Five good reasons why publishers should care about geolocation 2

Posted on by John Helmer
screengrab from iPhone of an app asking permission to use location dataThe second in a series of posts on geolocation. For an introduction to the subject see the first post: Reason 1: Because of the opportunity But for now we move on to…

Reason 2: Because of the threat

At a recent dinner event I attended, Stephen Bourne of Cambridge University Press said that he expects the digital portion of his business to rise to around two-thirds by 2020 from its current 22%. It follows that any publisher in a similar situation will be highly sensitive to changes in the internet landscape which, as we can see by looking backwards along a similar timescale, are both rapid and tumultuous (where was Google in the year 2000?). Geolocation is one of the biggest changes currently affecting that landscape, as evidenced by the huge amount of buzz around companies like Foursquare, purveyors of the location-based social networking software that has gone from 50,000 to 2.5 million users in the space of a year. So seriously is this trend being taken that all three of the major players in online media have made moves to counter it. Continue reading →

Five good reasons why publishers should care about geolocation

Posted on by John Helmer
screengrab from iPhone of an app asking permission to use location data You may have heard us say before at Semantico that the mobile internet could pass desktop internet access by as early as 2013 (Gartner). We believe it’s a stat worth flogging. Because as the mobile revolution draws on apace, it is beginning to transform the ways in which users access and consume published information quite radically. Geolocation is the latest way in which it is doing this. Smartphone users will already have noted geolocation’s fine Italian hand. It’s why all your apps keep asking if they can use your location. As a publisher, though, should you care unduly about this new feature of the landscape? We think you should, and in a series of posts we give five compelling reasons why. Continue reading →