s t e l l a t o

#HereNow: A New LocaModa App

Social media never stands still. In the past few weeks, foursquare has updated their APIs and they have recently announced their events feature. This is a big deal for any company focused on place-based social media. So foregoing summer cookouts and coding through the night, our engineering team has developed LocaModa HereNow, the first digital out-of-home application to compliment foursquare’s events feature.

HereNow has been a concept that we have had for a very long time and something that several clients recommend we build. For reference, we think about what is the best experience from a venue, consumer and then brand perspective and build accordingly. We use social media as a way to build value inside of digital place-based advertising networks (digital out-of-home) with fit for purpose applications.  Our fullscreen foursquare application is great for our day-to-day business because our applications are built for schedules that contain a variety of content but in an event setting displaying the Mayor, tips, and total check-ins for more then 30 seconds becomes less then exciting.

That mentality of thinking about the venue first then the consumer has made our products very popular for events whether it’s a concert, NHL game, NBA game, CES or a party with your friends, people love to see their messages on screen and event producers need the ability to moderate.

LocaModa HereNow displays users as they check-in via foursquare front and center alongside their name and where they are from.  Behind the scenes, profile photos hit the LocaModa Manager where they can be moderated. The profile photos are then assembled into a background mosaic of check-ins that dynamically updates as more people check-in. The area where the user information is shown rotates with venue safe tips that are controlled in the LocaModa Manager.  We have also thought about what will happen when 50 people check-in (swarm!) and so forth.  The application displays the appropriate swarm badge when each milestone is reached.

Like all of our applications, LocaModa HereNow includes standard cross-channel ad units that brands can leverage too (skyscraper & fullscreen).

We are already responding to brand and agency demand for the features in LocaModa HereNow so I don’t think we’ll have to wait too long to see this in the wild.

 

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Loved Jerry’s latest post:

In our vain effort to assuage the guilt of not being at the other end of work-life seesaw (regardless of which end we find ourselves on), we end up neither here nor there. Remember running back and forth on the seesaw trying to stand legs apart in the center, one foot in each world, getting both ends to balance? I remember the nasty bump I got in that vain effort.

The real gift is learning to be present in whatever third you’re living. So when you’re working, work. And when you’re loving, love. And when you’re eating, eat. As the wise old Ram Dass said: Be Here Now.

Being present is a challenge but something I strive to do each day. Some days are easier than others. 

Work-Life balance has always been a challenge and I’ve been told several times, ‘put down your phone.’ This is a great post & something I will continue to work on.

Many people suffer from a fear of failure.

I know people that use this fear as a way to avoid risks. They won’t take a job at an early stage startup. Or they will sell a company early because they are afraid of looking and feeling bad if it ultimately doesn’t turn out well. 

There are countless examples of letting this fear get the better of you. 

And I know other folks that use this fear as a motivator for striving to be the best. They try to conquer their fears on a daily basis by paying more attention to their will to create something awesome. 

The folks in the latter category have my respect.  They are human and they are winning. 

In startup land, most early stage companies don’t work out and they fall short of the early founders and early VCs expectation. Big risk and big reward. 

Often times the journey itself is the reward. That’s what led me to startups in the first place. I never thought or obsessed about how much my WebTV options would be worth one day. i was more obsessed about whether we could a difference. 

The one thing i notice with some VCs and some hiring execs is their sometimes lack of appreciation of failure. Especially when the VC and startup ecosystem requires a huge amount of failure.  I look at it differently and wonder about people that have never failed. Just like in skiing, if you don’t fall down it probably means you aren’t trying hard enough. 

Instead of dismissing a candidate with, “he/she must not be very good, that company was a failure”, I think it’s much more helpful to pay attention to what that person actually accomplished and attempted to accomplish. 

And many times, giving people a second chance or even a third chance can create amazing results. 

It can be a challenge but I encourage all of us to be proud of our failures and take the time to learn some valuable lessons.

“Just like in skiing, if you don’t fall down it probably means you aren’t trying hard enough.” - Bijan Sabet. My brother and I have been using this analogy since I can remember. Great post.

I’m not a fan of Facebook as a product. I have an account that I rarely use. I have the iPhone app that I’ll occasionally open to look at pictures friends have uploaded. I don’t use their groups, I don’t user their apps and I don’t poke anybody.

But I am a fan of Facebook, the company. And they did something this week that I think is very interesting and which put an exclamation point on an philosophy I hold to firmly; namely, that we’re in the midst of every nation, every industry and every company getting reinvented for a digital future.

I won’t bore you with the details, nor do a claim to fully understand all of the intricacies to the deal, but essentially Facebook, through their transaction with Goldman Sachs, has gone down the path of reinventing what it means to be a publicly traded company. The Facebook IPO story has yet to be written but I tend to agree with Felix that Zuck has accomplished the primary purpose of being a public company, access to capital, via the Goldman special purpose vehicle, without all the overhead of being a public company CEO. 

Whether this is the end game for Facebook and their IPO plans is yet to be seen but I respect that they’re looking at the rationale for being a public company with a fresh set of eyes. Reinventing the IPO is a pretty fantastic feet and one I didn’t see coming.

Which leads to my more general observation. I’ve never seen a time where so many markets are ripe for reinvention. I don’t need to look any further than my iPhone to spot a handful of them. Its my:

• phone. I really can’t remember the last time I took a call on a landline.
• communication. email, txt, twitter, foursquare all native.
• camera. I don’t even own a point and shoot anymore,
• video camera. Bye bye Flip.
• music player. iPod + Pandora, I don’t need much more.
• fax machine. I haven’t had to use a real one since downloading ScanR.
• flash light. that little flash on an iPhone 4 works so well.
• level- totally works for my home improvement projects.
• game console. I don’t play xbox or wii, but I love me some angry birds.
• navigation device. google maps is the best, true dat, double true
• fitness device. goodbye garmin and your crummy bluetooth sticks.

And that’s just on my first two screens. 

Reinvention is happening in every market at an accelerating pace. Just in the last two years we’ve seen fundamental shifts in music, gaming, banking, education, government, automobiles, energy, coupons, payments, retail, rental cars, manufacturing, publishing, journalism, just to name a few. My own industry, venture capital, is being reinvented by upstart funds (like OATV) and entirely new funding models, like DST.

Even the mighty Google is looking ripe for disruption in their untouchable search business. As Jeff Atwood points out:

The idea that there could be something wrong with Google was inconceivable to me. Google is gravity on the web, an omnipresent constant; blaming Google would be like blaming gravity for my own clumsiness. But, this is the first time since 2000 that I can recall Google search quality ever declining, and it has inspired some rather heretical thoughts in me — are we seeing the first signs that algorithmic search has failed as a strategy? Is the next generation of search destined to be less algorithmic and more social? It’s a scary thing to even entertain, but maybe gravity really is broken.

The cracks in the foundations of innovations past are becoming more and more apparent. A digital landscape is emerging that is not only opening up new paths to reinvent incumbent businesses, but mashing them up in ways that weren’t possible even 18 months ago. 

I don’t mean to come off as some starry eyed huckster but, from my vantage point, we’re living in a very exciting time. If ever there were an opportunity to think big and attack large markets with incumbent players, its now. I’m a believer that in the next 5 years we’re going to see every major industry reinvented in ways we didn’t see coming. I mean, who would have guessed a silly little site for college kids could reinvent the IPO?