Verizon‘s announcement today that it will buy AOL for $4.4 billion is a bid to get beyond dumb pipes and airwaves to get deeply into mobile and video. By doing so, Verizon, a $200 Billion company, hopes to play on more of a level playing field with other major telecom players combining access to content and personalization services, especially Comcast (with NBC U) and AT&T (with Direct TV.)

The all-cash deal provides a 150 percent return for shareholders in AOL from when CEO Tim Armstrong came on board in 2009. The price is 17 percent above the current stock price. And at the lower price — which may ultimately be even lower if some of the content properties are sold — a lot less is riding on it.

Have you seen this movie before in 2000, when AOL was disastrously sold to Time Warner for $165 Billion? A lot of the same synergies are being discussed: video on demand, personalized content and subscription revenue.

But this time, it is really all about mobile; video on mobile; and the prospect of converting (or selling) 2.1 million dial-up subscribers that continue to be AOL’s biggest moneymaker. Indeed, AOL has built or bought a powerful arsenal of mobile ad serving and video tech, especially LTE Multicast, which uses its cellular network to broadcast live video.

In our view, content is not likely to be an important factor here. It would have been more important if AOL had merged with Yahoo, or with Microsoft. The biggest “what if” probably involves MapQuest, which has technically lagged behind mapping leaders but retains a powerful, verb-like brand in that space. Given Uber’s $3 Billion bid to buy Nokia?s HERE, it may ultimately emerge as an important factor in the deal — much more so than Huffington Post.  AOL’s sizable effort to make Huffington Post into a super content portal, including a major local dimension, failed dramatically last year. Similarly, Armstrong’s huge, multi-hundred million dollar effort with hyperlocal site Patch amounted to very little.

To some degree, we also see Verizon’s acquisition of AOL as an acqui-hire. Verizon has stumbled around advertising for several years but not had an impact. It also has made some small investments in content and classified properties, but hasn’t been confident enough to really spend. Its biggest effort was a promotional program with the NFL to broadcast games for free.

We like the statement issued in the name of Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam, who we note, has long had his eye on geo-targeted advertising. “Verizon’s vision is to provide customers with a premium digital experience based on a global multi-screen network platform. This acquisition supports our strategy to provide a cross-screen connection for consumers, creators and advertisers to deliver that premium customer experience.”

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Apple finally made some moves into the local mapping wars last week with the purchase of Locationary, which helps find business locations, and HopStop, which provides transit maps and travel suggestions.

We’ll go out on a limb and predict that Apple will want to flesh out its map products with other map- focused media, such as map-based classifieds (Antengo) or coupons and deals (8Coupons).

Apple, meanwhile, has downplayed the significance of the deals, saying it often purchases ‘small’ companies.” The reality, however, is that both companies play key roles in the emerging world of mobile-oriented, map-based advertising and promotions.

One observation we’d make: while the companies bring real value to Apple, they were going to have a hard time scaling on their own, and also didn’t have many options besides Apple, Google , Nokia (HERE) and AOL (Mapquest). Google’s purchase of Waze for $1.1 Billion was driven by the same dynamics (although Waze is arguably more of a popular Web phenomenon along the lines of an Instagram, which is why it got such a big deal).

Of the two companies purchased last week by Apple, we’ve especially been following HopStop, the #4 transportation map behind Google, Mapquest and Waze. The company has moved to worked to develop the scale it needed for advertisers (and for Apple) when it moved beyond its New York base a couple of years ago to spread to 145 markets in six countries, with a major push set for Asia this year. Its transit maps also, conveniently, were fully integrated with Apple Maps.

CEO Joe Meyer always stressed that he had higher aspirations to get beyond the transit maps its best known for. Last November, non-subway maps for biking, taxis and walking, were up about 1000 percent, helped considerably, at all times, by crowd sourcing telling when roads were closed, train tracks flooded, etc.

