Here’s Quova’s description of the innovations:

“Quova’s newly added patent describes a method for determining the geographic location of an Internet user based upon combining trace routes, user registration information, host names with textual patterns that reveal geolocation information and Internet Service Provider (ISP) service area information. These trace routes describe the pathways by which data moves through the Internet. Each node or ‘hop’ in the trace route is identified by an IP address. These interconnected nodes can be used to recreate the topology of the Internet. Each geolocation can then be assigned to these IP addresses in order to determine the location of each node, up to and including the end user’s IP address and the geolocation of that end user.”

I previously have written about Quova in my extensive article, “Geolocation: Core To The Local Space & Key to Click-Fraud Detection“. My earlier description of them reads practically as an endorsement – something I very rarely do at all. But, I think what I wrote is pretty accurate, overall. Quova is considered pretty much best-in-class of the companies providing geolocation data mapping, because of their greater variety of geo data sources, their more sophisticated mapping methods, and because they actually submit to a third-party audit for data accuracy.

As I’ve described previously, there are quite a number of providers out there which try to associate endusers’ IP addresses with geographic location coordinates, but I’ve always been a really huge skeptic of the overall error rates associated with this type of data. In the past there were estimates that geolocation error rates could be anywhere from 50% to 85%! For marketers attempting to precisely target ads and content to geographically cohesive groups, such high error rates were far too high to be acceptable from my P.O.V. five years ago.

For all geolocation data companies, error rates increase as the geotargeting level becomes more precisely granular. In other words, most of these companies likely have very high accuracy for country-level geolocation capability, lesser for regional targeting such as state or province level, less than that precision for city-level, and lowest accuracy for ZIP-code or postal-code level targeting.

I’ve also been highly skeptical in the past because there’s a low ability to actually test how accurate a given company’s data may be — most testing is based on sample sets which I’ve suspected may be highly skewed towards more accurate geolocations. Anecdotal stories of erroneous geotargeting have come up repeatedly throughout the industry, while there are few ways of calculating actual error, and geolocation data companies reiterate unverifiable claims of accuracy rates.

However, innovations such as found in this patent awarded to Quova help in improving the stature of the whole industry, and really help to reassure marketers and security administrators that the data is solid. I can critique testing methodologies for auditing the data, but I get less strident about it when I can see that the methods by which the data was arrived at are improving and are far less prone to error rates.

Since increasing amounts of advertising targeting are being based upon geotargeting, and since so much of our security screening of PPC ads’ click-through results are being based upon geolocation data as a major component of analysis, I think it behooves companies to use very high-quality data. Quova’s historically high price tags have caused some to look for cheap and easy alternatives, but people should be very careful about the methods used by those other companies. In many, many cases, the cheaper alternatives equate with far less sophisticated methodologies, which also equate with higher error rates. And, auditing undoubtedly also adds overhead to the pricetag, but using data that has zero third-party checks will open companies to greater liability.

Most of the cheap companies are using only ARIN network data which has a lower accuracy level than if it was further enhanced by data from major ISPs and network tracerouting.

Except for the simplest applications which do not involve security and fraud analysis, I think that Quova’s industry-leading patents in geolocation make it so that other geodata companies’ products cannot realistically compete in this arena.

The demo product is an HTML 5 applicaion built using the Google Web Toolkit. Wave is being released as an open source product. Its open platform encourages developers to build other Wave clients, extensions and embed waves in other web pages and platforms. The product is characterised by the 3P’s namely product, platform and protocol.

The brothers Jens and Lars Rasmussen from Google Australia are the creators of this incredible product. Their previous creation was Google Maps which is now the defacto standard for online mapping of geographical locations. This has taken a good couple of years to develop and bring it to its current form. Jens stressed this fact to the audience – You must remember that all this is happening in your browser.

A “wave” contains equal parts document and conversation where people can simultaneously work and communicate together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps and more.

How Google Wave Works

You create a wave and add contacts to it. All the contacts on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, videos, gadgets and feeds from other sites on the web. All members can edit the wave directly and also insert replies. You can see all the edits in real time as the changes are made to the wave by others.You can be running a Firefox browser and your friend can be on Safari browser. You can add as many contacts as you want.

The playback feature is a very powerful feature. If a new contact joins the wave, she can see the collaboration and communication that has taken place in a certain form at that point of time. By clicking playback, she can see how the whole wave has evolved from the beginning to the point of time she joined the wave. This is a very powerful feature especially when teams are working on different parts of the same project document.

