Finding Businesses with Geo-Location Services, But What's The Larger Implication Here?

During Social Media Week here in San Francisco earlier this month, an interesting panel was held at the offices of Stage Two. The topic of the evening was about geo-location device and technology and what lies ahead in the future of these services. Among the stars on the dais, BT/Ribbit Vice President of Web Services Kevin Marks helped moderate this interesting group who talked about privacy, innovations, whether there was any business applicability and many other things.

But before we go any further, let’s discuss what geo-location is. If you’ve heard of Google Latitude, FourSquare or GoWalla, then that should be three good examples of geo-location. Essentially, it’s a form of entertainment that shows you (the user) and your friends where you are when you voluntarily “check-in” to a location/venue. Rather than it being just a GPS device, your phone and/or laptop can be used as a homing beacon when you check-in so that you can have friends and family follow along to see what interesting places you’ve been to. Another definition can be found by looking on Wikipedia:

Geolocation is the identification of the real-world geographic location of an Internet-connected computer, mobile device, website visitor or other. IP address geolocation data can include information such as country, region, city, postal/zip code, latitude, longitude and timezone. Geolocation may refer to the practice of assessing the location, or to the actual assessed location, or to locational data.

Featured on this geo-location panel were some analysts, users of geo-location and devil’s advocates. Interesting discussions came from technology evangelist from Rackspace, Robert Scoble, analyst & blogger from TechCrunch, MG Siegler, founder of SimpleGeo, Matt Galligan, Yahoo Fire Eagle employee, Tom Coates, and founder of Stage Two, Jeremy Toeman.

For the average person, geo-location is probably an interesting thing to start using, but when you examine it a bit further, you’re going to have to look at how it impacts your privacy and what is its implications on business. In using services like GoWalla or FourSquare, you’re voluntarily giving up your privacy to those people who are following you when you check-in. But in doing so, you might also be surrendering some other private information to those people at any given time. But then again, Jeremy Toeman puts it in a pretty simple way: “Do you know everyone that is following you?”

Do you?

I’d expect with geo-location services, there needs to be a clear definition on boundaries. For people used to just adding everyone and anyone to their friend list, individuals need to understand that they could potentially be giving strangers access to their specific locations or even their homes  - which can greatly risk their safety/privacy.  So what’s the big deal and why do we choose to participate?

According to Matt Galligan, location provides us with context. By knowing where we’re standing provides context to my “to-do” list. It seems that rather than telling someone that you’re going shopping, by checking-in to a Safeway, you’re giving your followers a better context on what you’re shopping for…in this case: food. Robert Scoble believes that geo-location should provide some value back instead of just listing where we are. In fact, he says that he’s willing to give up his privacy, but won’t even use Google Latitude – he’ll use FourSquare because of the entertainment value attached to it (badges, points and a sense of businesses offering services/deals).

Also at issue was whether businesses can get anything out of geo-location services to raise some revenue. While still yet to be wholly proven, there have been some considerable breakthroughs in this area. Businesses are now starting to award “mayors” in FourSquare with discounts just for checking-in and special badges are created for major events. What’s more…Bravo TV has inked a deal with FourSquare so that prizes and badges can be awarded when service users check-in to locations promoted by several of their TV shows.

So should you have your business invested in geo-location as a marketing tool? I would say that it would be a great service to utilize, but keep in mind what the implications are for you using it – both as a user and as a business. We are in an age where we are all living in public. As Toeman said at the panel: “Google and Facebook have pulled off the biggest bait & switch known to man. Facebook made us comfortable to share this information and then trained us that it’s alright to post it in public on other sites.”

While your service may want to utilize geo-location means, show the public that you care about their privacy and will do whatever it takes to secure their data. By using these services, the public is surrendering their data, but not without a caveat: do no harm – that means that you’re not allowed to exploit their data and you are ultimately responsible for insuring the integrity of that data as well.

Photo Credit: Kenneth Yeung

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized, UnintentionalEntrepreneur. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.