To some, mobile marketing is a touchy subject. It is to me, and it becomes especially touchy with “location-based services” (LBS) like Socialight.

Some companies do it pretty well, some do it terribly. When done right, marketing content on your cellphone can actually be content that not only pays for the free and cheap services you use, but could also provide useful and enjoyable, targeted content. When done wrong, it can instrusive, spammy, feel invasive to your privacy, and be so annoying you want to flush your phone down the toilet.

I’ll be joining a roundtable with Peter Olfe, founder of Yojo Mobile (markers of MizPee!), Bob Page, Senior Director of Strategic Data Solutions at Yahoo!, and Lennart Svanberg, Producer of IMC. I’d like to cover marketing opportunities, data collection and privacy policies, and integration of marketing into services. If you’ll be there, stop by and say “hi”.

IMC New York 2008
Wednesday, June 04, 2008, 8:30 am - 5:00 pm (I’m on at 11)

New York’s Hotel Pennsylvania
401 Seventh Avenue (at 33rd St.)
New York, New York, USA

Today we announced the launch of the Socialight API. This gives developers the ability to build applications that leverage our system for location-based content all around the world. The Socialight API exposes many of the features of the platform using well-known standards like XML, GeoRSS and KML. These tools now make it much easier to tag and share content about places near you. For instance, imagine an iPhone app that highlights the coffee shops in your neighborhood with cute baristas. Or think of a GPS device in your rental car that shows you the best bars in Boston - and overnight parking garages nearby.

In addition to providing various API hooks that your application can use, we’ve also released some useful reference code in the form of samples. You can see some of this sample code in our API tutorial and as a Ruby command-line application. Most interesting of all, however, is the open-source release of our official Java mobile application. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for nearly a year now and after working a couple of months on the code, it’s finally ready for a release into the wild as an alpha.

With location-aware systems like Google’s Android, Apple iPhone, Dash, BugLabs and others in the market, it’s proving to be an exciting year for both mobile and local content. I look forward to seeing what you create. We can keep the discussion open using the developer group and, of course, please get in touch with comments directly.

For the past few weeks, we’ve been playing with the exciting features the iPhone SDK exposes. We know that there are many other mobile developers in New York City that have been doing the same. We wanted to help organize an event where all of these enthusiasts could meet and share their knowledge.

So this coming Saturday, April 19th, we’re helping sponsor an informal event called iPhoneDevCampNYC at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn. It’s modeled after the BarCamp unconference structure and will bring together iPhone hackers from around the area. The breakdown of the sessions will be part-discussion, part-classroom and part-workshop/hackathon. This variety should provide a good experience no matter what your skill level or interest with iPhone.

We’re excited to meet everyone and look forward to some interesting discussions and ideas.

It’s human nature to recommend great places to go in the places we know. “When you go to Vegas, you’ve got to have breakfast at Bouchon and watch Monday night football at The Dome.” Now Socialight’s lets you share your recommendations in a simple new way.

We’ve partnered with our friends at trailblazing digital marketing agency, Organic, to create “The Urban Mixtape”. Using Socialight’s Channels architecture, each Mixtape is an individually curated collection of places that is easily created, shared, and accessed on any mobile or web device, including via the GPS-enabled Socialight Mobile application. You can create a personalized walking tour for your or your friends.

We’ve started with an insider’s guide to Las Vegas for visitors to the CTIA conference going on now. Add some Vegas sticky notes from Thrillist, Travel Channel’s Anthony Bourdain, and Bravo TV. Members of Socialight can create their own Mixtapes and share them with friends for viewing on their mobile phone or the web.

(press release here)

UPDATE: some nice press coverage of the Mixtape on Adweek and on PSFK.

At next month’s SXSW Interactive festival which will be held in Austin, Texas on 7-11 March, I’ll be moderating the “Mobile Phones: International Devices of Mystery” panel on March 10 at 11:30am. The panel features an all-star cast of international mobile industry celebrities and is a must-see if you’re going to be there. If you haven’t heard of SXSW Interactive, it’s ground zero for the creative web, mobile, film and music industries. In short, all the things you love in one place.

This year, Mark Zuckerberg, Jane McGonigal and Frank Warren are keynote speakers and there are far too many awesome panels to see. Highlights include Andreas Weigend’s Science of Designing Interactions, Behind the scenes at the Onion News Network and the Africa 2.0 panels. It isn’t all panels and no play, as meeting amazing people is the best thing there. Don’t just believe us, New York Times designer Khoi Vinh says

“Every time I go, I make more meaningful, long-lasting business contacts and new friends in the space of a long weekend than I might in months and months in New York City.”

New York’s not that bad, but trust me - it’s well worth the trip. If you’re going to be there - let me know so we can meet up.

You’ll find info. on open positions, background on some of the people who work here, future hiring plans, and more. Have a look and tell a friend!

My thanks to Ben and our friends at StandoutJobs (just launched at DEMO!) for making it simple to pull the site together.

Wow. It’s been quite a heady month for us here at Socialight HQ. First of all - we’re very happy to announce that we’ve won the Tele Atlas LBS Innovator Series “Attendee Choice Awards” competition held at CES in Las Vegas two weeks ago. Here’s a quick video walkthrough of what it looked like at gadget ground zero:

If that wasn’t enough, we’ve also been honoured as a Winner of NATPE Mobile++’s Mobile Top 12 in the Location-based Media category.

Many thanks to all of our users and everyone who voted for us at CES and at NATPE.

Watch this space for more - 2008 is the year that Socialight-flavored location based media is going to have a huge impact on the mainstream.

Since we last spoke, we’ve enlisted a group of elite fashion mavens to pepper NYC with Sticky Notes, channeled London’s seedy underbelly, and practically lived on an airplane to spread the Socialight gospel coast to coast and across the ocean.

As mentioned in our previous dispatch, Socialight is up-and-running and location-aware in London, providing the city’s residents with culture, nightlife, and events information on-the-fly, based on where they are. People have been steadily creating Notes and we’ve recruited more great content providers from around the world. It appears more and more people are waking up to the possibilities of location-based information and the potential of our humble Notes to create a new layer of content nestled atop the real world.

Read the rest of the newsletter now.

As I was thinking about another year gone by without the advent of mass-market flying cars, along came this quote about Socialight in a piece from The Press, New Zealand (22 December 2007):

…get ready for computing’s fourth wave. We have had the mainframe, personal computer and internet eras. The next big thing is going to be mobile computing coupled to the ‘‘geoweb’’.

It has been a science-fiction dream for a long time. To have a phone that not only— and affordably— browses the internet, but which is plugged into a geographically aware version of the net. Simms [Tomizone] says that, as you walk around, the phone will know where you are and bring alive your environment accordingly. Overseas, new kinds of social networking sites like Socialight are gaining traction. You can attach cyber notes to locations so anyone walking past will be alerted to events or have a run down of the inhabitants and history of the place.

Dan and I are at the Dow Jones Mobile Technology Conference today and there’s a great buzz and lots of interesting people around. I gave a presentation on Socialight earlier today which was very well received and then we found out that TeleAtlas named us as one of the finalists in their LBS Innovators Series. Nice!

The highlight for me was the great panel discussion this morning about location featuring Darren Koenig from TeleAtlas, Isaias Sudit from Loc-Aid and Chris Ackermann from the Travel Channel.