As a great way to end 2008, GeSmart has just been advised that they are a finalist in the 2009 Vero Excellence in Business Awards.This is a prestigious Award sponsored by Vero, BDO Spicers and National Business Review. Organisers said that there was a record number of entries and the quality of finalists was a notch higher than previous years.
Mike Watson, chief executive of the New Zealand Business Excellence Foundation said “In finalists we look for organisations that demonstrate they have robust processes in place to address key business and stakeholder/customer requirements. The delivery of products and services should be based on sound processes and the business should demonstrate clear direction and specific objectives to achieve success. Most importantly we look for evidence of success via the outputs and outcomes from business processes.”
GeoSmart General Manager, Phil Allen said, “This is an excellent start for what may well be one of the most exciting years in GeoSmart’s 30 years in business, with a number of major product launches to be announced early in the year. We are delighted to be recognised for our work and this is a significant pat on the back for the entire team at GeoSmart who are passionate about our business and the benefits we are delivering to businesses and consumers.”
So I’ve been thinking some more about entries that people could come up with for the Awards. It’s summer Downunder and that raises some interesting ideas for LBS applications for the Awards.
In summer we have lots of events such as beach parties and concerts in parks sponsored by various organisations and often in conjunction with radio stations. Often as part of these events, ice cream and energy drink brands get together and offer opportunities to win free product and other goodies by getting to the right place at the right time.
This might be a game or a treasure hunt or it maybe simply a matter of telling people that there is a free concert on in a particular park or beach, or that the Outside Broadcast Radio Vehicle will be at a certain spot at a certain time and if you are one of the first (x number of) people to get there you will get some free product.
LBS is a great way to get people to head for those locations. Here are a few examples:
Text a message to a short code with your current location (street address) and get the time and location of today’s beach party or concert, complete with personalised turn by turn directions on how to get there.
Text a message to a short code with your current location (street address) and get your first, or next clue to get you closer to your prize.
Text the name of your town to a short code to get information about the next event date and time.
Receive a message that you can forward to your friends who you want to join you at the party or concert so they can also get their own driving directions.
As above but with electronic coupons so that the first (x number of) people with the coupons get the prizes or free product. Only people who receive the electronic coupon qualify for the prize, which means people who send invites will want others to send one to them, which creates a viral marketing process.
Another concept could be a solution for free product for people driving on a holiday trip. This could be along similar lines, but promoting a different service. For example:
In recent years the narrow Kopu Bridge leading into the Coromandels is a major bottleneck, sometimes with delays of an hour or sometimes much longer. On a number of occassions I’ve seen one of the distinctive V cars on the side of the road giving away cold cans of their popular energy drink to frustrated drivers sitting in a long line of traffic on a steaming hot summers day. If they are going to do that, they could come up with some sort of LBS traffic report telling people where the traffic jams are and where to find themselves a bottle of V to cool down with. Of course this would also be a great concept for brands like TipTop Ice Cream who frequent run summer competitions.
These are just a couple of ideas where popular brands can have some summer fun with LBS and Viral Marketing to promote their brands, show some technology leadership and appeal to the tech savvy Generation Y people and build some product loyalty.Maybe you could come up with an idea, win one of our awards and then sell the concept to them.
So what’s the big deal with Proximity Based Marketing? We have included this category in the Awards because it offers a huge opportunity for companies to engage with potential clients in a way that adds value to them. There are different ways of doing proximity marketing, our interest is specifically mobile and opt-in. That means that you only participate in a campaign if you chose to and in doing so there are some critical criteria. I will explain those, but first let’s get an idea of what the concept means, because a lot of people don’t really understand the concept.
