AdSpeek

I just got done reading an article from RWW. The title of the article is: Location Based Ads a Goldmine, Says Survey – 50% of Users Take Action. So you can imagine this headline when I saw it in Google Reader immediately caught my attention, made me slobber all over myself, and fall off my chair.

I love this part especially:

“Perhaps more surprising is the level of engagement between these location-based service users and the geo-targeted ads. Nearly half of those who noticed ads while using a location-based service took some action.”

I just got through reading this article from ReadWriteStart entitled “Startups and the Lure of (Hyper)Local.”  The article is basically talking about how many startups now are focusing on hyper-local. It is quite amazing how with the advent of GPS enabled phones how many startups can exist. I think we can all think of some great ideas for some location-aware companies. I just hope that you consider AdSpeek location based advertising when creating them.

A recent article on Techcrunch brings up the issue and you can read more about it here: http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/17/open-database-places/

With the proliferation of location and how many apps and products are being formed around location. A big part of that is points of interest data. Applications like Foursquare, Gowalla, … all require information for places around you. Now you would think this would be a lot easier to get and you can use Google to search places by category or by some query term to return places around you. You could also license data from places like Localeze or InfoUSA. The problem is see with the issue as it stands today comes down to 2 things:

1) Categorization
2) Uniquely identify a place

Read more »

As everyone has probably seen, Gray Powell is the guy who “accidentally” left his next-gen iPhone in a bar last month.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=33292

One thing that is interesting is that he is former NC State University student. Living in the Research Triangle area it is interesting to see an NC State student doing some cool work at a “cool” company. It seems he was working on part of the phone that actually makes calls.

Although this was an unfortunate event and hopefully he was not punished too severely I hope to see more local students doing cool and interesting things.