobile operators in the US have offered flat-rate data for years, ranging in price from $15 to $40 a month. Some of them even let you use your mobile phone as a modem, something that Hutchison bans. [..] The result? Some happy Blackberry and Treo users, but nothing like a mass migration toward mobile data.

Five steps to make mobile data a success

In addition to offering flat-rate data, here are the other steps a mobile operator must take in order to make that mobile data ecosystem work:

1. Provide a consistent architecture that works offline. This is probably the most critical need. Web applications depend on having a constant connection between the user's computer and the Internet. That's not practical for the mobile Web. Even in countries with heavy 2G coverage, there are lots of gaps in the 3G network, and will be for many years. Mobile Web apps need to work like RIM's e-mail client, which stores both the program itself and the user's data locally and then sends the data to the network when a connection is available. [...]

2. Kill security certificates. But today the operators treat websites and applications completely differently. The new flat-rate data plans let you browse just about any website you want. But operators are starting to insist that applications obtain a security certificate before they can be installed. The certification process is slow, inconvenient, and unreasonably expensive for small software companies and those that create a lot of applications. Since small software companies are the most innovative, this has an enormous chilling effect on mobile innovation. [...]

3. Unlock the user's data. This is the other security-related problem area. Many operators make it very difficult for an application to access the user's data stored on the device, such as the address book, the dialer, and the user's current location. But many of the most interesting new mobile applications need to be able to work with this information. Users should be informed when they give an application access to this information, but it should be very easy for them to say yes. [...]

4. Make it easy to discover new content and services. The mobile data ecosystem will evolve faster if it's easy for users to find new services and applications. Today the content discovery tools and software stores on mobile devices, if they are installed at all, are often buried under several layers of icons, or are very hard to use. We need the mobile equivalent of an Amazon.com -- an online content store that's easy to find, browse and search, and that makes suggestions to you based on what you've used in the past. [...]

5. Get ready to go to a flat rate for everything. Vodafone's comment shows that they understand this: the logical outcome of putting the open web on a mobile device is that voice and data merge under a single flat fee. If a Skype call is free, then eventually all calls need to be free, or the users will just switch everything to Skype. Same thing for SMS messages once they're directly in conflict with instant messaging. The operators' old financial model won't evaporate overnight, but it's now officially dying. [...]

My friend knows all mobile Internet access fees in these 3 countries:

The following points is what I recall from the conversation:

• Best offers are in Italy rather than in Spain or Germany.
• In Italy mobile flat-rates are usually limited to several Gb (3 or so) and cost between 20 to 30 Euros a month. The cheapest one is Wind for 20 Euros.
• Many flat-rate schemes in Italy used to allow Internet access abroad with no roaming fees (but limited to 200 Mb a month). Now this possibility is no longer allowed.
• In Spain, there is an offer from Telefonica (mobile Internet access limited to 10 Mb) for 29 Euros.

And the reason is because I do not pay. If I paid it would be very different. The main handicap to mobile web getting popular is the high cost of mobile Internet access.

Saturday evening I investigated about mobile Internet flat rates. I visited the shops of the following Hong Kong mobile operators. In Hong Kong mobile operators (as well as any other business) face a huge competition.

The offer of Smartone - Vodafone of 7 € for internet browsing a month is just so irresistible. Smartone is the since July 3rd 2007 (two weeks ago) first Hong Kong mobile operator that has a especial offer for Internet browsing.

	Unlimited Mobile Internet Acess	Unlimited Mobile Internet Browsing
Operator	Allows downloading files (music, programs...), mobile Internet browsing, connecting your PC via your mobile...	Only allows Internet surfing on your mobile. No downloads, no connecting your PC via your mobile
Smartone - Vodafone	488 HKD (around 50 €)	68HKD  (around 7 €)
Three	488 HKD (around 50 €)	No
New World Telecom	No	No
PCCW	488 HKD (around 50 €)	No
1010	538 HKD (around 55 €). Only for one or two phone models	No
Peoples	128 HKD  (around 13 €)	No
One Two Free	No	No

The other offers from other operators for unlimited mobile Internet access for 50 € are not bad either.

Once I attended a speech of the Director of International R&D Labs of France Telecom (now called Orange). And he said that innovations from the East (Korea, Japan, Hong Kong) usually take 18 months to arrive in France.

I have no idea about these rates in Europe. I am going to research more about this and will tell you about this.

• mobile post-it
• location based RSS
• location based Internet

I am thinking of the classic idea that the basic service is free but more advanced services are not. Obviously the free msut be reasonably useful.

Posting a message on an area with an certain radio (more than X and less than Y) and with a certain duration is free.

If you want different geographical range (wider or more specific) or a different duration, you have to pay.  This approach can also be used to dissuade spammers (as they usually want the maximum range and the longest duration).

