Photo Credit: Cuellar
Earlier this week, Business Insider talked of the potential for a Yelp + Foursquare tie-up. I seconded.
Himmelsbach added the notion of OpenTable and iTunes-style microtransactions (something I’ve also been looking into — although OpenTable’s lack of an API makes things more difficult than they should have to be), which reminded me a bit of this post by Mark Cuban on newspapers as the local trusted source with your credit card.
Then I got to thinking — what other local data sources might be fun to work into the mix?
In the early days of the web, “local” meant weather, movie listings, and a smattering of newsfeeds from local papers, radio stations and TV affiliates. Then came the likes of Gothamist, blogging.la (later Metroblogging), and Curbed and so we had blog posts supplementing the weather and movie showtimes. Add in some geocoding at places like Flickr and you start to get some pictures to help tell the story. But it’s still way too static to feel like a living, breathing record of what’s going on in a city.
Flash-forward a few years and a few billion mobile device and app sales later, and we’re finally seeing the promise of real-time fulfilled. Twitter, Facebook, and a host of others are letting us broadcast live, with text, photo and even video updates made on-the-fly, as it happens. But just as (if not vastly more) exciting than a nation of newly-minted broadcasters is the opportunity for a two-way dialogue on-the-go. Beaming out updates to the world is great, but being able to see that your friend is hitting up a restaurant around the corner in 20 minutes AND score a reservation (b/c you’re a VIP who checks in from there on the reg), all from your handheld, is a game-changer.
Local businesses have long had to suffer the indignity of inelegant ways to effectively implement successful (and trackable) campaigns. The coupon asks a prospective customer to go through the inconvenience of retaining a small strip of awkwardly-sized paper to retrieve the incentive you’re using to get them in your store. Asking someone to remember to mention the local radio DJ’s name so you can know for certain that the radio advertising is or isn’t working, is no way to start a relationship with a new customer.
But now, the digital infrastructure for local business is finally reaching a maturation point, where consumers, technology, and the businesses themselves are all ready to plug in to the same grid of technology + consumer that’s built billion-dollar companies like Google and Amazon — and perhaps more relevant to the enterprises we’re talking about, has made local businesses like Wine Library into multi-million dollar empires — virtually overnight.
So all that being said, and working from the initial inspiration of a Yelp+Foursquare+OpenTable mash, I thought I’d just rattle off a list of the potential data sources that could find their way the digital aqueducts. By integrating these pieces, there is an amazing opportunity to remove much of the inelegance and inefficiency out of local business.
Here’s my starting off point for the local digital aqueduct functional spec. If I’ve left any out, please add them in the comments below.
Local Commerce
- Food & Drink — where this whole idea started: take listings from Yelp, add in the ability to see who’s there via Foursquare, and then get reservations by OpenTable OR order delivery from your phone (b/c you realized your ex- is dining in as we speak). Then layer in incentive/loyalty rewards programs (like retailers are already starting to do with Foursquare) and you’ve really got something
- Discounts & Sales — Coupons.com, ValPak and others have the infrastructure setup to deliver deals based on where you are, what time of day it is, etc. Now add in variables based on keeping businesses moving — the ability to make an offer of a happy hour special to help offset an abnormally slow Tuesday, or to offer 20% off the day’s big DVD release to get people in the store on a rainy day — and suddenly local businesses are empowered with many of the same tools that ecommerce has profited from for a decade+ now
- Beyond Retail – at any moment, in any city, somebody is selling something you might want. Tools that aggregate local listings on Craigslist, eBay, and other marketplaces could add a valuable local service layer
Local Entertainment
- Movies – Movie ticket reservations; I know, nothing new here; although if you could (a) tie it in to services like Foursquare and Facebook, to make meeting up with friends for a movie easier and (b) sell tickets for ALL theatres in one place, without having to guess if the theatre is Fandango or MovieTickets.com or Moviefone, then you’d have a major new offering
- Live Music & Events — would be great to have concert ticket purchasing without Ticketmaster, but even if they have to be in the mix, the bigger value here is alerting you to the concerts coming to town, and giving you a window into which ones your friends are going to attend
Local News/Media
- News – Outside.in is helping to make local UGC much more workable, and everyone and their grandma has an RSS feed these days — so creating local news feeds by city and by neighborhood = not hard
- Photos – Flickr and anyone else who enables geocoding can have their photos accessed; the biggest hurdle is getting people on board with geocoding, but that adoption rate will skyrocket as GPS-enabled cameras and cameraphones become the norm
- Videos – just as above, anyone else who enables geocoding is in play here. While geocoding hasn’t taken off on video sites yet, with a growing fleet of iPhone 3GS and other location-aware video devices out there, geocoded video, uploaded closer to real-time, is going to be in play in a big way. How much does your attitude towards YouTube fundamentally change when you can look at videos happening near you RIGHT NOW, as opposed to stale videos from events that happened days or weeks ago, maybe thousands of miles away from you?
- Real Estate — Zillow, Redfin, heck, even Google is getting into the game here
- Public Transportation — Google Transit and others have the schedules online, they should be available to port into other apps
- Traffic – real-time traffic reporting, leveraging a blend of cameras, computer monitoring, and public submissions via Twitter + elsewhere
- Town Hall – the guys at EveryBlock have done a phenomenal job of making public data publicly available:
- Building permits
- Excavation permits
- Liquor license status changes
- Police calls
- Restaurant inspections
- Street space permits
- Street use permits
- Zoning agenda items
Local Health & Recreation
- Fitness Activity – from 4S gym check-ins to Nike+ runs and Ballers Network games, Sportsvite game listings, etc. you can paint a rich picture of where people are playing sports RIGHT NOW
- Fitness Commerce – yoga and personal trainer listings, gym discount offers — plenty of $$$ to be made in increasing connections between people needing to get in shape and those offering to help
- Sports Stats – MaxPreps, STATS LLC, Takkle all can provide rich data on local amateur and professional sports teams
- Health – from Google’s flu outbreak maps to doctor/dentist listings and ratings — let you find out when you should be worried about your health and make it easy to schedule an appointment
And all of this assumes that various government programs to promote data ubiquity and openness take awhile to get up and running. But if/when those come online, you could round out the list above with a rich set of data about communities, law enforcement, public legislation, census data, etc.
Obviously pulling ALL of this together is a massive task. But so is any major infrastructure project with transformative potential on this scale. And considering the trending of data ubiquity levels, it’s not unrealistic to think that most, if not ALL of the data above could be available within the next couple years (give or take). Companies who successfully integrate the various moving pieces of data and transactions to reduce inefficiencies at the local level stand to be the next GOOG, if not bigger.
It’s a big job, and one I can’t do all by myself. So who’s coming with me?
UPDATE (7/16/09 @ 3:40PM): MG Siegler over at TechCrunch has picked up on the “Foursquare’s onto something big” story now too. Viva the next generation of location-based services and all the potential it holds!
