Where 2.0: Emerging Opportunities on the GeoWeb
Dev Khare
We’ve heard a lot of good ideas over the last 2 days, there’s a lot of innovation going on in the geoweb, geomobile, geocar, geovoice. Very hot with the investor community today. Look at how existing business opportunities can give us an advantage, and other areas to invest in.
“Geo is Impacting Many Industries” Tech, Auto, Logistics, Real Estate, Sports, Travel, Telecom, Media, Advertising, Retail
Consumers are paying for technology up front in Auto, in Retail.
These are some examples of the bigger picture.
“Many (New) Ways to Consume Geo” Laptop, Mobile, PND, Ambient, On person, Marine, Outdoors, Paper
PNDs 30 million to be sold this year, up 30% from last year. Mentioning Dash, Garmin, Tom-Tom, reckons the latter two will announce connected device. Ambient is more bleeding edge. Chumby. All getting connected.
Jumping into the geoweb. Big players, but smaller companies can succeed in these areas. Geobrowsers, in each of these layers there’s a number of these companies competing. What we look at is the key distribution deals that you can get with the bigger media players. In terms of entrenched players, Yellow pages can be disrupted. Existing online ad networks can be disrupted, noone’s cracked location based ads. Location brokers. Google is a browser company in this world, with google earth.
Some of the business models apart from advertising: subscriptions, virtual worlds, commerce.
Geo-mobile, GPS chip prices have dropped which is interesting, down to $2 down from $100-200.
A lot of the infrastructure here is entrenched, looking at investing.
30m cars in the US that are not connected, looking at digital cars/geocar a lot. People spend 60 hours in the car each month, more than TV. 70% of radio is listened to in the car. $27B consumer electronics is car. When was the last media company for the car created? Last thing would really be satellite radio. Telematics, voice based services serving the car, can be disrupted by automated voice recognition. People are paying, drivers are paying. Often subsumed into price of the car so consumers don’t feel the pain. Location based advertising is big with the car as you can deliver the person to the door.
GeoVoice - directory assistance is local search in different words. These are all cash cows or telecoms companies and they’re not changing fast enough.
Emerging markets - mobile and voice are growing in Africa, South America, India, China, Middle east. Opportunities are map building, POI databases. People pay in multiple ways, premium SMS, trading “minutes”.
Slide showing many companies being funded/purchased.
Every company in the world needs maps and don’t get the attention that everyone else gets.