eBay Previews Possible Geotargeting Feature for Sellers

As you may know, Black Friday is a pretty popular day for online shopping as well as offline. With that in mind, it is no surprise that a lot of people turned to eBay to find deals and work on their holiday gift buying.

eBay has created an interesting visualization of the site's Black Friday activity across the United States. This comes in the form of an animated map, which shows the areas of the country with the most shopping activity, and shows new areas as their first purchases were made. It's really easier to grasp if you just watch the short 2-minutes clip eBay provides:

On the eBay Holiday site, the company explains a little bit about the methodology and data execution that went into creating this animated map:

The visualization is based on raw data that includes eBay sales and purchases occurring in approximately 33,000 U.S. ZIP codes. To best represent large population areas and to condense data for a seamless display, ZIP codes were grouped to create 3,118 distinct areas. The methodology used to create these areas was based on the distance from the center of one ZIP code to adjacent ZIP codes. Those with a distance of less than .35 (latitude or longitude) between them were combined into an area.

The size of each point on the map corresponds to the number of ZIP codes encompassed within that area. In other words, the more ZIP codes included in an area, the larger the point on the map. The color of the points ranges in intensity, and areas with lower transaction totals appear in yellow while those with the highest number of total transactions appear in red. The spectrum of color can be most easily understood by comparing points on the map to the Activity Level Indicator, found just beneath it.

The map is available for interested parties as a widget, which can be embedded. That can be found here.

Interestingly, the company notes on the eBay Ink blog: "Even more interesting will be to see if we can make this a regular feature. It takes some fairly detailed transactional data to come up with such a high-level but targeted visual map. Crucial data for sellers looking to see geographical purchasing behavior patterns partnered with peak purchasing times (down to the second)."

This could be a popular feature (if released) for sellers to better target their offerings. This could in turn help with the marketing of their eBay stores. Would you find such a feature useful? Share your thoughts here.

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Google Improves Google News on More Mobile Devices

Google has announced a new Google News for iPhone, Android, and Palm Pre users. The company already offers one for other devices like Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and S60, although they say more improvements to those versions will be coming soon, as well.

Today's new version includes a new Google News homepage, which shows more stories, sources, and images, but keeps the same basic look and feel.

"Also, you can now reach your favorite sections, discover new ones, find articles and play videos in fewer clicks," says Google's Mobile News Team. "If you are an existing Google News reader on desktop, you will find that all of your personalizations are honored in this mobile version too."

Google News for mobile is currently available in 29 languages and 70 editions.

In other recent Google-related mobile news, AdMob, which Google recently acquired, has unveiled a new interactive video ad unit for the iPhone. Google also acquired Gizmo5, a VoIP firm, which will see VoIP integration with Google Voice, and Google Latitude introduced location history and smart alerts.

On the news search front, today Yahoo began incorporating tweets into its search results for select news stories.

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Google Latitude Introduces Location History, Smart Alerts

A quick, but important, note: the stuff we're about to discuss is only available on an opt-in basis.  So there's no need to stop halfway through this article and drown your phone or tape it to a neighbor's car.  Now, with that out of the way, let's move on to the news that Google Latitude's gained two features called Google Location History and Google Location Alerts (which is in beta).

Google Location History may be either the less cool or the less creepy offering, depending on one's point of view.  A post on the Google Mobile Blog explained that, with it, you can "store, view, and manage your past Latitude locations."  Then, "You can visualize your history on Google Maps and Earth or play back a recent trip in order."

In another nod to personal privacy, it's possible to delete part or all of your location history, too.

As for the second feature, it builds on the first and tries to intelligently connect you with acquaintances.  According to the post, "Location Alerts can recognize your regular, routine locations and not create alerts when you're at places like home or work.  Alerts will only be sent to you and any nearby friends when you're either at an unusual place or at a routine place at an unusual time."

You can enable these offerings here if they suit your style.  And should you later change your mind, Google promises that you can disable them rather than head for the nearest sink or roll of duct tape.

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Apple May Have Some Explaining to Do Over Google Voice

There was a lot of hoopla made regarding Apple's banning of Google Voice from its App Store. Fingers were pointed, names were (probably) called. Today Google announced that the FCC has made its letter (pdf) available to the public. The letter reveals what Google claims to be the explanation it got from Apple about why it would not accept its Google Voice app (as well as Google Latitude).

"When we submitted our letter on August 21, we asked the FCC to redact certain portions that involved sensitive commercial conversations between two companies -- namely, a description of e-mails, telephone conversations, and in-person meetings between executives at Google and Apple," says Richard Whitt, Washington Telecom and Media Counsel at Google. "Shortly afterward, several individuals and organizations submitted Freedom of Information Act requests with the FCC seeking access to this information. While we could have asked the FCC to oppose those requests, in light of Apple's decision to make its own letter fully public and in the interest of transparency, we decided to drop our request for confidentiality."

Apple has of course denied in the past that they rejected the app, along with AT&T. But according to Google's letter, Apple gave them the following explanations:



Now everyone's pretty much waiting to see what Apple has to say for itself. It will be interesting to see how the details shake out. Said details could end up shaking a fair amount of trust for some company.