Some of the really cool features are:

• Google Wave offers plain vanilla type email conversation where you can send emails to contacts you choose to.
• Instant messaging where unlike the typical IM chat, you see the message – Sarah is typing
  before you get to see the message once Sarah is done typing, in a wave, you see the chat transferred character by character in real time
• Use playback to see how the wave has evolved to its current shape
• Drag and drop attachments, say photos, into the wave from your desktop and everyone else on the wave can see it almost instantly
• API for embedding your wave to web pages such as a blog
• Wave can be embedded in social media sites like Orkut
• You can participate in a wave from your mobile phone
• Editing of the wave in real time and edits appear instantly with markups denoting the different edits
• Ability to send a private message to a particular contact which others cannot see
• Teams working on a project document can collaborate in real time and communicate simultaneously when working on it

Google Wave can be viewed as a platform with a rich collection of open APIs. This allows developers to build new extensions that can work with waves and also embed waves in other web services.

The Google Wave Federation Protocol is the basis for storing and sharing waves with the all important live concurrency mechanism which allows edits to be viewed in real time across contacts and services. This protocol is designed such that any user’s wave services can communicate with each other and with the Google Wave service. This is going to be achieved by making the Google Wave protocol code open source.

An excellent video on the Google Wave demo by the development team will give you a great idea of the amazing features that have been built into it.

Google is encouraging the developer community to create some cool apps that can be incorporated into the Google Wave before it is made public. You can sign up at http://wave.google.com to be notified of the release date when Google Wave is launched as a public product.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior search marketing consultant at Netconcepts, our Auckland search engine optimisation company in New Zealand. He also posts regularly to the Online Marketer blog at www.onlinemarketer.co.nz

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(Try out their local search engine to view businesses and ratings.)

Praized was built by some local search veterans from the Yellow Pages Group, and it’s already managed to nab small dribbles of acclaim — most recently, it was named a finalist in Red Herring’s Canada’s Top 50 Canada award which recognized the year’s most promising private technology ventures in Canada.

While it may be a Canadian company, the technology itself is nationality-neutral and compelling enough to be attracting interest and usage from U.S. developers and companies as well. Indeed, Praized has loaded United States directory listings into their database as well as Canadian businesses.

With the company founded by Yellow Pages Group expatriots, it’s no surprise that they have a formal partnership with that company. Praized has also set up formal partnerships with U.S. companies Yellowbook and Localeze as well.

Funded by a mere $1,000,000 seed round by Garage Technology Ventures Canada (and that was in Canadian dollars, right?), the company appears to have achieved a trifecta necessary to set it up for success: (1) compelling/useful product; (2) “vision” – management who *get* how to target a non-saturated market niche; and (3) partnerships with the sorts of companies that can help drive success faster.

Okay, so Praized isn’t really a paradigm-shifting new technology, I know. However, it marries up a few different pieces of functionality smoothly and simply, and targets a local search / social media niche that could drive rapid adoption and distribution. It looks to me like Digg for local search.

(Greg Sterling previously reported about Praized – check out his post on it.)

Will it be a SecondLife killer, as some have suggested? So far, no, since it doesn’t have one huge planet or room for interacting with everyone as SecondLife does.

But this is the first baby-step Google has taken into VR, and we can expect them to evolve it further, particularly if the service proves popular. I haven’t tried it out just yet, but the feature descriptions include adding VR rooms to webpages, pulling photos and vids into the VR environments, and tying it closely to Google Talk – Google’s chat service.

Check out their demo video and Google’s blog post announcing it:

This new feature will be well worth watching, I believe.

WhitePages states on their blog that they’ll use Snapvine’s technology to provide their users with free, private voicemail boxes. In addition, WhitePages will roll out other features such as email and SMS services.

I think this signals that WhitePages.com will be pursuing community development as an ongoing strategy to maintain and build their traffic. This could be a really strong strategy — encouranging community engagement could drive up usage and associated ad revenues considerably for the residential listings directory. WhitePages.com also offers yellow pages directory service through a partnership with Idearc’s Superpages.com.

Considering the rise of Twitter and other mobile phone services, VOIP applications like Snapvine could be poised to be the next big thing.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that the deal likely comes in below previous valuations for Snapvine.

It’s really great and progressive that such a large, publicly-traded company such as Google would release control of its considerable intellectual property rights and allow KML to be used by anyone.

Google’s LatLong Blog also crows a bit about how KML is “the HTML of geographic content”, and explains that KML is no longer owned by Google, but is now administrated by the OGC.