Hopstop’s revenue opportunities were always limited. It got major national accounts such as JetBlue, Delta, Macys, Dunkin Donuts, JC Penney, Ikea, ZipCar and major tourism boards and Convention Centers. But the site was a small one. In May 2012, it finally decided to rely on outsourced sales from Travora Media (formerly Travel Ad Network) . “They have the arms and legs to sell ads,” said Meyer.

Here’s a post from last year about why Apple has to get Maps right. And here’s a recent closeup profile of HopStop.

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Hurricane Sandy forced millions of North-easterners out of their travel routines, closing down regular transit routes and services. It also spurred a boomlet in online and mobile searches for alternative transit, as well as weather.

HopStop, a 20 person, four-year-old site, says its traffic for “non subway” searches was up over 800 percent. Biking, taxi, walking, hourly car rentals and biking usage was way up. Bus-only searches were up over 1000%, and bus-only searches were up over 1300 percent.

At the same time, subway/train-only searches were down over 30 percent over the same time frame (due to many of the subways and trains being out-of-service).

The site, which relies heavily on crowd-sourcing for transit route updates, serves 102 major markets in five countries, including the U.S., Canada, U.K, France and Russia. About a dozen more will be added in coming weeks. In early 2013, there are plans to expand to Southeast Asia.

HopStop self-reports that it is the #1-ranked transit app in iTunes, and the #4 ranked free navigation app in iOS overall (after MapQuest, Waze and Telenav). It recently got a boonfall when it was selected as one of the transit defaults for Apple Maps.

The lion’s share of HopStop’s usage has traditionally comes from the Big Apple, its headquarters city. But with all of the outside growth, New York now accounts for less than 50 percent of its traffic, says CEO Joe Meyer. “We’re in every MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL and MLS market,” he notes.

Until recently, HopStop’s major revenue model was geo-targeted ads sold by its own network. The site can sell location aware adds based all current and future whereabouts. “Anyone interested in knowing where people are,” says Meyer. But the company switched in mid-2012 to using Travora (formerly the Travel Ad Network.) “They have the arms and legs to sell ads,” says Meyer.

Top advertisers include such brand names as JetBlue, Delta, Macys, Dunkin’ Donuts, JC Penney, BofA, American Express, Capital One, Disney, Starbucks, ZipCar, Monster, CareerBuilder, as well as major tourism boards and convention bureaus.

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As the New York Times noted this morning, Apple’s initial iOS6 foray into mobile maps has been greeted with a thumbs down by iPhone 5 reviewers, who prefer the polished Google Maps experience that was the prior default.

But maps –and by extension, local — are strategically important to Apple’s future. You can bet Apple will push hard to get them right. This is no Ping-like exercise, where Apple launches something and then discontinues it.

Apple first signaled its interests in maps in October 2009 with its purchase of PlaceBase – an API company that let developers map locations and services with pushpins.

Where can Apple go with maps – and for that matter, Google, Amazon, Microsoft/Nokia, Yahoo and AOL? Our take on maps is that they’re part of a tandem with data, and the integration of maps, geo fencing techniques, proximity search, and data such as public transit info and listings creates rich opportunities for targeted advertising (“Mapvertising”) and services.

Maps, of course, have come along way from simple store locators, which were the first online application. Just as store locators today are widely integrated with listing data, coupons and other information, you can expect to see the same trajectory in other segments. Deal mapping, for instance, has already had an impact with such companies as The DealMap (now owned by Google), 8Coupons and Bargain Babe LA making it easy to see where the deals are.

Other map concepts have been out there as well, including public transit maps (HopStop), garage maps, jogging maps (Trails.com) and wedding maps (weddingmapper.com.) With the rise of mobile, the key is that they not only provide citywide vertical info for a number of localities (i.e. Zillow maps), but also provide national seamlessness.

It has been noted that maps are the top part of the data pyramid and that if you can map it, everything else is easy. That’s probably true. It’s also true that some of the map centric activity has been premature or out of context. Some of the map-centric directories, ad networks and map-centric SEO efforts have been a little ahead of their time, and also, not always easy enough to use.

