Geotoko - managing multiple location-based marketing campaigns.

Geotoko is a location based marketing platform using services like Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook places, Yelp or Twitter to allow brands, business and agencies to create their own branded location-based promotions. Founders of Geotoko realized that managing deals in multiple location-based services might be challenging and by leveraging existing API's, they have created platform that integrates all of them in one. By creating simple self serve tools to create, manage and track promotional campaigns and reward loyal costumers, Geotoko aims to reduce the friction for businesses to get into the growing geo-location trend. 


Geotoko allows to:

• Build Promotions On Multiple Location-Based Platforms – With Geotoko’s easy-to-use campaign wizard, you can create engaging location-based promotions for Foursquare, Facebook Places & Gowalla within minutes.
• Live Visitor Tracking & Heat Map Technology – Get access to powerful real-time location analytics, analyze user check-in behavior and gather competitive intelligence using Geotoko’s Heat Map technology.
• Manage Multiple Locations In One Place – Easily upload and manage thousands of locations on one powerful platform. We’ll automatically match your locations to venues on Foursquare & Facebook Places.

Besides integrating most popular platforms Geotoko provides users with tools to perform analysis of the campaign: real-time analytics to measure your campaign’s performance and ROI, customers’ behavior, and how various locations and services perform. 


Watch a demo of Geotoko:

Watch an interview with Adarsh Pallian - co-founder and CEO of Geotoko:




source: http://geotoko.com/

Google Earth Builder

Google has just announced new cloud service for geospatial data that will be available to the public in June 2011 (UP-DATE: on the 12th of September I received email from Google that they "are excited to make Google Earth Builder commercially available later this year" - so the it seems that they have a delay in lunching the service). With Google Earth Builder organizations can upload and manage spatial data from multiple departments. Costs of investment in spatial databases and GIS software are very often significant. There is as well problem of visualizing and analyzing data remotely on mobile devices. Such technologies exist however they are not available to regular user. Google Maps and Earth revolutionized mapping and the way how people use it. Users know it. They are not affright of it.

So what does Google Earth Builder offers?


Create Custom Map Layers

• Process complex geospatial data quickly and efficiently - for streamlined viewing of large geospatial data files.
• Access Google's extensive basemap - Imagery, roads, points of interest from Google to complement your data investments.
• Create custom map layers for Google Earth and Maps - with Google Earth Builder’s intuitive map creation tools.

Manage Geospatial data

• Scale services for traffic spikes - Google’s cloud platform scales to support unanticipated spikes in user traffic.
• Reduce server Costs - significantly lower IT costs and eliminate time maintaining, scaling and updating software and servers.
• Control source data and attribution - set attribution on custom map layers and share access to the data without sharing the raw data files.

Share custom Google Earth and Maps Layers

• View maps anywhere, anytime - laptop, desktop, home, work, mobile, etc.
• Share maps across departments - custom Google Earth and Maps layers can be shared with one person or a group of people.
• Visually analyze geospatial data - without required technical GIS training to create a map

So how can your organization benefit from Google Earth Builder?

• Anytime, Anywhere Access: view your maps from any computer or Internet-enabled device
• Speed & Scale: process your complex geospatial data quickly and efficiently; effortlessly scale to manage traffic spikes (e.g., in case of emergency)
• Lower Cost: significantly reduce IT costs and eliminate time spent buying, maintaining and patching software and servers
• Constant Innovation: just refresh the browser for the latest features
• Secure Storage & Recovery: benefit from Google’s industry-leading security; no longer worry about storage limits and backups; data backed up to multiple data centers for near-instant recovery

To check for more details watch video form Where 2.0 2011 Conference:

source: http://www.google.com/enterprise/earthmaps/builder.html

Avoid traffic with Google’s Navigation App.

Finally Google will use it's data to steer Android users away from traffic. The application will automatically recalculate the route around traffic using current and historical data. The new optimized traffic router for Google Maps Navigation is really just an combination of previously successful technologies. Google Maps have already been able to visualize current traffic levels. In fact this service is already working in the most popular GPS applications like TomTom from many years. The obvious advantage of Google service is that it's free and available to every Android user with access to the internet. The company said the new feature is being added in Europe and North America in places where it has both turn-by-turn and real-time traffic data. It added that it can’t guarantee it will always be right.


Watch a preview of the new functionality: 




Source: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/youve-got-better-things-to-do-than-wait.html
http://singularityhub.com/2011/03/14/androids-google-maps-app-automatically-tells-you-how-to-beat-traffic/

TomTom Live Traffic - available online

TomTom's Live Traffic data are now available online. The service on mobile devices has a very good reviews from TomTom's customers all over the world in terms of traffic data accuracy and usefulness.

From cartographic point of view the system of visualization of traffic problems is really good. It seems to be much more clear than Google Maps Traffic display.

Source: http://www.tomtom.com/livetraffic 

Geospatail revolution - episode 3

There is new episode of Geospatial Revolution available on-line. The aim of the project is to expand public knowledge about the history, applications, related privacy and legal issues, and the potential future of location-based technologies.

Where is the business market demand for GIS?

Where is the business market demand for GIS services is the crucial question for everyone working in this area. This knowledge can lead you to establish successful long-term business strategy or show you a proper path in GIS career. In March 2011 at the Esri Partner Conference in Palm Springs, CA, Lars Backhans, Esri Sweden managing director, was trying to answer this question.

The biggest growth in GIS will come from areas that are not yet 'Geo'.

Now why is that?

According to Gartner the growing practice of introducing new technologies into consumer markets prior to industrial markets will be the most significant trend affecting information technology (IT) during the next 10 years. As a result, the majority of new technologies enterprises adopt for their information systems between 2007 and 2012 will have roots in consumer applications.

So what does it really mean?

Basically an user behavior in the internet will drive demand for change in internal IT solutions. According to 10 Social Media Trends for 2011:

1. Location-Based Marketing:

2. Video Platforms:

3. Text Campaigns:

...

Now what's the 3rd most popular used application on iPhone?

What's the most popular used app on Android?

What's the 2nd most used service from Google network:

According to Backhanks sources Maps are in Google one of the first five priorities for the future.

Conclusions?

People are getting more conscious about the location aspect of life. They are already used to certain location-based ideas and their utilization. Google Maps revolutionized mapping, made it a part of everyday life of billions of people. Now it's time for implementing spatial dimension in business IT solutions.

Where in Business?

If internet users use 'Geo' and they want to see 'Geo' added to their internal IT solutions where is the demand going to happen?

Looking at the IT market 45% of all organization have budget to procure Enterprice Resource Planing systems, 31% have financial resources to procure Enterprice Content Managment systems and 24% have a budget to invest in Mobile Solutions. So in practice it means that if you meet 10 customers, 2.5 of them wants to know what's your mobility offer is...

Where to base your market strategy?

According to Backhans in practice all of listed bellow IT solutions can benefit from adding 'Geo' dimension:

Reference: ESRI Partner Conference 2011