Proximity based marketing is about getting messages, offers, invitations and communication about goods, services, activities based on where you are, i.e. they are availble close to where you happen to be. There are two main methods for doing this from a mobile persepctive, which is our interest in this competition. One is around targetted SMS messages, being the easiest technology to use currently and the other is Bluetooth. Unless there is an opt in component, Bluetooth is unlikely to be supported in this environment, but it could be. Bluetooth is really about short range communication between devices, say up to about 10 metres. It is a short range radio frequency concept that normally requires ‘pairing’ that is both devices agreeing that the other device is a trusted device to communicate with. So in most cases you can not communicate with another Bluetooth device unless A/ It is switched on (using a fair amount of battery power); and B/ It is open to communication with other devices in ‘Discoverable Mode‘ ; and C/ It has registered the other device as one it will communicate with. This is how you can have a Bluetooth headset for your phone and not listen in to calls that other people in the vicinity are making who are also using a Bluetooth headset. Free and open communications are not receommended because of the risk of virus attack.
So the concept, which according to BlueTomorrow is ‘all the rage’ of Bluetooth Proximity Marketing means that you have no control over who sends you messages. You may think that’s a good thing, but the last thing I want as I walk past shops in the mall is to receive unsolicited messages asking me if I would like information or perhaps an electronic coupon for products which are in the store. If they have deals, let them put some good material in the shop window.
Another concept which also isn’t in the scope of the competition is applications that require you to do something based on a billboard or other Point of Sale. In effect they didn’t contact you, but they persuaded you to do something when you happened to be somewhere. An excellent example is the UN Voices project put together by The Hyperfactory, who are a worldwide expert company in wireless and mobile marketing in Australia. The concept was that you take a digital photo of a mouth on a billboard and then get sent an audio message of the person who’s photo you took, telling you about their lives. This and other great examples of their work which are very inspiring can be seen here.
So the concept we are talking about goes like this. Through a form of marketiong, you convince people to opt in to a service, it could be via a brochure, a message on product packaging or on a label, or perhaps through a website or billboard. You will allow the service to send you messages based on your interests in products or services, which will probably be SMS or Text Messages. The messages might contain an offer, an electronic coupon, or ask you to do something.
To me the concept of being offered special deals for things that I am specifically interested in at a time that I would like to receive it is a great idea. For the marketing company if they can find willing subjects it is also great because it is targetted rather than the normal scattergun approaches. How much junk mail have you received in the recent build up to Christmas sales mostly about things you weren’t interested in? What would be the ad drop to sales conversion ratio. A very good DM (Direct Marketing) Campaign would get 5-10% return, the average would probably be less than 4%. If you know you can target people that are interested, you would get a significantly greater result.
The thing is, you don’t want SPAM solicited or not, so there need to be rules and if the rules aren’t followed, the entire industry could be set back for many years. So for the competition our rules are:
1. You must clearly understand what you are opting into.How many messages are you likely to receive.
2. You need to have control over when you will receive messages. For example for a ‘Happy Hour Club’ You might decide you only want to receive messages on Friday and Saturday nights and only between 6 and 10 PM.
3. From a proximity perspective you may only want to receive offers when you are within a km of a participating bar or club.
4. It needs to be easy and clear how to opt out. People might try something once in a while, but there are many services such as subscription newsletters where it is very difficult to figure out how to opt out of the service.
It’s interesting when you start searching for existing applications, how few actually exist so far, while the web is full of sites suggesting what could be done, most of the companies who could be doing it aren’t and wouldn’t know where to start, which is why this competition is so important. So here are a few ideas:
BP Petrol stations in New Zealand sell coupon books which give you two-for-one deals on coffee. The sell car wash services with coupon books so that your 5th car wash is free. You have to go out of your way to get them and most of the time when you need them they are not around. They generally do not work very well in motivating people to use the service. Often there are competing gas stations accross the road and people have a choice where they go. At commuting times of day most traffic is driving one one side of the road, the gas station on the other side misses out. Why not add a service for people to opt into so that they can be offered special deals when they are in proximity of petrol stations at quiet times. It could be a free coffee with $60 worth of petrol, it could be a half price carwash etc. I don’t know too much about the petrol industry but people sure like a deal. Why not give them one when they are close by. Why not get them to top up their gas now, when they are near your business, especially if they weren’t planning to stop.
Imagine you have signed up for your favourite retail clothing chain, given them your favourite colours, style and size. They know when you are walking into the mall, either because your phone has told them, or because you texted the name of the mall to the short code on the sign at the entrance. Now you get a text message saying that they have got something similar to what you loved last summer and if you come in now, you will get a 2nd garment for half price and you can forward this to 3 friends who will get the same deal.