An extra tuning to this business model may be adapting the free radio range and the free duration range to different kinds of content. But this may be difficult

Is it too naive? Anyway, if this business model does not work, you will always have Adsense.

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.

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

My friend and co-author of this blog already started talking about Siemens Mobile Post-it in a previous post.

Siemens calls it Digital Graffiti Service.

The press release can be found on Siemens corporate site and articles about it can be found on specialized sites like Infoworld or PCWorld.

The press release estates: "At present the developers anticipate that the graffiti system will be rolled out in about two years time, most likely starting with applications for tourism and in the exhibition sector."

I would like to make two remarks:

• Effectively, tourism sector would welcome an application like this, my idea is more oriented to user generated content and the general public.
• We are already in July 2007. More than two years have passed after the press  release and Siemens Graffiti has made little effect in the market.
  

The idea we are discussing here is similar to this one from Siemens.

As a small company, if we start doing something similar we should be able to get some smaller working prototype much, much faster (months). Big companies tend to develop big products with longer development time, our chance being small is to act fast and outmanoeuvre them.

In my previous post I discussed about a WiFi application I worked on before and how we can turn this model into something "more 2.0".

To put it short, that application could be defined as a WiFi location based multimedia tourist guide. Tourist in a certain area could get multimedia information according to their location but they could not create any content.

Imagine you could create location based content. Imagine you can leave a multimedia message on a specific place so that other people can read it when they pass by. Imagine you can add text, images, video and other widgets just like in any blog / mobblog / twitter. It would be like a multimedia post-it you can leave anywhere.

You could, for example:

• Label places that have been important in your life by leaving a note (this is the place where I had my first kiss, this is the place where I earn my first dollar, this is the company where I first worked
• Write a review about a restaurant and leave your review at the entrance of the restaurant
• Attaching tourist / cultural information to places resulting in a world-wide tourist guide
• Create a notice-board in your neighborhood, company, school

I would like to make some preliminary comments about some aspects I consider critical:

• Spam: there is a clear risk of spam. It is extremely necessary to enable a content policy and control mechanism. This control mechanism might make uses of expiration delays for content, approval and rejection procedures, voting procedures (like digg or meneame)
• Simplicity: this system should be above all focused on mobile users (Smartphone, blackberry). There will also be PC users but the focused should be on handhelds. As a result, the service should be extremely simple to use.
• Localization radio: when a message is associated to place it should be possible to specify how close the reader should approach that place to have access to the post-it. The larger the covered area the more strict should be the anti-spam policy.
• Post it ranking / searching / filtering: the system should be able to handle large volumes of messages. When a user is located in an area where there are hundreds of messages, it is necessary to help him / her get access to more relevant messages. This might be achieved by ranking, techniques, searching engines or filtering according to tags or user profile.
• Private versus public information: some posts may be addressed to everybody. Some other posts may be addressed to a restricted group of people and may require security mechanisms.

This idea is going to be the first one that we are going to explore and develop into detail in this blog.

During my previous work experience in France, I got to know an interesting application. 

The most comprehensive way to describe it is "a WiFi platform of general services". These services were based on different functional modules including:

• WiFi localization (which determines to which WiFi access point you are connected)
• Multicast communications
• Unicast communications
• Seamless mobility among WiFi access points
• And many other minor components

This said, a great number of services for PC and PDAs (at that time smart phone were rare in France) could be built on the top of this platform. Some of the services that were prototyped were:

• Video streaming services
• Location based notices boards (or post-it)
• Location based content on demand (like for example having a video, article or image from an element in the area you are)
• Multicast delivery services like broadcasting of stock exchange results, news, etc.

At the end of the R&D cycle, a location based tourist guide was built on the top of this Wifi platform. A beta trial with real users (under the name of Vezelay Interactive) was conducted in the very beautiful French city of Vezelay. 5 Wifi access points covered most of the downtown.

The following video is only in French (Sorry). It was on the regional news (France 3) in France in summer 2005

From my experience in WiFi applications like this one, I would say:

• WiFi is not designed for mobility. Moving from one WiFi cell to another takes too long.
• The infrastructure of this platform is expensive: 5 WiFi access points and 5 dedicated servers needed to be installed in the downtown. If you want to cover a much wider area, investment will be considerable.
• A business model could not be found for this application

Why do I tell you about this location based application?

Well, in fact this application was based on a 1.0 model rather than on a 2.0 model. How can we get a 2.0 model out of this?

• Change "Wifi" for "any available mobile network",
• change "Wifi localization" for "GPS",
• change "PDA" for "Smartphone" 
• and change "tourist guide" for "location based blog, or location based post-it"

... and you will get closer to an excellent web 2.0 business idea. 

My next post will be about this idea