LOCATION SERVICES SPACE HEATS UP WITH POINTABOUT LAUNCH

The location services space has seen the sudden arrival of PointAbout, a Washington, DC-based firm that launched earlier this year to enhance mobile service applications by making websites "location aware." Launched by veterans from Microsoft, GE, and others, one of PointAbout's strengths is the fact that it is able to leverage its understanding of handsets and carriers to develop solutions more easily than firms without such understanding. PointAbout's first customer is real estate firm Long & Foster, for which PointAbout will location-enable their listings. PointAbout is now setting about replicating their Long & Foster agreement everywhere possible.

PointAbout has also submitted the first entry to the Apps for Democracy contest being sponsored by the District of Columbia's Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO), digital agency iStrategyLabs, and Mashable. The objective of the contest is to spur innovation from the private sector to utilize data publicly available from the city's data catalog, which provides real-time data from multiple agencies. The city believes access to this information will be a catalyst ensuring agencies operate as more responsive, better performing organizations. Data available runs the gamut from juvenile arrests to vacant property. The contest will divide US$ 20,000 between 60 winners, the highest award value being US$ 2,000 and the lowest being US$ 100. The application deadline is November 12th, and the awards ceremony will take place on the 13th.

After installing the PointAbout application on an iPhone, the application presents the user with a number of "location aware" applications, such as Wi-Fi Hotspots from Zone, Zagat, Events from Yahoo! Upcoming, Movies from Fandango, news, Weather, local gas prices, Yelp, and Washington Metro (some of the applications are not yet enabled). Selecting Washington Metro as an example--this seems to be one of first applications PointAbout introduced--PointAbout displays the closest metro stations, sorted by distance from our location. Selecting a station then allows us to see the next train, get directions to the station, or get more info.

This is a Beta application, so there is no surprise about the fact that we encountered a number of problems, though it's not always possible to determine whether the problem is with PointAbout or with the network. One problem we encountered involved screen navigation--the left arrow buttons don't reliably take you back to the prior screen so it seems faster to get out of the application and get back in rather than to wait to see if the arrow button will work. PointAbout does a great job showing information about the next train. PointAbout pulls up Google Maps to provide directions and pulls in the Metro's home page for more info--both selections are valuable--but the presentations suffer from the fact that neither the map nor the Metro home page have been configured for the smaller phone screen. Another question we had is that while one can install an application in PointAbout--which is of course itself another application--it's not entirely clear that there will always be an advantage to doing this. In the case of Yelp, for instance, the Yelp iPhone app is already location aware. PointAbout will have to differentiate itself somehow in order to justify using Yelp within PointAbout rather than simply within the home screen.

PointAbout CEO Scott Suhy explained recently that their immediate objective is to gain revenue from enterprise agreements, though they anticipate moving towards a 50/50 mix of enterprise revenue and mobile advertising revenue in the future. They expect to be profitable this year and are looking for funding to expand. -Stuart Whitaker