Looking To Monetize Its Maps, Waze Launches A Location-Aware Mobile Ad Platform For Local Businesses

1-wf-2Last week, the increasingly popular traffic and navigation app, Waze, launched a redesign that brought a deeper level of social integration to its user experience. Along with redesigned maps and a new interface, the startup added Facebook single sign-on and features that allow users to share their drives, pickups and meetup spots, communicate their status from the road and check-in at a destination without leaving the app.

Following on the heels of its social integration, Waze is now turning its attention to monetization as part of an attempt to breathe new life into mobile advertising. Today, the company is rolling out a new product called Waze Ads, a location-guided ad platform for local business owners and big brands that want to attract the attention of nearby drivers.

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Closing In On 30M Users, Waze Goes Big On Social: Adds Facebook Sign On, Pickup Requests, Location Sharing & More

ChangingRouteApple’s launch of its new mapping service, the ensuing backlash and management shakeup, have been anything but its proudest moments. Adding insult to injury, As Kim-Mai reported two weeks ago, Apple’s pain quickly turned into a gain for other map makers. However, for most, this was only a temporary blip. Only one company was able to sustain increased marketshare: Waze, which saw its share of U.S. iPhone users jump from 7 percent to 10 percent.

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Closing In On 30M Users, Waze Goes Big On Social: Adds Facebook Sign On, Pickup Requests, Location Sharing & More

ChangingRouteApple’s launch of its new mapping service, the ensuing backlash and management shakeup, have been anything but its proudest moments. Adding insult to injury, As Kim-Mai reported two weeks ago, Apple’s pain quickly turned into a gain for other map makers. However, for most, this was only a temporary blip. Only one company was able to sustain increased marketshare: Waze, which saw its share of U.S. iPhone users jump from 7 percent to 10 percent.

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How to Optimize a Page for Local Search

In a continued series on optimizing your site for inbound marketing, we wanted to provide a breakdown of how to optimize a page to be found for local or geographic content. Search engines like Google and Bing do a great job of picking up geographically-targeted pages, but there are some things you can do to ensure your local page is indexed properly for the correct region and associated keywords or phrases. Local search is HUGE… with a large percentage of … Continue reading

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Nielsen: Native Travel Apps Trump Mobile Web By 95%, Google Maps Top Travel Service By A Mile [Updated]

google maps iphoneNative app usage has been edging just ahead of mobile web usage among U.S. smartphone owners in the last few months, but when it comes to the category of travel, mobile web use all but disappears from the map. According to figures out today from Nielsen, 95% of all mobile traffic for travel-related content comes from native mobile apps — specifically on iOS and Android platforms. Mobile web — and traffic on operating systems that are not Android and iOS, for that matter — accounts for only 5% of visits.

And just as Google has come to dominate search, it looks to be carving out a similar position in travel, a mobile-friendly category by its nature: Google Maps — in its combined native app and mobile web forms — accounted for 78% of all time spent in the travel category in June 2012, with a total of 78 million app users, and another 17 million on mobile web. It will be interesting to see how that transforms as Apple drops Google Maps in favor of its own mapping service in iOS 6.

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Recce, A Rich, Interactive Map That’s Also A Gaming Platform, Launches With $4M From NEA

The Shard, HMS Belfast & Tower BridgeWhile we wait for the full-throttle effect of Apple Maps in iOS6, a new app has launched today that is raising the game for what we should be expecting out of the world of social-mobile-local services. Recce — pronounced “wreckie”, British slang for “reconnaissance” (only English people would make slang out of a word like that) — presents a 3D, animated birds-eye view of a city, and what is going on in it, by aggregating dozens of data feeds from other services — ranging from mapping providers to those building listings of places to eat, and social networks like Twitter, integrating it all, and then presenting it in a slick, attractive app that is essentially a searchable map. (Think of Recce as the pretty face of big data.) And it’s launching with some support: NEA is the lead investor in a $4 million Series A round in Recce’s developers, London-based eeGeo, with total funding for the company now at $4.7 million including a seed investment from Initial Capital, Swordfish Investments, and others.

In its earliest iteration, Recce is only providing maps and data for central London, with San Francisco and New York next in line, but its developers are thinking big. The intention is to extend out to many more cities over the coming months. And, signficantly, to do more besides maps: Recce is also building itself out to be a platform not only for all location-based services but also location-specific games.

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Social Maps App CityMaps Arrives In Boston, Rolls Out Local Recommendations

citymaps-featuredCityMaps, the social mapping company fresh off its $2.5 million Series A, is rolling out a big update today which not only brings the service to a fourth city (Boston), but also introduces a recommendations feature it calls “Featured Maps.” This option allows users to quickly see recommended places to eat, drink, shop and play as a new layer on the map.

The update is live now in the iTunes App Store, and while I don’t have CityMaps available in my hometown just yet (it’s currently in New York, San Francisco and Austin, in addition to Boston), it’s easy enough to switch to another city to see the map for that area.

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SoLoMo: CityMaps Nabs $2.5M To Render Your City Social, One Block At A Time

CityMaps_screen2Maps have been around for millenia, but for a significant chunk of that time, they remained static, two-dimensional forms, rendered by hand on paper. It sounds crude now, even as services like Wave have us mapping our worlds with our smartphones like explorers of old. Today, with the ridiculous amount of data available on the Web and in the cloud, maps have become something else entirely, our surroundings coming alive in wizbang, interactive 3-D displays.

Throw in the level of granularity online maps are capable of, even on mobile, and your once-enthralling lists have become boring — bordering on analog. Google Maps is a feat in and of itself, but, again, with the wealth of data now available online about local businesses, their hours of operation, menus, websites, deals, and the ability to interconnect all of them based on location, I’ve been waiting for a smart, visual aggregated service like CityMaps.

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