Location - and BigData

Did you know that in the last three months location based adds are delivering a 3.8X premium?  Ok, so its from Nexage, but still, good data to have, no?  

Part of this is clearly because of the classic economics supply/demand curve.  Demand for location-based ads is going through the roof, and supply still hasn't caught up (Foursquare notwithstanding) .  According to Nexage, "All the inventory we can get, we're selling".

This is actually getting massive play out there right now - SoLoMo (Social, Location, Mobile) is the in thing from a buzz perspective.  LocalResponse is mining social data, and using it to send information to customers via twitter. The part that I find fascinating is that it actually seems to work, unlike a lot of the 'Social buzz' that has been making the rounds.  Personalization may have quite a bit to do with this, there is a lot of self-selection that goes into people mentioning a place, and said place (maybe) contacting them.

So, what next?  Not to harp on the BigData thing again, but the key to really getting value here is going to be merging location data with customer data, and in particular, making sense of the Velocity part of BigData, i.e., the rapidity with which new data replaces the old.