Geo-Loco! Bay Area Geeks discuss the issues and direction of geo-loco services.
The Geo-loco panelists
Wednesday evening I attended the sold out Geo-loco panel event put on by Bancroft Research Group at Stage Two Consulting. There was a waiting list of over 80 people indicating a significant level of interest in the topic of geo-loco services in the Bay Area.
The panel was composed of Kevin Marks of BT as the moderator, with Robert Scoble of Rackspace, Tom Coates of Yahoo’s Fire Eagle, Matt Galligan of SimpleGeo, Jeremy Toeman of Stage Two Consulting, and MG Siegler of Techcrunch as the panelists. Sponsors included Rackspace, Traveling Geeks, We Blog The World, Stage Two Consulting, and Gordon Biersch.
Based on who I recognized in the audience, I would say it was largely composed of geeks and early adopters.
As one would expect, the first thirty minutes revolved around privacy before moving into monetization, place vs. space, and how companies are trying to use it. Here are a few of the more interesting quotes and points that were made (more or less in the order they came up in the discussion):
- Tom Coates pointed out that as an industry we now have a history of legal precedence and experience. He shared that privacy was a primary concern when building Fire Eagle and that large companies routinely factor in privacy when building these apps.
- Jeremy Toeman started out by reminding us that our address information has been public since the first phone books. If someone wants your address, they can find it on the web.
- Robert Scoble said that when he shared Twitter a year ago, people said “That’s lame.” Now, when he shares Foursquare, they say “That’s lame and scary.” Geo-loco services have a much higher bar to adoption than did Twitter.
- MG Siegler: “The business application of this is what is interesting. The question is the privacy issue; why should I tell you where I am?”
- Kevin Marks: (speaking for the consumer) “I’ll tell you where you I am if it is valuable for me, otherwise, I lie.” For an example, he pointed out that if you believe the addresses people give on the web, more people claim to live in Bev Hills and Schenectady, NY than actually live there.
- They have the two most easily remembered zip codes: 90210 and 12345
Matt Galligan: “Location is going to be in everything soon – it’s all about making the apps smarter and more useful.” - Jeremy, the self-proclaimed naysayer opined that the existing services are not here to stay. “Something will be here, but this is not it. People don’t want the deluge of coupons.”
- Robert: “Plancast is the new Doppler.”
- Robert also noted the philosophical differences between services. Gowalla requires you to check in at your location where as Foursquare allows you to lie.
You can see video clips of much of the event courtesy of Renee Blogget.
That I would have liked to have heard before we ran out of time was the panelists’ predictions of what is coming next. It would have been a neat trick if someone could have predicted Apples move the following day to ban geo loco ads on iPhone and the iPad.
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