The article fails to mention the last time this sad concept was foisted on the world. Remember the company, Digital Convergence, with their various “CueCat” devices that allowed people to do this exact same thing?

The CueCat was developed in the earlier days of the internet, way back in the dot-com craze, and it was one of the bigger dot-bombs, sucking air and falling flat almost before any of the other dot-combs bit the dust. As recently as 2006, the Wall Street Journal called the CueCat one of the worst gizmos and bad business ideas of the internet.

Of course, I might be a bit full of hubris myself if I didn’t acknowledge that sometimes it takes a few trials and errors to make an idea commercially viable. Perhaps having this functionality usable from a cellphone makes it easier to adopt, and Google is certainly one company that might be able to make something work if no one else could. Silicon Alley Insider notes that this is apparently popular in Japan, but one still can’t escape the sensation that there’s perhaps some hype machine pushing up the appearance of relative popularity, similar to the defunct version of the idea that previously was foisted upon hypnotized investors here in the states.

The question remains: as a consumer, why would I want to scan (or snap a pic of) a barcode in a news ad I’m reading to be transported on my wireless device to the website? Is a wireless device really going to show me more info than a print ad could?!? The circumstances where I’d be interested in doing this are extremely rare, I’d suspect. This new incarnation may have lower hassle factor involved than the CueCat, but the issues are still essentially the same from my perspective. Bad idea.

My old company experimented with the CueCat product way back then, and I was immediately astonished that anyone thought this would be a good or viable idea for print ads — I recall being dumbfounded in the very first meeting I was pulled into in order to begin integrating with the thing, while others around me seemed to’ve drunk the Koolaid. Within a year or two, the Digital Convergence company began circling the drain as it was destined to do, and I was called in to vet their tech and internet assets for possible acquisition at a discount.

When the Digital Convergence company went belly-up, taking with it investment dollars from a great many individuals and major corporations, the stink was so bad that the founder, J. Jovan Philyaw, changed his name to J. Hutton Pulitzer and his personal website was launched with the company and product name pretty thoroughly sanitized from it.

I’m surprised the Silicon Alley Insider doesn’t remember this whole sequence and how stunningly bad the barcode concept was, but perhaps it didn’t make as much impression on Silly Valley, since Digital Convergence was a Dallas company.

John Hanke, Director of Google Maps & Earth is quoted, saying, “We’re pleased to be partnering with Magellan to provide users with detailed, relevant local information while on the road. Magellan devices are powerful, interactive tools for navigation and discovery that serve as a cutting-edge platform for Google’s robust local search capabilities.”

Magellan’s Maestro Elite 5340+GPRS is expected to be available in March, 2008 at around $1299.

At the SMX Local & Mobile conference back in October, the CTO for Google Earth & Google Maps, Michael Jones, stated that in order to get new applications embedded in automobile consoles, it required about ten years of advanced planning due to the car industry’s very lengthy development cycle. This new deal between Google and Magellan would indicate that Google has found at least one way to bypass that lengthy planning cycle and the car industry itself in order to get search integrated closer with drivers.

Of course, Google Maps has already integrated closely with BMWs in Europe and gas station pumps in America.

Yellow pages providers and other mapping services have been pushing to mash up their content with GPS service providers for a while now. One big kid on the block, OnStar, partnered with MapQuest for these types of services back in June of 2007, for instance.

One important question that this news release doesn’t mention is how the Magellan devices are necessarily sending users’ geolocation information to Google in order for them to provide up the local search results. Since the Magellan service involves a subscription, one wonders whether the info Magellan sends to Google is restricted to only the geolocation associated with a generic ID number, or whether more personally-identifiable information is included.

Behavioral ad targeting is nothing new on the internet, and I easily recall it being offered in one form or another as far back as about 1999. In fact, 24/7 Real Media currently offers behavioral targeting through their ad network as just one case in point. So what’s new with this incarnation is the way in which NebuAd collects data to base the targeting upon. NebuAd’s innovative twist on behavior targeting is based upon monitoring individuals’ internet browsing habits through their ISP, essentially seeing all the sites and pages that a user visits.

Other online behavioral targeting models are likely based upon ad networks cookieing users on all the sites where the ad network runs ads. This may leave a lot to be desired, since users are likely visiting a great many sites outside of the ad network, leaving them a little in the dark as to what the users may be up to currently — if a user only visited one or two ad network sites, there could be insufficient context to really make any sort of behavioral assumptions. NebuAd’s data collection method may provide them with the ability to more accurately target ads for far more site visitors.

