The problem with a really, really great idea is that nobody quite knows quite what to do with it.

Take television, for example.  Here’s a quote from TIME Magazine, Feb 22, 1926:

“In London, a concern called Television Ltd. obtained licenses to retail the ‘televisor,’ a radio device invented by John L. Baird of Glasgow that permits ‘looking in’ as well as listening in. Broadcasting from a televisor station in London was to begin at once.“

The television.  The device so many of us can’t live without today.  The device many people spend hours in front of each day.  But when it was first invented, many people didn’t know what to make of it.  ”A radio with pictures?”  In fact, early television shows mainly consisted of a newscaster sitting in front of the camera, reading a script.  It was basically just that: Radio, with pictures.  Nobody had figured out how to take advantage of this new medium.

Contrast that with television today:

We’ve probably gone about 98% up on the value curve in terms of exploiting the television medium.  It’s doubtful we’ll see any major innovations until the technology changes again (3-D TV’s, etc).

PointAbout is in the same position as TV was in the 1930’s.

What we are enabling by mobilizing brands is an entirely new channel of communication between the user and the brand.

For the first time, a company’s website knows exactly who and where the user is the moment they go to the site.

That’s a really big deal.

For example, when you walk into a Walmart today, you don’t visit Walmart.com as you’re walking in – there’s no reason to do so.  It wouldn’t make sense.

But what if Walmart.com wasn’t the main corporate site, but instead it was a site that was personalized and individualized for YOU.  What if, when you were near or in the store, you could interact with your phone to find out whether Walmart had something in stock, or heck for that matter, what if Walmart could invite you to come into the store because Walmart knew you were nearby and knew that you needed to buy toothpaste.

What if, in fact, your phone reminded you that you needed to buy toothpaste.  What if you had forgotten, but Walmart was telling you because you were in the neighborhood?  ”Why not stop in while you’re nearby, after all, you’re right around the corner.”

These ideas are really just scratching the surface of what’s possible with PointAbout.  The web has been blind, but we give it vision.  So for the first time, the web can see you, and see where you are and interact with you on a very personalized level.  And I’m confident that we haven’t even started to figure out how to take advantage of it all.  But if there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that the PointAbout crew will be helping brands figure it out.

Our goal is to get our users to the “How did I live without this?” moment.  But that can be hard to see before-hand.  For example, people lived just fine without cellphones, but can you imagine living without one these days?  Our goal is to accomplish the same thing by overlaying the virtual world over the physical world.  

This video will explain what we mean with a specific example.  Daniel Odio, one of our co-founders, had to get the oil changed in his car.  Now, the real question is, when you’re driving down the street, why don’t you have immediate access to know:

1. What oil change places are around you
2. What each one of them would charge you for an oil change, and
3. (most importantly) Which one of them wants your business the most?

Take a look at the video to see in more details how we’re planning on resolving this issue…

As seen in Potomac Tech Wire today:

o PointAbout Launches iPhone App to Help Voters Find Polling Place

Washington, DC — With the presidential election now less than a week away, DC-basedPointAbout, a developer of mobile applications, said that it has launched a downloadable application for the iPhone that allows voters to find their nearest polling place. The company said that it has taken an existing web service developed by Google and made it location-aware. Now, with one click, users of the company’s ”Get Out To Vote!” application can find the closest voting station to their actual physical location. “Based on an informal poll of friends and colleagues, we’ve realized that many people don’t know where to go to vote on election day,” said the company. PointAbout said that it has made the tool a featured application on the front page of the PointAbout iPhone Application Gallery through Nov. 4.
http://pointabout.wordpress.com/2008/10/28/find-your-nearest-voting-station-on-election-day/

PointAbout just surpassed 100,000 145,000 (update) 426,000 (update) page views and 2,500 5,000 (update) 15,000 (update) users in our first 5 7 (update) 30 (update) days.  We are currently averaging almost 2,000 unique visitors per day, and that number has been increasing daily.

