Geo Location

About a month ago, Mashable’s Adam Ostrow wrote a story abou Geo Location and why it was absent from Facebook and Twitter. You know where this is going right? I am going to say, well it is absent simply because they aren’t doing it. And you know where this is going next? So who is doing it on line? Well no one except IRLConnect. On the mobile, its all over the place, but still not pulling in the numbers like the good old Web does (sure argue with us later about it) but the fact is that there are 506 million or so users on the Web and those users are ready for a new experience. And geo objects is where its at.

So, the next evolution in this post is the fact that today IRL Connect announced that it has integrated Facebook with its application and you know what happened. Floods of people came into the application. I must say, it is the absolutely coolest thing to see all your Facebook friends on a map! I mean, You can see where they are and start up a conversation with them. IRL is the first visual social network.

I am an ex pat living in Amsterdam and today, Boston was flooded with my Facebook friends and the friends of my Facebook friends and I immediately had this connection again. It gave me something  I was missing. Not to sound sappy, but it really brought my social network into focus.

Try it- they have a public beta on April 2, but you can get a sign up  key here, use Tattletech.

– JLH

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Tags: Facebook, Frank Schuil, IRL Connect, Mashable, Twitter, Visual Social Network

Day 1, Mobile World Congress, Barcelona

First, we woke dreading the crowds, the lines, the herds of people that would slow down my routes. Then we got to MWC and found no lines, no waiting and bocadillos to spare. And, taxis. Taxis everywhere! What was going on here? Was this MWC in Barcelona? It turns out, it was and is Barcelona – the lovely feel of Cannes in Barcelona. People were in a good moods, there were no annoying crowds and busines was being conducted.

Today on the list for cool things was a Dutch company called zCapes, which is making a mobile mini blog. We met them at the Mobile Monday Peer awards and they had just launched one day ago and as we move to more start ups that start with the letter Z – here is Zentym – a mobile TV advertising company based out of Madrid that we had previously met at the European Venture Summit – this time out of the gate with a powerful message and lots of operators nibbling at their toes.

One of our favorite companies from Sweden, JayCut was on of the hosts at the Sweden Mobile Association cocktail hour and proved their online video editing product has a B2B play. Another cool company from Sweden was TAT – The Astonishing Tribe. I think by far they have the coolest logo and they are 100% focused on delivering a god user interface for mobile — combining design and technology. Tattletech will post an interview with Charotta Taranger of TAT this week.

But the one thing that we believe is out of control is all the emphasis on mobile in terms of LBS. Yes we know it is a mobile show – but can we have a reality check? Forty mobile companies presented at the Mobile Monday Peer Awards today – 40!  Lots of duplicates and clones and look alikes out there – the market will consolidate and in six months, many of those companies will be gone.  In the long term, yes its true, all that we know and love will be on the mobile, but the Web will not go away. The lines will become blurred so this means that when we are talking about LBS – we should remember that there are more than 500 million users on Web based social networking sites and those users will want to evolve their social network.

According to Frank Schuil, CEO, IRL, the Web will not go away – the web is a natural extension of mobile and vice versa – they complete each other. Innovation will take place at the intersection of the web and mobile. The key will be to unlock the value of location for those 506 million online users and then bring them to the mobile.

On another note, there are less scantily clad women at this show – thank god for the recession. --JLH

Tags: Frank Schuil, IRL Connect, IRL Corporate, Mobile World Congress, Social network service

Location Based Services just went to the A List

Recently Google announced the launch of Latitude – which got those folks that follow trends in social networking all worked up into a tizzy. Obviously, it was the relatively new and small mobile social networks pushing Location Based Services that got their feathers all ruffled cause if Google jumps into the mobile social networking game based on LBS, it might be game over for them. Tattletech recently spoken with a number of emerging tech venture capital firms in both Silicon Valley and the UK – they all believed that most of those 85 or so mobile social networks will be gone in 6 to 9 months – we agree. You can read a great blog dedicated to LBS  where they show you all the LBS companies and the ones in red are now dead (we have heard through the grapevine of a few more that are about to be red) The ones that will be left standing will be the ones that figure out a way to embrace the Web and not ignore it – like IRLConnect, Brightkite or Loopt (even though its very mobile/iphone focused).

According to Frank Schuil, IRL‘s founder he thought the Google news was not such a bad thing for the industry – of course their application is based on the Web – their application IRL Connect – Sense your Friends believes that you first have to start with the 506 million social networking users on the Web and get them used to Location and then migrate to the mobile where that market is expected to grow over the next 2-3 years says ABI Research. But the issue is value — how do you unlock the value of Location Based Services today?

This is why the Google news was so important to the industry – it isn’t about whether their system is good or bad (most Mobile LBS applications aren’t that good anyway, they are better on the web cause the devices (iphone excepted) aren’t ready to provice that rich digital experience we are used to on the web. We think that this will help to put some context around how LBS will fit into the social digital fabric of our lives.– JLH

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Tags: Brightkite, Frank Schuil, Google, IRL Connect, Location Based Services, Loopt, Presence based social networking