The Tendo View

In the early days of the Internet, businesses with a physical location were referred to as “brick-and-mortar,” while those on the Internet had a “Web presence.” Obviously, that distinction doesn’t hold up anymore, but a recent Google campaign and a new iPhone app got me thinking about the convergence of the online and offline worlds.

Let’s start with Google. The company took its online world offline this summer with its “Favorite Places” marketing campaign. Think Yelp meets Google Maps meets celebrity endorsements for the mobile age. For the campaign, Google asked local experts/celebrities in more than a dozen cities (in the Bay Area, folks like Gavin Newsom and Alice Waters are featured) for their favorite hotspots.

Go online and you can search by personality—what cultural events do Yo-Yo Ma and Maya Lin like?—or by city to find out the celebrity dish on shops, restaurants, culture, and nightlife. And in San Francisco, Google took the campaign a step further with a physical presence: Celebrity-endorsed businesses got a life-size version of the signature teardrop-shaped marker from Google, complete with a plaque telling you who had endorsed the business.

In the spirit of “there’s an app for that,” the offline world jumps back online with a new iPhone app from Acrossair, which has developed an augmented reality browser with 3D navigation. With this app, your iPhone becomes a portal to an “augmented” reality; now you can view the names of businesses, events, and so on that are near your physical location; hold the phone flat and it turns into a Google map view that also moves with you so you know exactly where things are in relation to you. Check out the video—it’s pretty cool.

Convergence and convenience
What’s old is new, what’s online is offline, and what’s stuck in a silo isn’t going to fly. It’s really about convergence and convenience—about making things as easy and “full-service” as possible for your customers, your audience, or whoever you’re talking to. Of course, none of this should be a revelation, as companies like Microsoft realized this a decade ago.

In the late ‘90s I worked for Microsoft’s Sidewalk.com, online city guides that provided editorial-based information on restaurants and arts and entertainment. The sites were great, but they were doomed almost from the start because of Ticketmaster. Microsoft wanted to make a deal with them to sell tickets through Sidewalk—users would read an editorial review of “Wicked,” for example, and the page would include a link to purchase tickets—but negotiations broke down and Ticketmaster made a deal with rival Citysearch instead. Sidewalk trudged along for a while, but Microsoft knew it had lost its best opportunity to monetize the websites (perhaps a fee from each ticket sale made via Sidewalk), and also to provide a one-stop shop for users who could read about an event and then buy tickets, all in the same place. They knew early on that convergence was key, but they couldn’t convert the idea to reality.

Now it’s a new reality, and companies need to promise an even bigger and better bang, not only for your buck, but also for your time and your convenience. Is there an app for that?