Last week the news was all about GyPSii’s new iPhone app. Developed by GeoSentric, GyPSii lets people, and now people who own iPhones ,create and share geotagged content in real-time with friends, family, and the growing global community of GyPSii members. But it doesn’t stop there. The places and experiences users create become Internet-searchable destinations, available for friends and communities to share and comment on, not only in GyPSii, but also across other social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

Read between the lines, and GyPSii goes one huge step beyond the slew of location-aware, mobile social networking services we’ve see up to this point. Sure, it allows people to instantly capture and share what they are actually doing, building a multi-media virtual diary on their world – the places they have been and the things that they have done.  But it also allows people to search (and find) these places/people/experiences with their mobile phones.

I am immediately reminded of the key theme of the Netsize Guide 2009, a milestone mobile almanac that represents an exciting (and on-going) collaboration with Stan Chesnais, Netsize CEO, who steered me in the direction of the next mega-trend in mobile: The blurring of the barriers between the virtual and physical worlds.

But it’s more than an adrenalin-driven vision of the future. As we described in the book (which I urge you to download via the MSG sidebar), it’s happening now, and examples range from Ford’s super-cool use of augmented reality in a mobile marketing campaign, to visual search/advertising schemes supported by SnapNow, to GyPSii’s little known business model, which is all about indexing the world around us for the delivery of relevant advertising and services we can’t yet imagine. (I hadn’t had the pleasure of meeting with GyPSii at the time I wrote the book, but you can bet it has a top-notch spot in the 2010 Guide!)

Shortly before GyPSii launched its iPhone app, Vanessa Vigar, Head of Corporate Communications, invited me to company HQ in Amsterdam to connect with Dan Harple, GyPSii CEO. The interview was a meeting of the minds, which I have produced as a two-part podcast here on MSG. (Thanks again for reaching out, Vanessa!)

In Part 1, Dan gives me the high-level view of what GyPSii is (and isn’t), presents his no-holds-barred view of the real market for location services, and walks me through the value propositions (for people and GyPSii partners) that are intertwined with the company mission to make sure all of us are out on our bikes searching the planet, instead of on our PCs searching the Internet.

Listen to the podcast. [17:00]

For background on  GyPSii and a review of some of the recent announcements (deals with handset manufacturers, impressive traction in China, and the newly-released Open Experience API), check out my bnetTV interview with Shane Lennon, Senior Vice President, Marketing & Product Development at GyPSii, in the MSG video jukebox (located in the right-hand sidebar).

Audio interview excerpts:

MOBILITY: Despite the fact we have mobile services, we still tend to experience life and everything around us in a sit-down, do-nothing mode. “Everyone’s connected now, but our lives are developing a kind of virtual feel to them that I think is thin.” Dan and his team (mostly ex-Netscape) developed GyPSii to “record your life in a digital way, so wherever you are you can record what you’re doing and you can share that with communities, your friends, your family.” The newly-released module, called GyPSii Connect, automatically connects people with their other social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter.

LOCATION: Is LBS the next big thing? Maybe – but our definition of it is limiting our ability to break new ground. A problem is our outmoded paradigm. “To create innovation you don’t look in the rear view mirror.” GyPSii does location, “but it’s not all we do.”

SEARCH: A primary function of GyPSii is PlaceMe. From the website: “PlaceMe – allows you to create a point of interest (POI) and associate a current or previous image, video, audio and text, URL and reference the POI to your current or last geo-location, categorize, tag and describe the point of interest and submit to the server in real time to a personal or publicly designated folder in your MyPlaces (your record of points of interest).” Put simply, every time you do [perform] a PlaceMe, you create a searchable place on the Internet. GyPSii has put this function at the center of a new search paradigm. It’s all about “a much deeper level of relevancy which isn’t about a virtual world, it’s about a real world.  So, when I search, I don’t want to really search what other websites people clicked on, I want to search other places and experiences that people had.”

PEOPLE-POWERED SEARCH: Google search is about PageRank, an algorithm that, like a popularity contest, pushes what the mass market says is cool. But there’s more to life than following the crowd. GyPSii relies on people to make results relevant and potentially more valuable to us. It’s all about “building an alternative global Internet search index.” As Dan puts it: “I think the only way you build that index is if you empower millions of people to build it.  So, that’s natural, it’s organic, it came from real people, I just think that’s a cooler index to have.” After all, it’s people and their opinions that matter most. “When I search, I don’t really care how many people clicked on a restaurant’s website, it doesn’t matter to me.  What matters is did my friends go there, did people in my community go there, who goes there and what do they think of it.”

MOBILE ADVERTISING: Part 2 focuses on this topic – but we do get a view into the business models Dan imagines can emerge when you combine people-powered search and real world experience. “I think the future of advertising is about a much deeper level of relevance and context and location.”

iPHONE: It’s game-changing – but the barrier to entry for that coolness may not be so high after all. “As a developer, you can make much cooler apps on the iPhone right now, but I would suggest that other companies who build browsers, [such as] Opera and Microsoft, will create a much better mobile browser. But I think the barrier to [an] enhanced user experience is more at an operating system level. (Translated: Symbian is clunky and needs to get better, for example.) As far as advertising goes, Dan isn’t jumping on the iPhone bandwagon. “I’d say the amount of ads served in the mobile market right now isn’t yet quite material.  It’s material when it’s at scale, and, for all the love of Apple and the coolness of the iPhone, it’s not a product that’s had scale.”

GYPSII iPHONE APP: (Note: This interview was conducted prior to launch, so no deep details.) What could Dan say at the time: It does more and looks cooler (because it’s an iPhone, of course!). But look under the hood and the iconography of GyPSii (the visual vocabulary), which is core to what GyPSsii is, will stay the same. “Practically, what this means is when GyPSii rolls out on the iPhone, it will reflect the next-gen – and we don’t call it UI any more, we call it UX – user experience.  So, our next-gen UX will be on the iPhone and then that’s already in build processes on all of our other device families.

OPENEXPERIENCE API (OEx):  Just call it the “window into the management of your social fabric and your interaction with people, not just on GyPSii but on other social networks.  It’s the management of all your social media, how you record it, how you share it, and how you search for it.” What does it mean for partners? In a word: Speed. “If you think what Facebook Connect has done for Facebook, it’s a similar thing for GyPSii; it allows us to get integration with other partners fast.” As Dan puts it: “The way to think about this is if we had to go and do a custom build of GyPSii on every device, no company could afford to do that, there are too many devices coming and they’re coming too quickly….So, we essentially built a core platform and an API around that platform which drives all the experiences you see in GyPSii, so then all those key functions can be called out of that API.” The OEx is at the heart of a recent deal with Samsung. “They’re launching their own social media location-based portal, and essentially it’s GyPSii, it’s using the GyPSii back-end and using our open experience API to make all that happen.”

In Part 2 – Dan and I take a look at mobile advertising, which is live in countries such as China. We also deep dive into the details of the Gypsii business model, one Dan calls the waterfall model, and we dissect the GyPSii mobile search paradigm, one based on a new concept Dan calls PlaceRank.

Special thanks to GyPSii for hosting my podcast until I can work out the details to upload my content to the cloud and make it avaiable to MSG readers via iTunes. It’s work in progress and coming soon!

Tags: Apple, bnetTV, Facebook, geotagging, Google, iPhone, Location-based services, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Internet, Mobile Marketing, Mobile Search, Mobile Social Networks, podcast, Twitter

This entry was posted on Monday, May 25th, 2009 at 10:13 pm and is filed under Mobile Advertising, Mobile Search, Mobile Social Networking, Personalization, Podcasts, Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.