MapQuest’s efforts to monetize as a directory showed promise but wasn’t an instant hit. More recently, ABC News got rid of its interesting-but-unessential iPad app, which featured a spinning globe of news stories.

Despite some false starts, Apple has figured out that it has to be in the middle of maps to compete in the next generation of mobile services. We’re excited about Apple’s validation of the power of mapping in local online media and commerce, and expecting to see great progress in short order.

The post It’s All Local: Why Apple Has to Get Maps Right appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Amazon has reportedly purchased UpNext, the five-year-old, 3-D mapping and directory service that now provides “clickable building”-oriented maps for more than 50 cities, including 23 that are enhanced in depth. The service has experimented with a number of features, including transportation guides, events, happy hour deals, etc. While the purchase price hasn’t been reported, UpNext raised $500,000 in 2011.

For Amazon, the acquisition represents a dive back into the mapping and directory wars it abandoned several years ago when it pulled the plug on its A9 directory. We expect UpNext to be integrated into Kindle Fires and other mobile media, and to leverage the map and directory capabilities for Amazon ad sales, Amazon Offers and small-business support. We also expect it to compete generally with Apple and Google, which are pursuing their own paths in local maps and directories.

We’ve been following UpNext since its inception in 1997. At that time, cofounder Danny Moon launched it with several high school friends as a project in his Entrepreneurs class at Columbia Business School.

I noted that the maps/directories were “cool, but unless you want to torture yourself, you’ll probably want to use a 3D Virtual Cityscape for less than 15 percent of your local lookups. Watching the innovation in the space, however, is thrilling. The applications are already fun, and getting more useful all the time.” The experience, of course, is likely much better today.

source: Addictive Tips

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A few years ago, the location of businesses became a big question mark, as well as a strategic issue, as people wanted to shop or dine nearby. These “geo-fencing” issues were especially important for Yellow Pages companies.

Since then, search has become more the norm, along with GPS-based phones, which have location baked into them. What hasn’t changed is that you still need the geo-fencing data tied with other meta data for local discovery. You still need to know what subway line is near, where the nearest parking garages are, or what your choices are for dining when you are visiting your friend in Chelsea.

Companies such as Maponics, Urban Mapping, Zillow and others are still licensing or providing their geo-fencing results. And now, the customer base is more universal among companies in the local space, along with key verticals related to schools, real estate and other verticals. Other companies, such as Yahoo, have used such data to introduce Proximity Search.

The result can be a seamless paradigm that integrates local mapping information with coupons, deals and other merchant information. But not everyone gets it.

“Some publishers still don’t get how to have cross platforms,” suggests Maponics CEO Darrin Clement. “They’re still looking for leads in the social world; still bolting on coupons to their results. They’re too intent on protecting the existing paradigm.”

Clement says mobile users, especially, need seamless roaming of information. He notes that some local services will just use the Zillow API. And it works well for start-ups. But Zillow only has 7,000 neighborhoods, he notes. “We have 160,000. Zillow has 100 cities. We have 2,300 cities.”

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HopStop, a directions portal that competes in the segment against an ever-building Google Maps, today announced its plans to fight the Big G, including new markets, content partners and features. The 20-person site, which gets about one-third of its traffic from destination and SEO traffic, and one-third from affiliate partners, has added 20 markets and is now serving a total of 57 markets (including four markets outside North America: London, Paris, Moscow and St. Petersburg).

The company’s partnerships — new and old — include hourly car rentals from Connect by Hertz with integrated driving directions, real-time booking capability via Limos.com, daily deals from Groupon, local events from Zvents and business reviews via Yelp. According to CEO Joe Meyer, the revenue model with each partner varies, and includes CPM, CPC and affiliate sales. The company is operating profitably and not actively raising funds, he adds.

HopStop has also added new social media tools, including a feature that enables users to share travel plans with friends. Other features include walking directions and intercity travel via Amtrak and bus routes. Meyer says that the company’s biggest defense against Google and other competitors is its passionate, social media-driven user base, with 37 percent of users using the site 25 times a month or more. Seventy-two percent used the site within 24 hours of their last use. (We provided a full profile of the company in May 2010.)

