It’s scary how much information about our personal selves are available to anyone with an internet-capable device (doesn’t have to be a computer anymore – not with smartphones around!)

Cellphones with GPS chips to pinpoint exactly where you are at all times, cars with “OnStar” that does the same thing – even allowing a complete stranger have access to your car’s functions, and most of us voluntarily give out all our info so anyone with half a brain knows exactly where, when, why, and how we get to someplace, knows our likes/dislikes, and so much other information.

And the techno-geeks in the multi-billion dollar technology companies keep coming up with more and more ways to “network” everyone with everybody and come up with quicker, more automated ways to access you and all your data before you have a chance to object to it. Watch the movie, “Minority Report” – not concentrating on the basis of the story of “predicting” crimes, but the technology used to target advertising to individuals – watch it and look for the “automated retinal-scanners” in public areas. It’s like this “location-based advertising” taken to the N’th degree!

Technology will get there – and possibly within our lifetime (near future)!

“Location based advertising” is simply the market’s attempts to fill the former monopoly ( but now obsolete) “Yellow Pages” text base advertising of the land line era. While there have been many attempts to recreate the Yellow Pages online none have ever become large enough to become an exhaustive, monopolistic source containing every business in an area. By lacking “all” businesses the online “Yellow Page” style directory falls short of end user needs.

My approach has been to provide a device with incentives for businesses to add their own data to the list, to offer a guaranteed, permanently free ad for them, to expand that basic offer and enable them to “host” the device themselves and, thus, participate in building the advertising infrastructure. In simpler terms, a DMOZ style web directory geared towards local small businesses but that also provides financial incentives to those who participate in building the list. In a sense, it provide small businesses an opportunity to become “Yellow Pages web advertising” franchise in their communities and end up “owning” the fruit of what they build. And since the “device” is nothing but a combination of web based software and a business model similar to Adsense there is no fee for this (just as their is no fee for Adsense software).

I hope my product becomes a social network of small business adverting. The unique aspect of this plan is the hope to “recycle” web traffic that, until now, is wasted and untapped. With 1.8 billion dollars spent to get visitors to a website, little is done to recycle or reclaim the perhaps 97% of those visitors that do not buy. My system attempts to capture that departing traffic, aggregate it into a previously non-existent product of web traffic, and market it on the website owner’s behalf.

I’ve read articles about location based advertising where its said shops will use to intice people in by offering free stuff and special offers…just looking at it from this angle i’m pro location based advertising!!