More on the Geo Stack

Feb15

by Lawrence Coburn

Bookmark and Share

In one of our favorite Valentine’s Day posts of all time, Chris Dixon posted about the “geo stack” – a model for how to think about the various layers of the geolocation ecosystem.  According to Chris, the stack looks something like this: lat long detection > lat long translation (into venues, addresses, etc.) > user relationship (how to get consumers to share location) > recommendations (tips, reviews, etc.) > social graphs > monetization.  If you haven’t already, please click through and read the whole post – the comments are worth reading as well.

We’ve taken the liberty of trying to visualize this stack with a few tweaks and notes – for instance, we’ve included social graph in the “User Relationship” layer, and example companies who we see as competing at the various layers:

Picture 31 More on the Geo Stack

If you are working on something in the geolocation / social check-in space, you may find it helpful to think about where you fit into this stack, and what you need to do to stake and defend your claim in what is rapidly becoming a very competitive area.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 3:20 pm and is filed under Android, Foursquare, Google, Google Buzz, Gowalla, Laptops, Loopt, Mobile, PlacePop, Twitter, iPhone, location, yelp. 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.

  • alvisbrigis
    Lawrence, I am digging your posts / geoweb thoughts and analysis. Most make it to my delicious account and I tweeted this one.

    The geo-stack is very similar to my view of the geosocial web's emergent and stable layers. I'm not sure the top 3 items necessarily stack hierarchically into layers, but I do view them as distinct meta code or bubbles.

    My main takeaway is the same as your conclusion- it's important to visualize the emerging geosocial web to see where current and near-future endeavors fit in. The situation is so dynamic (a result of geosocial convergence + hard tech infrastructure tipping point) that without accurate models it's very easy to replicate efforts or make bad strategic choices.

    Keep up the awesome posts and best of luck with Double Dutch!
  • I appreciate that Alvis. I hear you on the top three items not really being layers at all. Recommendations and monetization angle can both be user relationship differentiators. For example, the reason a new user might want to start checking in with Yelp as opposed to FS is due to all that great Yelp content. And access to Groupon like deals seems like it would be a nice incentive to check-in.
  • alvisbrigis
    Xactly. It's downright mashup mania! (and only getting crazier with more apps and companies) A new style of agile dev is required in this space + the singular super-focus that Fred Wilson always talks about. That said, the growth will be so huge that there's room for many players.
blog comments powered by Disqus