“Mobile and Geolocalization are the third chapter of the Internet revolution, after Search and Social,” Robert Scoble said during his keynote at Geo-Loco 2010 in San Francisco this Wednesday. Location-Based Services (LBS) are at the peak of the hype cycle, especially with Foursquare, and we are still in the industry’s infancy.

The emergence of dozens of LBS startups has been enabled by great progress on the infrastructure side in the last few years. But according to the event’s speakers, pure geodata applications will not be relevant soon and still have to add real value: context. Real time geodata is not just a feature but something which could be tremendous when combined with information: for example, friends with location or buses with location.

In fact, the LBS landscape will soon split: the services which add really compelling experiences (Booyah with Mytown for example) and those who will provide nice back office white-label databases like Simplegeo.

Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures identified privacy as the biggest issue for the LBS startups. There is a total lack of comprehension of people’s needs in term of privacy, but we want to be very careful about what we are sharing with whom. A question from the audience illustrated this: “Can you be fired if your employer knows you go to bars four times in a week?”

As always from the VC point of view, there are plenty of business opportunities for startups in this area as we will need more and more capabilities for filtering our sharing with our communities and the web.

Context and privacy are definitely the new keywords for LBS industry, as well as plenty of web and mobile businesses (ask Facebook). The question for the LBS industry is: will companies have time to develop their business before Facebook launches its own check-in feature?

On March 24th, Plug and Play Techcenter hosted its spring PACT. The concept is quite simple: thirty startups presenting their product in a 2-minute elevator pitch to a panel of VCs. The jury decides the best three, which are then qualified to present for 10 minutes followed by a Q&A round.

Everything began as usual. Saeed Amidi made his usual speech and announced the expansion of Plug and Play Techcenters around the world through franchises or JVs (Singapore, Malaysia, Austria). The model of the incubator associated with venture capitalists funds seems interesting for these countries and being associated with the biggest incubator in the world makes sense. The keynote speaker, Vivek Paul, former CEO of Wipro, insisted on what was an ideal Silicon Valley success story: “Not funded, no IPO but they knew when to sell their company.”

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Last Friday at the Peer Financing for Developers conference at the Sun Campus in Santa Clara Menlo Park, CA, the discussion of new project-financing possibilities was a heated one. PayPal Platform Product General Manager Jason Korosec made a clear call to developers: “Stop spending time on putting your idea in a PowerPoint to convince VCs,” Korosec said.

“Get first seeds from the crowd, start creating your product, bring it to the market, improve it with customer feedback and after that get funds from VCs to scale up your business,” Korosec said.

Danae Ringelmann, co-founder of IndieGoGo, explained that this was the purpose of her platform, which was initially dedicated to artistic endeavours. The artist submits their project with all the information as well as what the reward would be for potential investors, then IndieGoGo publishes the project and people can invest whatever they want.

IndieGoGo wants to expand the concept to the developer sphere, for any kind of application. The transaction fee of 9 percent is perhaps too high but the idea is there: with no more intermediaries like VCs or banks, you go directly to the crowd, tapping your network or community of interest.

“Getting money from your peers to fund businesses is not new,” said Ram Lakshmanan, founder of Chittai.

“Social networking is not a Silicon Valley invention,” Lakshmanan added. “It has been around for centuries in most regions of the world, in local communities, but the big change today is the Internet: you can think of it at a large scale without physical connections.”

Connecting your projects with people who trust you or are interested in your projects is much easier than before. You have access to all the project information needed to put your money on the table and therefore you don’t need a trusted third party to invest your money (i.e., banks or other investment institutions).

“Anybody has the same information level so it’s the end of institutions” said Rob Garcia from Lendingclub, a major US P2P platform.

The disintermediation of finance is coming and PayPal, the event’s main sponsor, wants to play an active role with their PayPal X initiative. We think that “peer financing” could be a very interesting alternative for starting a business and would make sense in areas with wealthy professional networks like Silicon Valley. Financing platforms could be also a very lucrative business but it’s too early to determine who will be the key players in this area.

Live streaming from the TechCrunch50 2009 conference.