Still in the mall, you walk past the Music Store who send you a message saying that your favourite band’s new album has just been released and another group who is quite similar also have a great new album and if you come in and buy them both now, you will also get a free collector T-Shirt.
How about renting a camervan or motorhome and subscribing to travel deals as you drive on your holiday. As you travel around the country, you get SMS alerts from attractions and activities within say 10km of your location. You drive into Waitomo to go on the boat trip the the underwater caves, but the day has been quiet for the Black Water Rafting Trip so they send you a special deal where the 2nd person goes for free. As you drive further towards the end of the day and are thinking about where to stay, you get a text message from the nearby Top 10 Holiday Park with an offer of a 20% disccount on your meal at the restaurant next door.
The key to this concept is that the offers are targetted and the recipient has control of when, how often and what type of deals they are offered and have the ability to stop them as quickly as sending a text message. You might subscribe indefinitely or just for the 5 day trip in your motorhome. In many cases these deals might also include aspects of other categories such as LBS Games or Social Networking. The key is that it targets you because you are interested in or a regular consumer of the goods and services, buit most importantly because you receive the deals when you are in the proximity of the offer, they are welcomed. You don’t want to receive an electronic coupon for a petrol discount if you are on the beach or out on the boat, you want it when you are driving past. You want something that is a really good deal.
Hopefully I have given you a few ideas for applications you might like to come up with for the competition. If you are not elligable or don’t want to participate, please feel free to share comments or ideas on this blog that other people might be able to pick up on.
One of the applications that many organisations have seen as major opportunities for LBS application development is the concept or Friend or Buddy Finder. The most common concept is which of my friends are nearby, but it can also lead to finding new friends of similar interests. This concept offers lots of opportunities to come up with an entry for the GeoSmart Location Innovation Awards.
One application that seems to do this quite well is Mobiluck. Mobiluck is a mobile social networking application which allows you to see where your friends are and let them know where you are. It can send you free SMS alerts when a friend is nearby. I don’t know if it is free everywhere in the world, I’d be surprised if the New Zealand telcos allowed any SMS to slip through without getting some revenue from them. Like all good social networking sites it lets you make new friends. It is free because it is supported by advertising and with almost half a million users, I suspect it is proving itself to be an app that people want to use. When I looked at the application, it knew from my IP Address (I’m assuming that’s how it worked because I hadn’t yet entered any data). It also supports multiple languages and gives you the ability to decide how much profile information to share. They are working on getting establishments such as restaurants and bars to get involved in the network as Points of Interest to make it easy for people to let their friends know where they are and invite them to join them.
Japan pioneered a system of proximity based dating several years ago which was an instant hit, Korea followed quickly thereafter. You could set your criteria of the person you were looking for and would get a message when someone that matched your interests were nearby. The first devices were simple Bluetooth Devices specifically designed for the purpose and as you walked past a person who was a match, your devicee would beep. Now off course the technology is cellular and uses GPS and SMS as the key enablers. I’m not sure that culturally this would work so well in the Western world, but given that dating sites are amongst the most popular on the web, I could well be wrong.
Car Navigation won’t be left out. My TomTom GO720 has Buddy Finder technology. I use my navigation unit as my hands free car kit so it is already paired through Bluetooth to my phone. Any friends who also do the same with their unit have the option of allowing me to see where they are on a map in real time. This is a great tool if you are travelling to a location. Let’s say I was on my way to the Big Day Out and I was going to meet a friend outside and go in together. Let’s say one of us finds enough car parking for 2 cars, I could spot exactly where they are on my unit and grab the other park. This would also be a lot of fun on car rallys and other events. Of course you don’t have to be driving either. You could even create a proximity game using phones and TomToms.
