A Social Net You Can Bring Out to the Bar

By Alice Z. Cuneo - Published: December 17, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO (AdAge.com) -- Want to know how long the line is outside your favorite club on a busy Saturday night? Or the guy-to-girl ratio at a bar before you pay the cover?
That's the promise of BuzzD, a new local-search/networking service from mobile pioneer Nihal Mehta. "It's the next generation of the mobile internet," said Mr. Mehta, who founded text-messaging company Ipsh and sold it in 2005 to Omnicom Group in one of the first holding-company mobile acquisitions.

The service is initiated through text messaging and gives users the lowdown on social venues in real time from their peers. Sending a message brings the user to a mobile website with friends' critiques, ratings of drinks and other information on social venues.

Partnerships
BuzzD launches this week in partnership with Flavorpill, a website that lists cultural events in major cities. Flavorpill Mobile initially will be available in six cities: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami and London. BuzzD also has partnered with another guide publisher, Time Out.

Helio is expected to be the first carrier to offer BuzzD, but Mr. Mehta said he plans to make it available on all the nation's major carriers.

Nokia's Nseries is sponsoring the launch. "Nokia looks at the mobile device as more than a device to make phone calls," said Camilla Pagliarolia, communications manager, Nokia U.S. The Flavorpill and BuzzD combination "uses the phone as a creative platform. It's a good fit for us," she said.

Generating revenue
BuzzD works without information about a user's location but eventually will add a GPS, Mr. Mehta said. While there is evidence that popular location-based services, such as mapping applications, are generating good revenue for carriers, it's still unclear whether location-based mobile social networks will do the same.

The Walt Disney Co. shut down its branded phone that allowed parents to locate their children. Boost Mobile said 171,402 subscribers use its Loopt service, which allows young adults to locate friends. Sprint, provider of the network for the Disney and Boost Mobile phones, has a similar location service, but a spokesman said Sprint does not share information about the number of subscribers using that service.

Roger Entner, senior VP-communications sector, IAG Research, said he's not sure the idea will work. "If I'm having a bad time, I might take the time [to write a review or critique the scene], but if I'm having a good time, probably not. That sounds like serious work at a time when I'm having fun."

Mr. Mehta said the concept has proven itself with Dodgeball, another mobile social network. "If you're having a good time, you want to connect with your friends," he said.

Digital M&A Trends for 2008

Published: December 17, 2007 - By Abbey Klaassen - AdAge

SIZE MATTERS Especially as more marketers are looking for agencies that can handle their global marketing duties. Need proof? Look at the 1,000-person shop WPP is setting up for Dell. (And it's perhaps no coincidence WPP made several major purchases in 2007, including Schematic, Blast Radius and 24/7 Real Media.) Look for agencies and holding companies to continue to grow in 2008.

INTERNATIONAL INTEREST Thanks to the weak-dollar effect, several industry prognosticators suggest we'll see more international firms looking to snap up American companies. "On a per-employee basis, the U.S. is still a cheap market, as hot as it is," said Michael Seidler, CEO of Madison Alley Ventures.

NEXT-GENERATION AGENCIES Whether you want to call it an aQuantification of the business or an inevitable trend as more money moves to digital, a new crop of agencies rooted in search or digital creative are trying to expand into other areas and create a new breed of agency. AKQA, with private-equity investment, has been aggressive in this space. Also watch for the formerly search-centric iCrossing and 360i.

ANALYTICS WILL BE HOT -- AND EXPENSIVE As more marketers laser in on return on investment, expect the value of firms such as Web Trends, CoreMetrics and Omniture, which has been steadily gaining since its mid-2006 IPO, to rise. "It's driven by supply and demand and right now there's not enough really good companies across the sector," said Linda Gridley, president and CEO of Gridley & Co.

MIXED IPO PERFORMANCES Ms. Gridley's firm has tracked new IPOs for several years. She said there were five in the internet business in 2005 and four in 2006, and the share values of all but one have risen. In 2007, performance was mixed -- a trend she expects to continue. "You can get higher returns, but the risk is greater," she said.

THERE'S ALWAYS A BIGGER FISH If it seemed like all the big acquisitions already happened (Google-DoubleClick, Microsoft-aQuantive), think again. Likeliest candidates for giant acquisitions? Those with more than one technology or silo, said John Hawkins, partner at Generation, a coastal venture-capital firm. He said AOL is a great example of this philosophy -- even with all its 2007 acquisitions, people are already wondering where it will be when 2008 ends.

COMMERCE IS BIG If investments in commerce and transactional companies seem unfashionable, think again, advises Ms. Gridley. "They are at the heart of data centric and consumer-behavior-driven marketing."

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS At the onset of 2007, would you ever have guessed Microsoft would own an ad agency? "Ten years ago you had offline agencies buying online agencies," said Mr. Hawkins. "Now you have tech companies coming into the space. ... Tech companies, ad agencies and ad networks -- they're all coming together."

VERTICAL AD NETWORKS Expect media companies to continue to invest in this space, either acquiring or building out their own vertical ad networks. The idea behind the trend: While a magazine or TV net might have great reach in their specialized offline space, it's difficult to garner that scale online -- so they seek to aggregate and sell related sites.

AD-NETWORK CONSOLIDATION

Then again, there are too many ad networks, said Mr. Seidler. This sector has seen astronomical premiums but having too many players negates the advantage of networks: scale. He suggests high-margin rich media networks and those with deep analytic backbones will grow more expensive while the price of commodity networks with lower margins will fall.