4 ms·

>> Location-based is the future of business. I wonder if this guy sees it and is trying to drive away the competition, or if he took his one flawed pass at a bu

by lhorie 18y ago

>> Location-based is the future of business. I wonder if this guy sees it and is trying to drive away the competition, or if he took his one flawed pass at a business model and gave up. Either way, he's full of shit. Are you doing this successfully? If not, I'll take the word of someone who's been there over the word of someone predicting the future.

calambrac 18y ago
He's been there with a model that failed. He talks in great length about why that model sucks, and then draws the conclusion that the whole space is doomed. Why is that more convincing?
- lhorie 18y ago
  I'm not saying I'm convinced either way. I have an idea of what it takes to pull together a location based service with a business model similar to the yellow pages (in my case, I'm referring to a local service in my city which is not as big as the Yellow Pages, but is still a 30+ people operation). If he has valid arguments about why his model doesn't work, I can combine that info with what I already know about the amount of effort, time and money needed to reach the critical mass needed for the yellow-pages-like model. Then I can come to my own conclusions.
  - calambrac 18y ago
    I have no problems with what he said about his model. I have a problem with the larger conclusion that he draws, that the whole space is poison as a result.
    - lhorie 18y ago
      I thought the conclusion was this: >> As a LBS start-up, you need to think about adding distinctive value for users which, afaik, is true of any type of business (especially start-ups). In that aspect, I definitely agree with the author.
      - calambrac 18y ago
        You're exactly right, but that's my point. I mean, isn't it always obvious that you need to be adding value? If you're not, how are you in business at all? And yet, he's saying this as if it's a great admission of defeat, that location is dead as a business because you actually need to do something with location information, not just provide it, and the only things he's thought to do that could possibly make money are sex and security. But he's wrong. "Who's nearby?" is still very valuable, just not to the guy holding the handset. It's valuable to the businesses who want those people to walk in their door and buy something. The thing that he talks about being commoditized is your friends locations, the social graphs that we define. But I'm not going to add grocery stores and such to my personal network, so the how are businesses going to know I'm nearby and want to spend money? Well, what if I implicitly gave the companies around me permission to know I'm nearby by pulling them up in search, mediated by my location? The company that sets this up using realtime local search is going to be able to make a lot of money, because businesses are going to pay to know who's around and what they're looking for, and to be able to pitch to them directly (think, as a consumer, how great it would be to have access to a reverse auction from the six stores within walking distance anytime you wanted to go grocery shopping. Then think, as a business, how great it would be to be able to broadcast any price advantages you had over your competition in real time to the people who wanted to buy what you were selling).
        lhorie 18y ago
        That sounds like a great idea, but again, convincing businesses to join in and participate enough to reach that critical mass needed for a service to allow the reverse-auction-from-the-6-places-closest-to-me kind of deal can be difficult. I don't know how your experience talking to local business owners has been, but mine is that a surprisingly high number of local businesses are small shops who are not techie enough to even care to have a semi-decent brochure website. I suppose that idea would be a lot more feasible in a place like Tokyo, though. These days, they have those 2D barcode scanners on cellphones and all.
        calambrac 18y ago

by lhorie 18y ago

calambrac 18y ago

He's been there with a model that failed. He talks in great length about why that model sucks, and then draws the conclusion that the whole space is doomed. Why is that more convincing?

lhorie 18y ago
I'm not saying I'm convinced either way. I have an idea of what it takes to pull together a location based service with a business model similar to the yellow pages (in my case, I'm referring to a local service in my city which is not as big as the Yellow Pages, but is still a 30+ people operation). If he has valid arguments about why his model doesn't work, I can combine that info with what I already know about the amount of effort, time and money needed to reach the critical mass needed for the yellow-pages-like model. Then I can come to my own conclusions.
- calambrac 18y ago
  I have no problems with what he said about his model. I have a problem with the larger conclusion that he draws, that the whole space is poison as a result.
  - lhorie 18y ago
    I thought the conclusion was this: >> As a LBS start-up, you need to think about adding distinctive value for users which, afaik, is true of any type of business (especially start-ups). In that aspect, I definitely agree with the author.
    - calambrac 18y ago
      You're exactly right, but that's my point. I mean, isn't it always obvious that you need to be adding value? If you're not, how are you in business at all? And yet, he's saying this as if it's a great admission of defeat, that location is dead as a business because you actually need to do something with location information, not just provide it, and the only things he's thought to do that could possibly make money are sex and security. But he's wrong. "Who's nearby?" is still very valuable, just not to the guy holding the handset. It's valuable to the businesses who want those people to walk in their door and buy something. The thing that he talks about being commoditized is your friends locations, the social graphs that we define. But I'm not going to add grocery stores and such to my personal network, so the how are businesses going to know I'm nearby and want to spend money? Well, what if I implicitly gave the companies around me permission to know I'm nearby by pulling them up in search, mediated by my location? The company that sets this up using realtime local search is going to be able to make a lot of money, because businesses are going to pay to know who's around and what they're looking for, and to be able to pitch to them directly (think, as a consumer, how great it would be to have access to a reverse auction from the six stores within walking distance anytime you wanted to go grocery shopping. Then think, as a business, how great it would be to be able to broadcast any price advantages you had over your competition in real time to the people who wanted to buy what you were selling).
      - lhorie 18y ago
        That sounds like a great idea, but again, convincing businesses to join in and participate enough to reach that critical mass needed for a service to allow the reverse-auction-from-the-6-places-closest-to-me kind of deal can be difficult. I don't know how your experience talking to local business owners has been, but mine is that a surprisingly high number of local businesses are small shops who are not techie enough to even care to have a semi-decent brochure website. I suppose that idea would be a lot more feasible in a place like Tokyo, though. These days, they have those 2D barcode scanners on cellphones and all.
        calambrac 18y ago