Another interesting service is navmii from GeoLife.It operates in a Windows Mobile environment with GPS. You can find people or allow them to find you and they can then see you on a map and get driving directions on how to find you. You can see an example below. They are also planning new related products including GeoFamily and GeoPet. The latter 2 I’m sure would be very popular. GeoFamily means that you can make sure your children are safe and know where they are, another aspect which has been very popular in one of my own blogs is using GPS to keep track of elderly family members, especially those who may have memory problems or suffer from Alzheimers or another form of dementia, who get themselves lost and don’t remember where to go. Another popular aspect is when elderly people are away from their homes and are injured or need medical assistance. Current solutions tend only to work within a close radius of their homes. You can find more information on my other blog about this.
Have you registered for the Location Innovation Awards? It’s not too late. The Location Innovati0n Awards don’t close until February 16.
Recently I came across a site that shows potential, but they are not yet using GPS or mobile. Nevertheless, their concept is very good. In simple terms Woices allows you to record comments on the net about places that you have been to, called ‘Echoes’. Using reverse geocoding you can tag the location to a map so that people can go to a map and see the locations that have ‘Echoes’ and then listen to them.
From a Location Innovation Awards perspective, this would be a great concept to make mobile. Whether it’s through GPS or triangulation, it would be a simple thing to create an application that takes advantage of the mobile knowing it’s position, recording a voice message and a photo and then uplocaing it to a website.
The concept of a social community sharing information is becoming commonplace, but most of these applications are web based. This is fine when you are planning a trip, but could be much better if it was made more mobile.
When I travel overseas and am looking for accomodation or activities, I check them out on Travelocity. The reason I do this is because the public can upload comments. Last year I had a short holiday in jamaica and found this system very helpful. For example the first resort I looked up in Montego Bay looked great on the hotel’s website, but the comments said things like, “If you are single and want to party 24 hours a day, this place was made for you. Don’t bring your kids. ” Using people’s comments I found the perfect resort and it was exactly what the comments said it would be and I was very happy with my selection.
Mobility means you can do much more. For example let’s say you are in Rotorua and looking for somewhere to have a brunch. Using your mobile you could search for cafe’s or restaurants within a kilometer of where you are and listen to the ‘Echoes’ other people had left. For example “great food but it took an hour to get it to the table’.
From a tourism perspective, sharing information that you can access from your phone could be great. I was talking to someone recently who went on a motorhome tour of New Zealand and they told me that some of the best places they stopped for the night weren’t marked on any maps, they found out about them from other motorhomers who told them where to find spots where they could park by the water and enjoy wonderful sunsets. A GPS mobile application could allow you to locate all sorts of interesting places based on the recommendations of others.
Voice messages like this can be in multiple languages and would allow you to enjoy high tech results without requiring you to have computing skills or sophisticated technology. In addition to info from fellow travellers, this is also a great opportunity for locals to share information with travellers about local history, amenities and attractions and people have already started doing this on Woices.
A concept like this in a mobile environment would fit into several categories of the Location Innovation Awards, including the best Tourism Application and the AA Maps Widgets which could earn you a luxury adventure in a Maui Camper.
How do you combine LBS technology with GPS and mobile phones with a gaming environment that is fun, educational and gives you plenty of exercise? That’s one of the questions we have for Kiwis who enter the GeoSmart Location Innovation Awards.
29 people have entered the awards so far and we know of several more people who are working on projects. A lot of interest has come from universities and we all know that university students love coming up with ideas for fun things to do. The Auckland City Flashmob Group already has 487 members who have signed up through their Facebook page.
In this blog I am going to give you some examples of applications that might gove you ideas on applications to create yourselves. One that I really like as a concept is Navball which comes from Amsterdam. The Netherlands are of course a nation of football fans and it makes a lot of sense to combine their love of the round ball game with GPS and LBS technology to come up with something that is fun, fast, competitive and very Generation Y.
The concept is that you have two teams of 11 players, just like you would in a game of soccer and they compete to kick a virtual ball into a virtual goal. The playground is a set of predefined streets, unknown to the players before they hit the field. The players off course have soccer strips so that they are recognisable from the general public and won’t cause concern for pedestrians as they go about their business.
Each player is equipped with a Nokia N95 which is GPS enabled. The players are shown where the ‘ball’ is and the location of the first ‘goal’. They have to form a line in the shape of an arrow in order to be able to identify the direction the ball will be kicked. The game lasts for 45 minutes and the winner is obviously the team which has achieved the most goals.