Additionally, we’ve gotten requests from around the world, including the UK and Hong Kong, requesting PointAbout internationally.  For example, here is one person’s request:

“Can I use this appl in Hong Kong?
Sent from my iPhone”

PointAbout is US-Only to date, but we’ll be working on International expansion in 2009.  It’s nice to see the international demand.

PointAbout just released its first private-labeled application, called “DC Alerts”.  This video shows the differences between the regular PointAbout application and the branded version.

The beauty of our branding approach is that it allows your business to quickly & easily “mobilize” your brand across multiple phone platforms, which right now include the iPhone, with BlackBerry and Android in testing, and WindowsMobile, Symbian and others to follow.  We will have BlackBerry released within 2 weeks with other phones rolling out over the next 90 days.

All your business has to do is code to HTML, just like you’ve been doing.  PointAbout takes care of the rest. All of the infrastructure investment you’ve put into your website or web application can be leveraged in the PointAbout application. We pass you the pertinent user information from the phone, including latitude & longitude, city, state & zip, the device ID, accelerometer information, etc.  You can then use this information in your website, which is now “location aware”, because you are sitting inside the PointAbout thin-client springboard.

You also get the added benefit of having the PointAbout Application Gallery included, which vastly increases the stickiness and usefulness of your private-labeled application.  You can filter which applications are included in the Gallery, so complimentary applications can be included to enhance the value of yours.

For more information or to discuss a specific implementation of PointAbout for your business, please Contact Daniel Odio atDaniel.Odio@PointAbout.com or 202.250.3846.

PointAbout featured in Bisnow for its participation in the Deloitte Tech Venture Center panel on mobile advertising.

Click here to view the full Bisnow write-up.  Bisnow writes, “Yesterday morning¸ we rose early to hear about a certain market that’s growing despite the economic downturn: mobile advertising. We joined about 30 others for an executive briefing at the Deloitte Tech Venture Center in McLean, where we learned the number of mobile devices in the U.S. will jump more than 32% next year. You mean there’ll be even more than there are Starbucks?

PointAbout co-founder Daniel Odio and Mobile Posse CEO Jon Jackson. Daniel’s three-month-old startup creates shell mobile applications that use the phone’s GPS to retrieve useful information. They even created a Metrorail app to show your nearest stop and scheduled wait time. (We hope the 2.0 version will help us find an empty seat on the bus.) Jon tells us Mobile Posse is a targetedmobile advertising platform and just inked a deal to carryGaithersburg-based Weather Bug’s info.”

It’s a big day here at PointAbout, as we were just approved through Apple’s Application Store (click here to go to the application - this will open iTunes on your computer).  Now anybody can download PointAbout to their iPhones.

We’ve had over 600 iPhone users download the application in the first 12 hours with no marketing efforts! (yet )  Here are some other stats that are knocking our socks off:

• Over 11,000 page views in the PointAbout “thin-client” native app in first 12 hours
• An average 12.82 page views per visit
• A bounce rate of just 5.79%
• Average time on the PointAbout thin client of over four minutes
• The top applications are “cheapest gas near you” and “weather in my area” 

App store link http://appshopper.com/link/pointabout-let-your-favorite-websites-find-you
More info http://appshopper.com/navigation/pointabout-let-your-favorite-websites-find-you

Study the app store images and read the reviews to see if you agree with me that this application could simplify your life and iPhone. Couldn’t you get rid of apps like Where! and similar ones like gas buddy, Starbucks etc? Did you notice you can expand this application for new services and web sites?”

Listen to a complete audio transcript of the event here.  Note – the voice recorder was set to pause during silence so some parts were cut out (so sorry!).

Today Daniel Odio was on Deloitte’s Tech Venture Center panel on mobile marketing, along with Jon Jackson of Mobile Posse, Michael Avon of Columbia Capital, and Kevin Bertram of Distributive Networks.  The panel was kindly hosted by Carl Grant of Cooley Godward Kronish, LLP in lieu of Jason Siegel of Qorvis whose wife went into labor the night before!

Thanks to Ellen Mundell of Deloitte for setting this great panel up.