This posts is more meaningful to people focused on this type of product. If I’m honest, anyone with good mobile experience will know that reliance on Carriers is almost detrimental to any business - at least that’s understood in Europe - especially in the UK, where mobile is more advanced than most countries. LBS has never taken off as it’s prohibitively expensive to use the data from Carriers. The next best thing is Google’s database - it’s not readily available but it’s easy to hack and I hear it’ll be given for free quite soon.

After having read through your comments, i’d like to sum what’s been negatively addressed by most of you:
- lack of market research
- offer solutions for real problems / need at the customer’s side
- gather some evolved management, partners and experiences internationally
- missing business case/ revenue i.e. idea before technology
- location is just a feature, not a product

Well, this is general saying as consultants do. But even in 2008 if you did everything of the above alright you would be facing Paul’s drawbacks.
In particular - at early-stage you won’t find that much data about potential usage and revenues. And hell, everybody wants to come along with Myspace, no?
Furthermore I don’t want some experienced guys get into my boat (we are doing location-aware apps too) and let them tell me the same old story as back then in 1999. I can almost raise this knowledge in 6-12 months on my very own when dealing with these beloved “location-aware circumstances”. In the end I will find myself stuck in deep water just as the big CEOs out there.. the big difference:..what i cannot do is mixed financing :/

For the [location specific] rest, Paul’s issues come handy.

By the way: Anyone, tell me how to make it absolutely viral …and yeah, give me an exclusive free access to that huge Google GSM Cell-ID Databases or i will have to wait for carriers or crowdsourcing (Yahoo Zone Tag, Celldb.org, gsmloc.org, cellspotting.com, opencellid.org…) to make my day!

Fore those of you who like the buzz around location based services (lbs)…

Hype vs.Reality of Location-Based Services - LBS at the end of 2001
http://lbs360.directionsmag.co.....cle_id=144

LBS: Turning Corners in 2003
http://lbs360.directionsmag.co.....cle_id=296

The Outlook for Location-based Services – 2006 and Beyond
http://www.directionsmag.com/a.....&trv=1

I will do the 2009 edition of these articles

Personally, I just wanted to add some related experiences we had with BuddySpace, a geolocation-meets-Jabber-IM tool that gained some traction briefly in the early 2000’s (!), at least in the open source / research arena. The dual problems of “First I had the download pain, and now I’m the only one of my friends using it, so I can’t be bothered” were of course significant and stifling, *BUT* they were also treatable. To circumvent the download pain, we eventually moved to a more modern all-AJAX style, with Google Maps integration, that has resurfaced as “MSG” (see http://msg.open.ac.uk )… of course Google Talk and others handle this niche beautifully, though without (yet) the map integration. More importantly, to circumvent the “I’m the only one using it” problem, we found that enterprise-wide rollout could be so effective (instant critical mass), but only if we worked with organizations to give them CUSTOM maps (e.g. office maps), so everyone could ’see at a glance’ where their colleages were and their online statuses.

Even so, this could well have been more of a ‘feature’ than a ‘product’, just like Meetro, and having it as academic open source meant much less pressure to create a viable business model (not zero pressure, incidentally, just LESS of it).

There’s also the ‘idea’ vs ‘execution’ issue: Last year I heard a nice talk by Rashmi Sinha (of Slideshare) in which she repeated a well-known mantra that “ideas are a dime a dozen, but EXECUTION separates the winners from the losers”. It’s hard to do the controlled experiment: how do you know that the execution was “great enough”, even with all the awesome work that went into your obviously cool product? A nagging thought for all of us!

On a final note, I’m keeping the geolocation banner alive with a separate startup, http://www.clustrmaps.com, a geolocation hit counter widget which does one thing simply, showing impossibly many visitors in an impossibly small space, all impossibly fast - creating a nice ‘gestalt’. Check it out - fits well with Lefora! Best of luck, too….

-Marc

At least you were always the most entertaining guy at TC parties :).

Good luck in the future.

Michael, this is the type of material that keeps me coming back to TechCrunch.

And the ‘google is about to buy us’ rumor started by these guys? Genius.

Remember the movie startup.com? As painful to watch as it was to read this and you could see the ultimate outcome a mile away. Anybody legit tech business who met either eGov or meetro could have told them that this what was going to happen to the.

Circa 2001 there was a company in Cambridge UK called Apama. Great technology for mobile location tracking - basically they could simultaneously track several hundred thousand cell phones and determine who was the closest to you fitting certain pre-determined characteristics that were along the lines of social networking / on-line dating (age, gender, availability, etc). They in turn were trying to copy what had been successful with some similar applications in Korea, but with weaker technology and focused on smaller numbes of cell phones (application for meeting people in bars and restaurants).

Apama found out very quickly that Western consumers were really not that interested in mobile location-based dating or location-based communications - this was very much a Southeast Asian cultural pattern.

So they morphed their great technology into a trading platform (what stocks are closest to your target strike price to) and ended up shelving the mobile business and selling it for a nice valuation as an algorithmic trading platform.

My point is simple - while Meetro may have been an early player in the US, there were other examples elsewhere in the world. By 2006 you could have contacted the founder/CEO of Apama (John Bates) and had a good chat over his learnings, which you in turn could have applied into perhaps refocusing your business in a way that would have had a happier ending.

It is very easy to look at what is happening in the US technology space in isolation, but in certain sectors, particularly mobile applications, one must have a broader worldview or you are discarding a lot of valuable experience, which is another way of saying you will need to spend more of your limited external funding than you otherwise need to on things not directly leading to sustainable cash flow.

Paul Bragiel from Meetro posted a detailed post-mortem on the demise of Meetro.  Meetro is, er…was, a location service that would figure out where you are and introduce you to people nearby.  Brightkite is currently working in this space and se…

I find comments like this above really amusing, because they have really nothing much to say. Its the commenters version of “move along, nothing to see here”.

Here’s the comment I want to see from such a commenter: “”.

Meetro, the location-aware instant messaging application - and company - has failed (or as my entrepreneur friends often like to say in such cases, it has “run out of runway”). Peter sent me a link to an inspiring TechCrunch guest post by Paul Bragie…

Same scenario in this article: “If we had done a, b and c instead of x, y and z, THEN we would have been successful…and happy…and driving around in our new Teslas. And oh, by the way…we really COULD HAVE fixed things, but by then we were so busy on our much cooler new projects, we just didn’t care.”

It’s the start-up’s version of, “move along, nothing to see here” that attempts to absolve those who blew the money of any guilt.

Here’s the article I want to see from the former CEO of a failed startup: “EPIC FAIL. The end.”

Thanks for sharing….it’s hard to do when a venture didn’t turn out as planned. I’m always amazed at the number of “experts” who come out with their mean-spirited critiques…..wish they had the cojones to identify themselves (and let us all know how many times they had actually started a business!

I want to shout out to #26; who I think makes a great point that the common interest comes first - then the location and “finder”. Of course this is easy for me to say as I am starting a business based on knowing where millions of passionate, like-minded people will be…people who WANT to find each other. So ideas such as Meetro will be a terrific add-on for me.

And to see that there is life after startup death is so important to hear. Makes you fear it less.

The 1st 2 comments stunk. If you didn’t get anything out of it, that’s cool. But why say that you didn’t. How does that benefit anything?

Anyway, props to Paul for not going quietly.

Businesses are not businesses unless they make money (That’s the IRS speaking, not me).