Gur Kimchi, Principal Architect, Microsoft Virtual Earth

Gur provided a lot of demonstrations of existing and upcoming features from the Virtual Earth teams:

One of the interesting tidbits he mentioned was how Microsoft had acquired Caligari, a 3d modeling and animation company to expand defining realworld understanding within the virtual mapping apps. He provided a lot of examples of how Virtual Earth understands 3d projections from flat map data and can even plot streets beneath buildings in satellite/aerial photos. Unlike some top apps like Google Maps, Virtual Earth even corrects the Escher Effect in these pix.

According to him, the platform is capable of “indexing everything in the world”. He was referring to the real, physical, locative world, and mashing up other, virtual information with it.

He also stated that the key to monetization of it was to eventually create “deeply contextual advertising” which is highly relevant to the consumer — this is the key to ad effectiveness. “Almost mind-reading,” as he put it.

Regarding the mapping/display of sensitive security subjects, Gur stated that “…we never show critical infrastructure. The CIA tells us what to avoid (in America).” He also spends a lot of time meeting with government representatives from around the world in order to designate and avoid such sensitive areas.

The demonstrations were impressive and almost overwhelming. He showed a lot of content from Photosynth which we’ve seen before elsewhere, but it was still intriguing in the context of how it might be applied to search interfaces for mapping. Greg Sterling suggested that the audience might find it a struggle to understand how all the eye-candy could apply to search marketing, but I think it was still interesting to everyone to hear opinions from Gur, since he clearly is something of a visionary in the future of innovative mapping and user interfaces.

Yahoo! Local’s Frazier Miller

It was very interesting to hear the take on local & mobile from one of Yahoo! Local’s top thought leaders. It was obvious that Frazier has a very tight grip on understanding what motivates consumers and where the trends may be headed in local/mobile evolution.

Some highlights of Frazier’s presentation included:

• Mention of how Yahoo Answers has incorporated a local component;
• How SearchMonkey could provide more compelling listings in SERPs;
• Need of users to be able to easily search government sites;
• Heavy interest at Yahoo in Events, which is why they purchased Upcoming in late ‘05;
• They consider Local Product Search to be the “holy grail” of local search;
• The convergence of Local and Social is compelling, although Yahoo feels it’s not yet been adequately addressed and there are needs for managing privacy considerations in the way that it ultimately gets implemented;
• The “hyper-local” trend is perhaps getting filled out by a number of niche players;
• Geotargeting will provide the next acceleration of ROI in advertising;
• Educated the audience on the “ROBO” acronym: “research online, buy offline”;

Frazier’s candidness was refreshing when he spoke openly about other companies’ services which he found to be highly compelling for local work. These included:

• Walkscore.com - a service which helps users decide how difficult a walking route could be — something that’s highly useful to many during these gas-crunch times.
• Yelp - the highly-popular business rating and directory site;
• Craigslist - the well-known classifieds site;
• Facebook - the growing social networking site;

What Yahoo! may be working on for the future:

• Better geotargeting capabilities for advertising;
• Expanding Ad Exchanges and Ad Networks - “making the local ad market”;
• Increasing merchant awareness — channel resellers are transforming sales teams to educate merchants about online marketing. Some of these include major IYPs such as Yellowpages.com, Yellowbook.com, and Idearc Superpages.com.

Frazier stated that there are reasons to believe that mobile search marketing may finally be arriving, despite past predictions of critical mass that were off-base. The devices and hardware have evolved, with Moore’s law reducing down the cost of the products. Connectivity rates and badwith have improved. And devices and carriers are both opening up for app developers, with the technology getting beyond just SMS.

Yahoo’s Blueprint platform for mobile is different from Google’s Android, and may be superior in terms of easing development. Yahoo’s motto for this is “write once, run anywhere”.

Based on Frazier’s presentation, I think it will be interesting to continue to watch what Yahoo! is developing and deploying in the Local Search space.

I’ll be speaking on the subject of “Managing a Local/Mobile Search Marketing Campaign” on the morning of the first day. There are also a number of other interesting presentations that I plan to attend, covering subjects such as Local SEO, Pay-Per-Call Advertising, Mobile SEO, Mobile Advertising, and LoMo.

For readers of Natural Search Blog, we’re able to offer a conference discount of 20% off the full registration price if you sign up now. Just go to the SMX Local & Mobile 07 registration, and enter our discount code:

SMX20OffLM

Google’s advent of Universal Search has propelled content from a number of search verticals into the main results page, including content from Local Search in many cases. This development has opened the eyes of many marketers to the fact that businesses with local components really need to specifically target their content to appear optimally under this new paradigm.

Also, there have been a few evolutionary leaps in the development of cell phones and other mobile devices, as shown by the rapid success of the iPhone. Industry analysts have predicted that usage of mobile services in the US is likely on it’s way to becoming far more popular and ubiquitous than ever before — a situation not unlike the introduction and rise in popularity of the internet itself.

Learning about Local Search, Mobile Search, and the combination of the two (”LoMo”) is going to be vital for effective broad-spectrum interactive marketing. The SMX Local & Mobile Conference will be a great opportunity for getting ahead of the curve and discovering the latest information.