The play can be followed on a Google Maps mashup which allows viewers to monitor a scoreboard and see the locations of each of the 22 players as they make their way around the course, which is the streets of Amsterdam.
Here is a promotional video of the game being played in Amsterdam.
Navball is the brainchild of The Saints mobile software, one of many innovative Dutch developers. Another application they have launched which would be great fun for both tourists and locals is Get Lost in Rotterdam. It’s sort of like a treasure hunt, except that it is simply about finding new places and having fun. It is designed such that it could be played in any city in the world.
You send a free txt message to a short code and can then download the application which has 15 consecutive instructions. I watched a video demonstration on the website, which went like this:
1. Get on the tram heading for the city centre and get off at the 5th stop.
2. Take the first Metro (subway) entrance and go one stop.
3. Follow the first dog you see for (x) time and then turn left
4. Catch the first available bus. etc
There are lots of prizes for people who send in photos from their journey and the game will run on many different brands and models of phone that have Java capability.
These games are entertaining, fun, involve adventure and exercise. I don’t know if they allow you to track the people or their trail on a map website like AA Maps, but that would obviously add some more fu, not only to the players but to others.
So there are a couple of cool examples of LBS Games. What do you think you could come up with? You can enter to win prizes with your idea at www.locationinnovation.co.nz. If it’s really good, you could be heading for a free trip to the USA to the Where 2.0 conference in May next year!
Are you deciding where to go on your summer holiday around New Zealand, or perhaps looking for a weekend adventure? Before you head out on your Kiwi Road Trip, have a look at what GeoSmart has added to the AA Maps web site.
There are many new and improved features. You can now create your complete itinerary and then change the order of the stops and even check the real time traffic conditions before you leave!
Let’s say you were going to take the kids to Rotorua. You had decided on the Luge, the Agrodome for a ride in the Zoorb, a jetboat ride and the other cool activities they have there, and Rainbow Springs to feed the trout. You set your itinerary on AA Maps and then decided to change the order so that you could finish the day with a meal at the top of the gondola ride and enjoy the views with a nice sunset. Now you can drag and drop the destinations, automatically generating new driving directions from A to B to C to take with you in the car, even showing the travel distance and driving time from one to the next.
You can find your accomodation from AA Maps and when you select it you can look for other amenities such as restaurants within 5km of the property. In this instance my search found 10 within 400 metres of the Millenium Hotel.
You can now set up a free account on the page and store your ‘Favourites’ so that you can find them again later and you can even leave a ‘rating’ once you have been there so that other people can appreciate the great experiences you enjoyed.
Many Kiwi’s feel they know their way around New Zealand and don’t need mapping websites. All good and well, but they don’t know there was a major accident which has blocked the Auckland Harbour Bridge or a slip which has closed the Milford Sound Rd. Now we have included AA Real Time Traffic as well as Traffic Web Cams. There are certain holiday spots that often have traffic jams at peak times such as Long Weekends or the start and end of major holiday periods. In winter there may be ice and snow, or slips that can close lanes or sometimes entire roads. Yu will be able to find this information on the AA Maps web site, where you can select from Minor Accidents, Major Accidents and Traffic Webcams where you can see the traffic flows, refreshed every minute.
If you live and drive in New Zealand, you are probably a member of the NZAA which has many great services to offer you. As a member, these are your services and another important feature is the Feedback button which allows you to tell us whatever you want to, whether it is suggestions for new features, a Point of Interest we didn’t know about, perhaps a restaurant that has changed ownership and has a new name. This is a never ending project as new technology continues to allow us to add new services and features.
If you would like a map on your own website, AA Maps will give you an idea of some of the features GeoSmart can offer you, but wait, there’s more. Many of the services we offer are not relevant to the AA Maps website. Of course there is also the AA Maps Bizlocator, which not only gives you a free map and directions from your company web page, but also lists it with car navigation brands so people in their cars can find their way to you. . We have lots of other services, so if it’s to do with location and you have a need, please feel free to ask us any time.
