Continuing with Part 2 of my audio interview with Dan Harple, CEO of GeoSentric, the company behind GyPSii, a digital mobile lifestyle application. But look beneath the hood (and listen in to Part 1 of the series) and GyPSii isn’t just another company jockeying for position in the location-aware mobile social networking space. It’s got its eye on the prize: Using our location, our social graph (because we are members of the GyPSii community), and our judgment to index the world around us. Google may be about organizing the world’s information; GyPSii is about organizing the real world.

What to do with a people-powered, user-generated index of the world out there? Follow in Google’s footsteps and sell advertising on top of it.

As I wrote in my last post, GyPSii has cleverly harnessed PlaceMe, a primary function of GyPSii that allows you to create a point of interest (POI), add your content (image, video, audio, text), add your current or last geo-location, categorize/tag/describe the POI, and submit to the server in real time to a personal or publicly designated folder in your MyPlaces (your record of points of interest).

To get this to Google scale, GyPSii needs a lot of people out there indexing the world with their mobile phones. It’s an ambitious strategy, but not far-fetched. Dan’s forecast models tell him that a company with 7 million users, each doing 2 PlaceMes a month would produce an index in the first year that would be “significantly larger than the Google file system in its first year.” (Dan expects GyPSii to be on “between 80 and 100 million devices in the coming 12 months.”)

There are no stats on active users as a percentage of that total. But GyPSii members tend to be hyperactive when it comes to PlaceMe, creating and tagging “15-20 PlaceMes per month.” Every time GyPSii members do that, they are adding a new indexed item to what the company calls the Osmotic File System (OFS).

Where does mobile advertising come in? It’s already work in progress in China. In fact, GyPSii has a lot of progress to report in China – period. As Dan sees it: “To have an ad-based model, you have to have an audience.” To reach more members (and encourage them to index the world around them) GyPSii’s has this week launched the Java version of its application, with both Chinese and English language support.

The expectation, according to the press release, is that the new app will “appeal to the 70 percent of the 650 million phone owners in China who own Java-based phones.” By way of background, GyPSii is already locally available in China for the major operators China Mobile and China Unicom, for download on compatible Java phones. GyPSii is also available globally across a wide range of devices, including Samsung, Nokia, LG, Apple iPhone, and BlackBerry smartphones.

How does GyPSii plan to make the jump from critical mass to relevant advertising? What is the rev share model for partners (handset makers and carriers) who get on board? And what is the experience for members that use the ExploreMe function to search the world around them (and so trigger the delivery of an ad on their mobile device)? These are just a few of the questions I explored with Dan in this final segment of our podcast interview. (It’s a little longer than my usual interviews, but I felt detail was necessary to fully understand the interplay between search and advertising GyPSii-style.

Excerpts from the interview:

People-powered search: Dan is a great believer (as I am) in social search on mobile. As he pus it: “This is the ultimate user generated content business model ever.” With patented technology in place (as part of the PlaceMe function), the next step is scale. “It’s got to be at scale because if our goal is to build that index, we’ve got to get lots of people to use the app.” Downloading is only part of it. Bundling is the business model that drives results.

Read the rest of this fine article Here.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 5th, 2009 at 7:58 am and is filed under Guest Authors, Mobile, Verticals. 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.