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It’s hard work distilling 20,000 people, hundreds of sessions, droves of start-ups, seemingly endless parties and even a Mike Tyson cameo into a cliffs notes recap of SxSW Interactive. Not that anyone is shedding any tears for me. America loves lists (or so I’ve heard), so here are “the big ideas” that have my brain buzzing post-Austin.

1) The Check-In Gets an Ego Check: Kudos to Gowalla’s Josh Williams, cofounder of a company that has leveraged check-in fascination to fund and fertilize the business, for reminding the location-based services space that check-ins were originally designed as means to greater value, not as ends unto themselves. When misconstrued, badges, passport stamps and other social rewards that fail to tell a more compelling value story (whether tangible, personal, philanthropic or other) can become a hindrance rather than a facilitator. “We’re drinking our own Kool-Aid,” Williams admonished.

So what does “getting real” really mean? Not a lot of concrete nuggets were offered. Perhaps it’s being able to tell a larger, more colorful personal and social narrative around places you’ve been or communities you’ve interacted with (the Gowalla idea). Maybe it’s about social recommendations that blend local places with friends’ activity (hello Foursquare). Maybe it’s gamification for larger social good (see Seth Priebatsch’s grand plan to use game mechanics to fix education). Or maybe its something else. But it’s not check-ins … not long-term, at least.

2) So, This Whole Deal-a-Day Thing May Be MUCH Bigger Than We Thought: Actually, many of my colleagues have viewed group buying as a local commerce game changer since its earliest days. But the deals session at SxSW, particularly a slide from Yipit’s Jim Moran, brought this burgeoning ecosystem into sharper relief.

I’m well aware of the critical places that deals sites, white-label providers, verticals and aggregators hold and can feel the rising demand for data to justify the opportunity for publishers. Exchanges were a natural as the space grew. But there is also real potential in merchant services, consumer services and merchant agencies. These are largely new doors to be unlocked. There may be more opportunity in b-to-b deals as well, where promising rollouts are limited (Business Insiders’ Pipeline, for one).

The next nuts to crack: better merchant care to boost customer retention, self serve that’s truly accessible (Groupon’s merchant center hasn’t exactly caught fire) and, for publishers, tighter integration of deals into brand content (not as blunt ad units).

3) Won’t You Be My Neighbor?: Maybe, if I knew where the neighborhood started and stopped. Much of the future of the mobile-social intersection hinges on definitions of, and ability to utilize, location. Sounds mushy, huh?

To paraphrase NeighborGoods CEO Micki Krimmel, technology has been great for building affinity and interest groups, but can it be equally useful in fostering local connections? Foursquare and others are beginning down this path with their location + social recommendation engine, but the layer that NabeWise CEO Ann Baldinucci says is missing is the one that “sits above property listings and addresses to tell you what a community or neighborhood is all about.” That is the context wrapper that is largely absent.

Joe Stump from SimpleGeo noted that the demand for neighborhood-level data is fervent, but limited in its application if no social context is connected to it.

4) Twitter Saves Linear TV!: Well, maybe not singularly save it, but it certainly can provide a boost. Chloe Sladden, Twitter’s Director of Media Partnerships, shared anecdotal evidence that integrating second screen activity with live, linear event programming can enhance the real-time appeal of a show (i.e., DVR can’t replicate the dynamic social experience users have when connecting over a live show).

Interestingly, Gavin Purcell, the supervising producer of “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon,” foresees a new job title growing around second screen experiences. Essentially, this person will extend the role of the community manager cross-platform to connect big screen and second screen interaction.

Many local broadcasters are already effectively utilizing Twitter in their newscasts by soliciting audience questions and surfacing story ideas. Now, can they extend the experience to a second screen to create more dynamic conversation?