For more information about GeoSmart, please go to our Home Page. For AA Maps, click here.
This blog is offered as an interactive comunication, so please feel free to comment or make suggestions here as well. We welcome your feedback.
The car is the brainchild of our GM Phil Allen who says “This is the most advanced mapping car to drive New Zealand roads. We have driven all of New Zealand’s roads with differential GPS before, but this car has leading edge technology. New technologies demand superior quality data.”
While other cars are getting pretty good information and imagery, pretty good isn’t enough for today’s needs. This car is collecting up to a terabyte of data a month from five cameras catching lane information, street signs, turn restrictions and points of interest. We are capturing lane information, road curb and other information of value to councils, road maintenance, utility companies (managing roadside assets) and much more. We are also taking a 360 degree panorama photo every 50 metres.
So what’s leading edge? How about an IMU? This is an Inertial Measurement Unit as used in modern missile tracking systems and allows us to capture data with accuracy of 15 centimetres, even when the GPS signals are weak or lost. With traditional differential GPS accuracy is lost when the satellite signal is poor such as behind volcanic hill shadows and particularly in places in the South Island where the satellites are very low on the horizon or totally obscured from the GPS antenna.
The car is capturing valuable information including inclinometer (the rate of incline and decline of the hill which can be useful for all sorts of things beyond navigation, for example in data for cycling, training for marathons, car rallies. It is also measuring road camber. By providing road camber information to services such as Fleet Management it may be possible to reduce truck accidents where they approach corners to fast for the height and load, based on knowing the angle of the road camber through corners.
Nothing has been spared when it comes to accuracy. The nature of the work means that we had to use a SUV and the trade off is body roll. To compensate for this we have sonic technology which measures the body roll and this is used in data calculation algorithms making sure that our data is highly accurate.
This unique vehicle is going to enable us to provide for the ever changing demands of new technologies with the best national data ever collected in New Zealand. It is part of our continuous ongoing driving program supporting a range of products including the leading brands in Car Navigation (brands such as Navman and TomTom) and Fleet Management (brands such as Navman, Xlerate, Astrata) as well as clients who will use the imagery to reduce the need to do their own driving.
GeoSmart has built a console to monitor the information and is also creating plug-ins to allow the visual data to be used in conjunction with GIS systems such as Intergraph and has the ability to pinpoint the location of street hardware such as power poles and transformers.
When people see the vehicle, we want them to know what we are up to, so they will understand that we are working to enhance the mapping products and services they use including websites like AA Maps and Wises, the Map Books they carry in their cars and the car navigation devices they use.
GeoSmart is a New Zealand based Geospatial Solutions Provider. What does that mean? If you want anything to do with location, we are the people for you to get in touch with. We have driven all of New Zealand as well as flown most of it to gather orthophotography which is used by many GIS departments in regional and local government. We have the only full turn restriction database in New Zealand, which in simple terms means that we have eliminated the paper roads designed in Scotland in the 1800’s which still exist on paper and in many mapping products, we know all about the no left or right turns, one way streets, legal and implicit turn restrictions and much more including a huge database of Points of Interest including businesses, accomodation, petrol stations right down to public toilets, boat ramps, places of geographic or historic interest and more.
Our products include:
Cartography including Wises and NZ Automobile Association Maps
Custom map jobs small and large, street maps, need a digital map for an advertisement, call us
Car Navigation, we supply around 93% of car navigation product in New Zealand including TomTom, Navman, Nav N Go, Horizon, BMW and more
Fleet Management, vehicle and personal tracking including Navman, Astrata, Xlerate, Argus Tracking and more
Route Optimisation including Traveling Salesman through to complex problems
Demographic, sales and franchise territory applications
Web Mapping API’s and Web Services for applications of all sorts with the most thorough information available including GeoCoding, Points of Interest, Driving Directions, Vector Graphics, Reverse GeoCoding and much more.
We love to hear from and work with new ventures, people trying to solve spatial problems, develop new web sites, games, social networks or anything to do with location.
As Sales & Marketing Manager, this is a semi informal place for me to share ideas, knowledge and generally share some of the things we are working on. Feel free to comment or make contact with me.
