Fred Wilson Insights; Robert Scoble Wrap Up on #geoloco2010

Below are Fred Wilson's insights from his keynote this past week at the Geo-Loco Conference in San Francisco. Immediately below them is a wrap-up summary on video from Robert Scoble.

"You should be able to give permission for how your information is used. An issue with large companies like Google is that they just may not be that capable of building private location-based services because their social graphs are not tuned for this kind of activity. When people start revealing their data, they want to know on day one that they get to define the terms and what they want to share and with who. There's an advantage for start-ups and the entrepreneurs over the big companies, because the big companies have to roll back and undo the permissions you may have already granted."

"How do you turn these services into businesses? Knowing where someone is in real-time right now if you have context about that, is an incredibly valuable marketing opportunity: it’s the holy grail for a merchant. If a merchant knows you’re nearby, they can make an offer or offer a coupon at the time when they're highly incentivized to do so.

Revenue models around these businesses are fairly straight forward. There will be resellers and aggregators who create value for these services. I’m not worried about how you make money with these services, because those problems pale in my mind compared to the challenges around privacy, incentivizing user behavior and creating value for people for sharing that data."

"What excites me is this: What if all the world history books were archived and integrated with a service like outside in and I could see what happened right here at the point where I’m standing in Rome 500 years ago?

When I go to a museum, there’s always a guided tour of the museum, but it’s the museum’s curated tour. What I’d love to be able to do is get Lou Reed’s private tour and another day, someone else’s private tour of a museum, or a walking tour of London. There are a lot of opportunities combining audio and mobile, as well as geo-tagging to create highly personalized curated experiences at places like museums."

"I love the idea of open APIs but open APIs should also come with monetization – they go hand in hand. The API should monetize in the same way a site monetizes. You can’t just have an open API and not have it make money. Don’t try to hoard the data; use the data to get the monetization out into the marketplace."

"The checkin will be a commodity if it isn’t already. You can get a Twitter style update on Yammer and Facebook, but that hasn’t stopped Twitter from being a large network that continues to grow and become more and more interesting every day. The same thing is true with checkins -- you’ll get checks in Yelp and Facebook, but it doesn’t mean that the checkin services are in danger of not being monetized. What really matters is what’s behind the checkin. Can I protect my data, can I get valuable offers from doing this, where are my friends checking in? It’s all the other stuff that’s behind the checkin that creates the value to the consumers and to the brands. The tweet or checkin gets invented, the social bookmark gets invented -- ALL of these social gestures get invented AND they get copied by everyone, but the innovator of that social gesture has gone on to build a really good business on the back of it. Commoditizing these "copying of social gestures" will not take the value of these gestures themselves."

Below is Robert's recap/summary: