Advertising and LBS
Adidas Death Star
If you're Adidas and you've got a Star Wars -inspired collection rolling out in January, what better way to promote it than by using social media? Adidas, however, has taken its online marketing initiative one step further, integrating Facebook and Google Maps to create the Star Wars Death Star Superlaser . The Adidas Originals application uses Facebook Connect to personalize the application experience, even granting you power over the Death Star control deck so you can blow up your Facebook friends' streets with help from Google Maps. The application experience is straight out of a Star Wars movie, and on the first go around you'll notice that your location is the first target of the superlaser. After your street is blown to smithereens, however, you can target a friend's location by selecting any one of your Facebook friends to attack.
Brightkite/Layar advertising
Location-based social network Brightkite announced this morning that it has added what it calls the first mobile Augmented Reality advertising for U.S. markets to its AR layer in the Layar augmented reality browser.
Augmented reality and geo-location really started to gain steam in 2009, and we expect to see even more developments in 2010. Geo-location in particular has really compelling opportunities when it comes to advertising. Already businesses are discovering the benefits they can gain by engaging and promoting services via Foursquare — it was really only a matter of time before bigger companies would start to take notice. Today, Brightkite has launched what it calls the first augmented reality advertising solution in the U.S.
Augmented Reality Advertising Is Here
LBSAdPlatform AdLocal enters America
Mobile advertising is poised to become a huge growth area, with research firm Kelsey Group seeing the market grow from just $160 million in 2008 to $3.1 billion in 2013. eMarketer projects mobile advertising spending in the US will balloon from $648 million in 2008 to over $3.3 billion in 2013. While some believe search will account for the biggest chunk of the market, others expect geo-aware advertising, another way of bringing “relevant” ads to users, to have a bright future, too. This is where AdLocal , a location-based, self-service mobile ad platform that (re-)launched yesterday, comes in. Offered by Sunnyvale-based Cirius Technologies USA , the platform has been around in Japan since 2006, currently commanding the largest share of location-based advertising in Japan’s $1 billion [PDF] mobile ad space.
Talk about being in the right place at the right time: When Natasha Léger debuted LBx Journal , the publication she cofounded, at last May’s Where 2.0 conference, she thought of that first issue as a much-needed solution to a long-unaddressed problem—delivering, as she puts it, “location in the language of business.” Location-specific data is a relatively new concept, and the full potential of its enterprise value remains unclear, but the industry has rallied around the statistic that perhaps 80 percent of company data is location-oriented. Even so, traditional geographic information systems (GIS) have been expensive and proprietary, reserved primarily for companies with big budgets or mandatory location-based needs (e.g., utilities or communication companies).
Here, There, and Everywhere - destinationCRM.com
Stowe Boyd Geo-Fencing: The Future Of Advertising
Geo-Fencing: The Future Of Advertising Is Outside Of Media
Location 101: breaking down the market for location-based apps |
Location 101: breaking down the market for location-based apps [People have got location all wrong, argues guest blogger Jane Sales, co-creator of flook . Rather than treating the market for location-based applications as a single monolithic entity, Jane breaks it down into use-case-driven segments and makes it concrete by showing the key iPhone applications in each segment.] As the author of a location-based application, I get into many discussions with fellow technologists about the future of the consumer location-based application space.
Local business directory and search engine Local.com this morning announced the acquisition of the assets of OCTANE360 , a technology startup based out of Los Angeles that provides domain-based local advertising solutions to small businesses, domain portfolio owners, agencies and channel partners. Under the terms of the agreement, Local.com is paying $5 million in cash and stock with an earnout of up to $5.9 million if certain performance criteria are met in the two-year period following the closing. OCTANE360 will become a wholly-owned division of Local.com Corporation . Founded in 2008, OCTANE360 offers a number of services to its client base, which consists mostly of small businesses and agencies, on a direct, wholesale or private label basis.
Local.com Buys Domain Advertising Company OCTANE360 For Up To $1
POIdo makes location-based advertisers compete for your attention
POIdo is one of 20 promising startups included in the MobileBeat 2010 Startup Competition and is in the running for one of two coveted Tesla Awards. POIdo , one of a number of location-based advertising startups, is putting a new spin on the concept. The Moscow-based company is able to target advertisements at users based on their exact locations, the context of them being there, and their recent behavior in other applications on their phones. A pay-per-action advertising platform, POIdo is able to deliver ads when mobile users happen to approach a certain virtual billboard, or when they search for specific addresses that happen to be nearby.Run Multiple Location-Based Marketing Campaigns with One Cool App [INVITES]
Mashable’s Spark of Genius series highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, see details here . The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. Name: Geotoko
Yahoo Japan has acquired location-based mobile ad firm Cirius Technologies. Cirius is based in Tokyo and operates AdLocal, a service that targets consumers with ads. It takes into account the physical location of the users via global positioning system (GPS), cell phone identification, map coordinates and other data. Cirius has about 38 employees.
Yahoo Japan scoops up location-based mobile ad firm Cirius
If you’ve used Foursquare, you’ve likely seen the little badge that appears in the corner of your mobile phone’s screen when a deal is nearby. It’s a good way to alert someone to a location-based offer, and it seems to be working well for the company. A new startup, TappLocal wants to take that idea and expand upon it to create a new location-based ad network. The way this works is that TappLocal uses their backend to create a geofence around certain partner venues. When a user crosses that boundary and happens to be using one of the partner apps, a deal indicator will pop-up. A quick click on this area will open a larger area explaining exactly what the deal is.