Born innovators...

TELMAP was founded in 2000, as a very small start-up focused on creating technologies around vector data and how it is transferred and rendered on the very small client devices from a server.

In a short time, if you’ll pardon the analogy, they’ve travelled a long way. From an initial staff of four, Telmap has grown to a business employing over 160 people, with offices in Israel, London and New Jersey.

“Telmap is primarily a product and engineering company, so a lot of engineers involved in a lot of innovation,” says Nissim. “We deal with how to make things work that didn’t exist before, so innovation is in our DNA.”

Nissim describes himself as a serial entrepreneur. He has a background in both marketing as well as technology and admits to often having dabbled in the two fields trying to find workable combinations. Indeed, he ran his own marketing agency in New York before moving back to Israel, where after being involved in a number of internet ventures, he founded Telmap.

Besides his technology background, Nissim’s marketing experience allows him to see certain synergies in terms of LBS and how that plays with information services. He has a great deal of interest in the potential for convergence.

Having recently had an opportunity to trial BlackBerry-based Telmap applications, I started to anticipate what might come next. Whereas traditional information services are something you have to pro-actively access, the future could allow us to have information come to us without us having to source it initially - context appropriate and location appropriate information could literally find us.

“Generally speaking for us, it’s all about trying to solve the basic problem of people asking how to get from A to B,” says Nissim. “But the natural progression would be more towards the personalisation aspect of it. Knowing something about the user and then providing content that’s relevant is difficult but also very interesting. I also see it from the context of location based advertising coming into the market.

“There are a couple of ways to look at this, as a problem or as a challenge. The Telmap way is to say, we know the user to the extent that we know where they are. We possibly know a little bit

of profiling info in terms of knowing where they’ve been in the past, knowing about where they travel etcetera. Yet, we don’t know the person per se, we don’t know their name and we don’t know their gender.

“However, from their location or localised preferences, we can attach an advert which means that we bring this user something that is more contextualised and more personalised. So if I saw that you went to a couple of veggie places, now when you’re on your journey I can offer you something along these same lines. I’m bringing to you something that can be basically sponsored by a third party that wants to advertise to you. It’s not a typical advert - it’s a piece of contextualized and important information. There’s a very fine line between the two but if we can get it right then going forward, I think we have a very, very powerful tool in terms of making location based advertising a reality.”

The potential for such a converged model is plain to see and clearly this has implications for the legacy players in information services such as directory publishers. It’s interesting to hear Nissim’s views on the matter.

“To be very honest, they need to move to become part of it, because if they don’t somebody else will. I think there is a huge opportunity here for them, but at the other end there is also a big risk, They’re tapping into what is one of the most difficult markets in the world, what is referred to as the long tail of advertising. We’re talking about very localised shops, businesses who can only reach their customers in their vicinity.”

“There is a huge opportunity here because if the number of phones that have GPS grows year on year - which is a working assumption at Telmap - then it’s going to be the next biggest trend after cameras with a phone. And so, based on the fact that users have an acceptable tool to use together with their GPS, it brings in a whole new era for the ‘old school’ directories, because they are the ones that are used to talking to this crowd. But it’s a question of whether or not they can offer them a new suite of products and services that are adapted to the new age of consumers.”

Whether or not the legacy information services players want to play ball with businesses like Telmap is a moot point – resistance is just as plausible as cooperation. However, it seems highly likely that, either way, there will be new market entrants who will move into the space and capitalise. These might be alternative media players or businesses with an obliquely related online business model.

“I agree there may be resistance and also that there will be big media interests that get involved. I spent some time meeting with these players, as well as the old fashioned directory assistance companies - you can guess who I met. I also met with some of the new media guys and our general feeling was ‘you can’t teach an old dog new tricks’.

“It’s unfortunate because I think the people that the directory players represent in essence are looking for these types of opportunities, and so if the DA guys don’t bring it to them they will go another way.”

Wearing his marketeer’s hat, Nissim fully acknowledges that it pays to orientate your business towards demand as opposed to many technology businesses which tend to focus overly on the supply side of the equation. A very useful way of orientating your business towards demand is the personalisation of services and Nissim is happy to outline some of the plans that Telmap have in this area.

“There are a couple of dimensions,” says Nissim. “We’re working towards bringing on more content under the context of a more personalised service. We have launched a capability called Content Deck. Basically, we would show somebody [online listings magazine] Time Out - and with this you are able to do all your searches like you would do using the regular Time Out application. But the results would be shown in a way that can be contextual and geographical, meaning you can see on the map how to navigate there. You can also send it to your friends.

“So, after reading an article about a new great restaurant, you want to know ‘how do I get there?’ or ‘where is it?’ - and this is how we provide an extension to content providers. A content provider for us is also somebody like Facebook or somebody from the social network world, and so in that context we’re also starting to bring a lot more personalised information onto this application.

The ability to look into these websites allows a much nicer extension to the end users profile.

“Another thing we’re doing is looking to widen out the services on the end-user’s phone. We’re seeing a lot more applications coming on line today that have the use of maps and location within them. And one of the questions we ask is ‘do we really need each and every application to build their own little map server and have their own way of running things on top of that?’

“So, what Telmap has done, earlier this year, is opened up our platforms – and what we’re saying to other application developers is go ahead and use them as part of your app when you want an extension to a map or to a location or to both. So, basically rather than building your own, you can simply use ours and ours are already launched with a bunch of carriers. So, to the application provider, it’s simpler - but more importantly to the end user, it’s a single experience as opposed to a silo approach where each and every application stands on its own and there’s no connection between them.”

Personalisation has been seen as a significant way of adding value for some time, but surely it’s not the information services holy grail. There have to be other levels of value and relevance, in terms of search and in terms of marrying consumers with pertinent information – in other words, contextual search.

A search engine capability that understands context rather than just mechanically pulling up results based on a key word or term – surely that would provide a richer environment of possibilities, especially if location could be one of the contextual components? Nissim vacillates between being the marketeer who sees the opportunity and the technocrat who understands the obstacles.

“It’s a very interesting and difficult point and I have to say within the areas of location I think the problem is slightly easier because location provides a lot of the context,” he decides. “Context is really important but we’re already doing it in the sense of someone asking for something and we provide it in their area, unless they specifically say they’re looking for it somewhere else. The response will be based on distance from him showing the added information, results that are actually rated for example, that provide another whole layer of complexity. What you’re doing then is answering those search queries, but coupling those search queries to content providers who can actually provide some level of quality to the results.”

As a proposition, contextual location based advertising definitely works – you only have to consider being in the vicinity of Old Trafford (Manchester United’s stadium), where on a match day, you’ve got 80,000 people in one place and in a similar context. It’s easy to imagine driving business to online betting sites and so on. Nissim is excited by the prospects for continued growth in mobile internet usage, as it is intrinsically related to the kind of applications in which Telmap specialises.

Nissim sees vast changes in the information services landscape over the next few years.

“One big trend I think will have a lot of sway in the market is around cloud computing,” he says. “And I think this will, generally speaking, help with the access of information and keep things available for the mass. I think another thing will be wireless devices turning into much more of a wide platform that is very easily accessible to end users.

“Regarding the mobile internet, data packages are getting flat, so I don’t need to think about how many extra megabytes I’m consuming - and obviously a better device and delivering a nicer user experience will help. The iPhone will encourage everybody else to start to provide similar devices and I think all this will push the market to become a lot better equipped to see complex content accessed through mobile devices - which means more people will enjoy the benefits of that access.“