{"id":43972,"date":"2009-11-18T09:00:49","date_gmt":"2009-11-18T14:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=80216"},"modified":"2009-11-18T09:00:49","modified_gmt":"2009-11-18T14:00:49","slug":"1020-placecast-pins-5m-for-mobile-geo-targeted-marketing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/43972","title":{"rendered":"1020 Placecast Pins $5M for Mobile Geo-targeted Marketing"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\"\"With of an infrastructure of social location information<\/a> just starting to coagulate, the monetization side is raring to go. Since real-time mobile advertising<\/a> is inherently somewhat invasive (and by extension, somewhat creepy), these products end up less groundbreaking than they could be. (Which is OK by me.)<\/p>\n

A new offering from a San Francisco-based company called 1020 Placecast<\/a> — which is announcing today that it’s raised a $5 million Series B — will be trialed with three retailers over the holidays; it uses a double-opt-in relationship built directly between users and their favorite shops. Once users sign up to receive alerts on a phone that has persistent location information (BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Android), they get pinged with marketing messages from that brand every time they enter a “geo-fence” targeted area, as small as a single city block. <\/p>\n

<\/param><\/param><\/param><\/embed><\/object><\/p>\n

Another way to geo-target users is to advertise to them when they’ve checked into a known venue — say, a baseball stadium for a game. Startups like mDialog<\/a> are trying to make this work. To me, that makes a little more sense than waiting for a previously identified customer to wander onto your block. <\/p>\n

1020 Placecast raised the Series B round from Quatrex Capital, Onset Ventures and Voyager Capital; it brings total investment in the 3.5-year-old company to about $10 million. The company makes money by charging brands a set-up fee and then a monthly fee based on number of users. It says its technology is ready and it just needs the cash for marketing and biz dev. <\/p>\n

Though 1020 Placecast is really more of a mobile marketing company, any startup involved in advertising or mobile is pretty psyched about what Google’s bid-up $750 million AdMob buy<\/a> does to its valuation. <\/p>\n

For more on the promise and worry of push-based location-aware mobile advertising, see this panel writeup<\/a> from our Mobilize conference a couple months ago. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/div>\n

\n

<\/a><\/p>\n