NebuAd has already partnered with a few ISPs like CenturyTel to get access to their subscribers’ surfing data. NebuAd uses a sort of network appliance hardware to sniff out the sites/pages that users are requesting through their ISP’s network operating centers.

The few weak links I see in NebuAd’s approach are (1) the sensitivity associated with online privacy, (2) their dependence upon persuading sufficient numbers of major ISPs to cooperate with them, and (3) users coming in from ISPs which are not data partners of NebuAd, making them harder to profile.

On the privacy issue, NebuAd claims they do not generate a database that could be leaked or subpoenaed, since they encrypt user-identifiable data like IP addresses in a one-way hash. It all sounds good, but as consumers we just have to trust them that this is all handled well, and it only takes one server to be misconfigured and IP data starts getting logged.

The subpoena bit is just PR-spin, too, since a government agency or lawyer can still hit them with a subpoena to fish for anything that might accidentally be there.

Just a few years ago, DoubleClick bought Abacus Direct, intending to mashup online browsing with offline purchase habits in order to enable greater behavioral targeting. There was such intense public outcry over privacy concerns that DoubleClick felt compelled to halt the integration of the Abacus data. So, it nearly doesn’t matter if NebuAd does safeguard privacy well enough — if people are creeped out by having ads appear which seem to know what they’re up to, they might lash out at the advertiser, the ad network, and maybe even their ISPs.

On the second issue, will NebuAd get enough ISPs to partner up with them? They’re apparently already partnered with a number of ISPs, thought they won’t say who. This makes one suspect that perhaps those ISPs could be keeping the behavioral profiling a secret from their subscribers — something that would appear to run against the NebuAd pro-privacy stance.

NebuAd says that they require ISPs to allow users to opt-out of the profiling, but ISPs frequently bury subscribers under reams of privacy terms and conditions fineprint to the point where few subscribers can actually figure out what’s done with their data.

Many users are browsing the internet from work or school, and I suspect that corporate and educational networking departments will be unlikely to participate by providing NebuAd with their users’ data. So, there could be a substantial number of users that NebuAd will be unable to profile and target.

Still, all things considered, NebuAd may have built a very compelling business proposition — they could be positioning themselves to eventually be acquired — they’d make a very attractive advertising component if coupled with various other targeting technologies like geotargeting, demographic targeting, keyword targeting, contextual advertising, etc.

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It’s not all that surprising that Verizon might do this, since they oppose net neutrality, but for users like myself, this is highly undesirable. I’ve been highly complimentary about Verizon’s FiOS service, because I’ve had excellent speed and high quality from it. I work from home providing expertise around internet technologies, so it’s vital that I be able to clearly experience the internet just as the majority of the rest of internet users out there, so having Verizon meddling with what’s delivered up to me is not cool.

If you all recall, another company did something quite similar to this back in 2003: Verisign previously did something quite similar when they abruptly launched their “Site Finder” service which intercepted all queries to mistyped/nonexistent .COM and .NET domain names and redirected users to a similar sort of search results page that they controlled. Verisign’s action was heavily criticized for interfering with many systems’ processes which expect incorrect domain requests to error out, and VeriSign agreed to suspend the service after ICANN pressured them to halt it.

Now, Verizon’s action isn’t quite as serious, but it’s the very same sort of thing, and while it doesn’t impact the entire internet, it does impact a great many of us who work from home or do hobby programming of various sorts. It’s a bit too little, too late to point out that users can opt out of this, too.

Now, I have my IE browser configged such that it uses a particular service when auto-correcting for this sort of thing, but I don’t have this set up in FireFox, and in that browser I’m getting that Verizon page.

Verizon is making money off of ads delivered on that search results page, so this was intentionally done to their already-paying subscribers in order to increase profits. Unfortunately, a great many of us do not want this sort of “assistance” when browsing the internet, and we get irritable when companies are aggressively inserting themselves between us and the normal process of interacting with the internet.

By the way – for one mistyped domain I did, it appeared that InfoSpace was powering the search results. For another, it was Yahoo! powering the search. I’d suggest that neither of those companies should associate themselves with this sort of business. InfoSpace results:

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Verizon: not cool! I shouldn’t have to go in and opt-out of this sort of thing, and you should’ve notified me in advance before interfering with my internet access. Are you using the same software that the Chinese goverment uses to control their citizen’s internet access?

Verizon has tried to fight off net neutrality through propaganda, issuing statements like that of Peter Davidson, Verizon’s senior vice president for federal government relations:

“…Net Neutrality – better named Net Regulation – is trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist…”

Um…. they’re just not convincing me with stuff like what they’ve done in this example.