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In the “Field of Dreams” “if you build it, they will come” spirit, when Marissa Mayer takes the stage, thousands are sure to follow. Google’s VP devoted much of her keynote at SxSW Interactive to evolutions in Google’s mobile mapping products (Maps Navigation, route-around traffic and Latitude, among others).

Mobile mapping shares close synergy in the product suite with Google’s aggressive advances into local business and social channels through Places and Hotpot, and Mayer came armed with data aplenty to support progress in both. Among the highlights:

– 6 million Place pages have now been claimed by business owners.
– 20 percent of desktop search is local (a fact we already know). That share spikes to 40 percent on mobile, underscoring Google’s Maps-Places-Hotpot reviews marriage.
– Hotpot now sees more than 1 million ratings/recommendations each month and has 3 million total user submissions.

We had heard that Hotpot was catching fire quickly, but consider that number: 3 million is already one-fifth of Yelp’s 15 million reviews, and Yelp has a six-year head start (Hotpot debuted last November).

However, Mayer noted that recommendations only take a consumer so far…luring them in the door, but then what? The next step for business owners is cultivating a sustained consumer relationship. This is where “loyalty offers that cause me to come back and spend more and become a repeat customer” enter the picture through Latitude, which is testing rewards-based check-ins here in Austin this week. The problems that Mayer and team are trying to solve with check-ins are “what do I get?” and “how can it save me money?”

Speaking of problems, Mayer acknowledged that while all the mobile innovation is exciting, Google realizes that it has “too many features, and we need to condense them into products.” In other words, simplicity is the objective, both for users and especially for small businesses. This is expressly why the company has released Tags and Boost (three-click AdWords campaign generation) through Places, and has deployed SMB sales forces to test direct selling in Austin and Portland.

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Google today announced a rather significant change to its local search results and ranking algorithms. Dubbed Place Search, this provides more detailed information about places that match your search query and location (inferred or explicit).

This means a few things. First, it’s the official end of the famed 7 pack (formerly 10 pack) that Google launched at the beginning of 2008. Second, it’s aligned with Google’s goals for the growth of Google Places as a trusted, frequently used and frequently updated information source.

To the latter point, pushing Places front and center in local search results will further solidify its position or “put it on the map” (bad pun) for merchants and advertisers. The information will mostly come from Google Places listings, including details like items served or hours of operation.

The presence and density of these terms is hoped to surface listings for specific things that people search for, rather than just business names (i.e., “Belgian ales”).  There will also be a new “Places” Tab in the left-hand SERP navigation that lets users more directly search the Places database.

This is significant in that it gives Places its own home, from a user-facing standpoint. This was sort of the case with Google Maps, but this is decidedly more location-focused, rather than mapping and navigation. The specific real estate it’s given (along with “video,” “images,” “news,” etc.) is huge.

Beyond Google’s goals for pushing Places more front and center for users and merchants, it appears to be a more intuitive and user-centric SERP design. It will take users a while to get used to, but it will ultimately lead to more effective local search and train users to search differently.

Google claims it cuts search time by 2 seconds on average. This is a common theme for Google lately — including the launch of Instant Search. The idea is less time searching means more hours saved for users, and more searches performed (read: more money for Google).

From the official Google blog:

One of the great things about our approach is that it makes it easier to find a comprehensive view of each place. In our new layout you’ll find many more relevant links on a single results page—often 30 or 40. Instead of doing eight or 10 searches, often you’ll get to the sites you’re looking for with just one search. In our testing Place Search saves people an average of two seconds on searches for local information.

For advertisers and publishers – particularly vertical directories or YPs — this means they will have to scramble once again to figure out how new ranking algorithms affect strategies to acquire organic traffic from Google.

That’s something they’re used to by now, starting with the bomb that was dropped on the local search world with the aforementioned 10 pack. Since then, Google has been walking a fine line between satisfying publishers, users and its own bottom line (not in that order).

This should ultimately be a good thing for users though. TBD on exactly how it affects publishers (Andrew Shotland has some good early thoughts and screenshots). It will be rolled out over the next few days and we’ll be watching closely.

Before

After

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