Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Tasso Roumeliotis, CEO of Safely (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I think I agree with you. You are saying that Groupon is the most significant. Groupon – and the others in that category, such as LivingSocial – is the more significant innovation in location-based coupon services in the recent generation.

Tasso Roumeliotis: Yes, exactly.

SM: What do you see as the impact of the intersection of social media and location-based services?

TR: There are three major developments , I would say . . . two categories, three companies, if you will. One is, if I go chronologically, Google launched Google Attitude as an extension of Google Maps. You can place your friends on the map and see where your friends are at all times. The next pioneering service was definitely Foursquare, which did an incredible job of bringing fun engagement with game mechanics, and the  serendipity that they bring has added magic to the service. And then Facebook with Places built on top of what Foursquare had done, without the rewards. I would say check-in and person locator are the two categories of social. They’re interesting categories. Monetization is going to be tough there because a lot of the monetization would have to come from retailers, and retailers are already doing customer acquisition – and trying to do retention as well – through companies like Groupon and LivingSocial. Those two entities, coupons, and the check-in and person locator, would need to fit in well together.

SM: Are there any other broad areas in location-based services  we have not discussed?

TR: We talked about personal security. We talked about navigation. Navigation, by the way, is in many ways an extension of local search: I’m looking for a place and I need directions to get there. That’s the way Google is viewing it. That’s why they’re offering their navigation free. They want to make sure that they’re also the source for the result of the local search. Those are the major areas.

SM: What do you see as the car component of this? One of the dynamics of the car industry is that auto makers are starting to put more capable computers in dashboards. Where do you see that trend going?

TR: Well, there are a couple things. One is the penetration of modern cars comes at us at a much slower rate than a cell phone. The average person replaces a cell phone after 18 months. The average lifetime of a car is, I don’t know, 15 or 20 years. So, the cell phone is replaced at ten times the rate of a car. You can make the cars faster and better, but the point is, that system that you’re plugging in there is probably going to be an antiquated system in 10 years when the car still has half its useful life left.

[There’s a] natural slowness of adoption of these things because of the replacement cycle and the fact that people are buying third-party navigation systems. Android and your iPhone can do a lot of this stuff already. They can do navigation, or you could buy one of these $1,500 add-on navigation services to your car. In terms of connection, you already have connection with a big screen on your phone. I think there’s potential for the car industry, and a lot of these discussions we’re having should be on connecting to your phone and adding safety.

One of the key, what I’ll call, services on the car that has big potential is what’s called the ODB2 port, which is a port underneath your steering wheel. It’s a standard interface. When your car goes in for repair, it’s what they use to get all the information and diagnostics. The ODB2 port has a lot of rich information that could be used for a variety of things. You can see how the car is doing. You can see how fast the car is going, and you can feed that information to a phone, perhaps, and that’s the only thing that can capture the information. You can do things like determine how long you’ve driven, how many miles you’ve driven or where someone has gone, because you can get the GPS from the phone. I believe this telematics device that fits into this port under the car – and which is in every car built since I believable 1996 – has the potential to make an impact on the insurance industry.

I see the insurance industry [changing] with a lot of the mobile safety stuff we’re doing, such as no texting while driving, and GPS and location connectivity. That, tied with the ODB2 port and the insurance industry, means there will going to be new business models that come out of it.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Tasso Roumeliotis, CEO of Safely
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