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At the PDF09 Conference, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg comments on the 5 big challenges NYC is facing in going online. He is advocating the 311 service and launching a big App Contest.

The winner will get some funding … and a dinner with the Mayor. With a great sense of humor, Mayor Bloomberg shows that he is an able user of new technologies. Unable to attend the conference live, he did so by Skype connection … that failed in the middle, but was of great quality overall.

Amee (amee.com) is a website that helps you track your CO2 emissions. Its CEO Gavin Starks introduced to the Green:Net Conference’s audience interesting figures like the mass of CO2 that it takes to build, use and recycle a 2,5 kg-product Mac Book: 460kg! Fortunately it’s the “greenest family of notebooks….” He then explained why we had to urge governments to tax Carbon instead of allow its trade, in order to avoid a “Venus Syndrome” on Earth and a decrease of the human population to 1 billion or less by the end of the century.

Every CO2 emission has to be measured, compiled and then reduced, the main obstacle being that it involves tracking down the purchases, precise energy consumption, travels … of every individual. CO2 ID could represent the most complete amount of data about one’s lifestyle. Therefore, for obvious privacy matters it would require all personal data to be handled with extreme care to make sure it is not embezzled by ill-intentioned third party.

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Good news and something I don’t get !

All the big conferences have to have their prizes (Nobel Prize and so on). The Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference gives three prizes every year, and asks each recipient to make a wish. “Wishes big enough to save the world,” proclaims TED. Ambitious. You will discover here (www.tedprize.org) the prizes of this year, their wishes, and the prizes of the previous years.

The prize session has been very emotional this year. And a bit disappointing, at least to me, for one of the winners. Jill Tarter, from the Seti Institute, who has been doing research on extra terrestrial signs of life for a while now, received the first prize. And honestly, I do not really see how this is going to save the planet! Her speech was very inspired - almost ideological. I do not see the science there, and all this is not hot news. Yes, we have to consider ourselves as the resident of a Small Planet in a corner of the Milky Way, as she puts it. This could change our perspective. Is it enough to spend millions to look for other signs of life out there, while we are killing our own planet? Honestly, I do not buy it. But I may be wrong. What do you think?

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I just arrived at the Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) Conference (http://conferences.ted.com/TED2009/). I’m so excited ! This is supposed to be the Davos of Innovation. And, actually, a lot of the attendees were in Davos last week. Don’t they have a regular job? Just being difficult…The program is so exiting : Tim Berners Lee (the dad of the web), Bill Gates (the dad of the PC), Chris Anderson (the dad of the Long Tail), Al Gore (the dad of the Planet), among others. Yann Arthus-Bertrand and his project, “6 Billion Others.”

I have decided to do the lightest coverage one could do: just share a few feelings and thoughts with you, and see what’s going on. And I know a lot is going on. You are going to be frustrated.

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Mobilize, “the next generation mobile conference” presented by the GigaOM team, takes place today in San Francisco. Selected coverage follows below from this morning’s speakers.

Hyperconnectivity, Wideband and Innovation
Om Malik spoke with John Roese, chief technology officer of Nortel Networks on the issues of developing high capability networks. The saturation of the Western European market (112 percent mobile users), including Italy (147 percent) makes an overwhelming argument about the importance of system robustness. The US trails sadly behind other countries in terms of the quality of the 3G network and market consistancy.

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Day one of TC50 introduced the first batch of the 52 best and brightest start-ups being showcased over three days in San Francisco, CA. Monday’s sessions focused on youth and entertainment, memes and news, enterprise, and advertising and commerce themes.

Ashton Kutcher added celebrity buzz to the conference when he presented his social-networking and celebrity news site that targets tweeners, BlahGirls, during the first session. Not shy of a crowd, Kutcher later strolled through the demo floor with TechCrunch co-founder Jason Calacanis’ bulldogs, Taurus and Fondue, while fielding questions from the press.

Marissa Mayer, the VP of search products and user experience at Google announced Google News and Archives, a feature allowing Internet users to search for old newspaper articles and view them in actual news print form via a PC.

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