LightPole Publishing System:
Products and Services White Paper
Overview
As a leading provider of products and services optimized for location-relevant content delivery, LightPole makes it easy for content owners to initiate or extend their participation in the mobile economy by helping them to distribute location-specific information to mobile devices.
For content owners, we make it easy to enhance the value of their content with an absolute minimum of technology change and churn. For mobile marketing services providers, we supply a way to enhance existing offerings with complementary, geo-based information that will help make prospective campaigns even more relevant and compelling.
To this end, we have designed, developed, and implemented the LightPole Publishing System™ with the LightPole Content Distribution Fabric™ (CDF) at its core. The CDF forms the basis for our location-aware content network capable of delivering relevant content to a range of formats, including Web, WAP, and SMS, and a variety of mobile devices.
LightPole works side-by-side with its partners to create an engaging mobile user experience that utilizes location, and offers a robust publishing system that flexibly and easily connects our partners to their consumers.
LightPole Publishing System
The most fundamental object in the LightPole Publishing System is a Point of Interest (POI). A POI is a data object that includes a location as well as other information related to the designated place. For example, a POI can denote a business that offers customers a Wi-Fi hotspot or a bar that features a “happy hour.”
The LightPole Publishing System also relies upon the concept of “channels.” For all intents and purposes, a channel is simply a collection of POIs. For the most part, the POIs in a channel are aggregated by common themes (e.g., Wi-Fi hotspots). However, one such channel, My Places, is completely defined by the end user as a place to store POIs of special significance. These can be either personal POIs created by the user, or favorite POIs “bookmarked” from published content channels.
The LightPole Publishing system can consume and manage many types of structured data feeds (XML, RSS, ATOM, JSON, KML, ICAL) and is optimized to handle data feeds with location specific information.
Core Technology: The Content Distribution Fabric
At the core of the LightPole Publishing System, as illustrated in Figure 1, is our Content Distribution Fabric (CDF).
Figure 1
A sophisticated “content switch,” the CDF is the infrastructure that mediates all of the main functions of the system. It supports high performance content switching and data caching for the communications and content flows, and processes the various structured feeds and Web-services APIs.
Built from the ground up specifically as a networking solution, the CDF is implemented using the Erlang runtime system developed by Ericsson as the basis for their communications switching systems. Unlike similar efforts undertaken using standard Web tools, the LightPole CDF has the capability to scale to literally millions of simultaneous connections without a significant hardware and networking investment.
In addition to this unparalleled scalability, another attribute that makes the CDF unique is its intrinsic bi-directionality. Unlike other approaches to distributing content to mobile devices (e.g. RSS readers), the CDF supports fully bi-directional communications between LightPole partners and their consumers. Using a LightPole client, consumers can communicate with LightPole partners to contribute new content and to comment on existing content. Easily configured from within the LightPole Publishing System, this communication channel presents our partners with a whole new opportunity to participate in the user-generated content (UGC) phenomenon.
The CDF provides unprecedented flexibility to our partners from both technology and business-model perspectives. Rather than burdening either the partner or the client device with additional work, the CDF facilitates standards-based connectivity for transactions like ticket purchasing or reservations.
This flexibility also allows us to work with our partners to establish “closed-loop” marketing solutions. Starting with an initial, “opt in” SMS-based interaction, our location-relevant content awareness enables us to drive our partner’s consumer actions in very exact ways. For example, we can help guide consumers to specific retail locations by incenting them with coupons for items that they want “here and now.”
CDF Features and Benefits
Key features and corresponding benefits of the CDF include:
Carrier-grade switching platform
The CDF was built from inception around the concept of scalability. No matter how many users or content feeds a LightPole partner needs to support, we can scale easily and inexpensively to meet those requirements.
Extensible Web-services APIs.
LightPole is committed to meeting the requirements of our partners, from the simplest to the most advanced. To that end, we have already created an extensive set of partner-accessible, fully supported APIs that permit customized, programmatic interaction with our system. And we are continually adding to this API base.
Integrated messaging system
The CDF supports direct messaging between LightPole partners and their consumers and between those consumers. In general, these integrated messages are routed within the CDF, with no need to touch external networks.
Dynamic cache support
The CDF has a built-in cache for rapidly accessing POI and other types of data. Not only does this help deliver top-notch performance, but our complete control over the cache maximizes our on-going ability to respond to application-specific requirements for quick data access.
Additional System Components
In addition to the CDF technology, the LightPole Publishing System includes several components necessary for an easy-to-use, end-to-end system. These include:
Customizable Geo-Browser
The LightPole GeoBrowser™ is compatible with devices from leading manufacturers including, Motorola (RAZR), Apple (iPhone), RIM (Blackberry), Nokia, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson among others. We continue to evaluate other platforms for inclusion in our ever-expanding product family.
WAP and SMS Support
For partners who wish to provide their location-specific content to consumers via extant mobile-phone browsers or SMS, we also offer support for WAP and SMS access.
Web Widgets
LightPole can also provide fully interactive, dynamic, and customizable widgets that allow our partners to distribute their content to third-party Web sites. These widgets support cutting-edge sponsorship and advertising campaigns.
Publishers Console
Consisting primarily of a set of easy-to-use online tools our Web-based Publishers Console makes it easy to integrate and manage geo-tagged content in the LightPole content network. For more ambitious content partners, we also have a comprehensive set of APIs that support sophisticated interactions between consumers and unique collections of POIs. This console also provides basic usage statistics for our partners.
Service Offerings
Currently, we offer three levels of core services. These are aimed primarily at content owners partners, and include:
Basic
Default channel status; universal availability as a “systems channel;” use of basic static or dynamic widget; revenue splits on display and interstitial advertising; access to basic channel statistics via Publishers Console.
Premium
Basic package services as well as (1) Core channel branding (i.e. use of customer designated/provided identity elements—logos, map pins, etc.) for use as mobile deck, splash screen, interstitial page, channel page bar and POI detail page bar icons; and (2) Access to premium channel statistics including report building.
Premium Plus
Premium package services as well as (1) Custom User Portal (as described below); and (2) exclusive end-user marketing rights.
Additional Services
We offer several additional services that could be of interest both to content owners and to mobile marketing services providers. Some examples of these include:
Content Licensing
Partners can license existing LightPole location based content and build their own branded channels using that content. Licensing costs depend on the licensors content, size of content base, and level of branding. For mobile marketing services providers, this service can be used to supply collections of POIs into SMS/MMS/WAP campaigns.
In-system, targeted messaging
In-system, targeted messaging allows partners to communicate directly with their mobile consumers using LightPole’s messaging subsystem. Partners can inform consumers of events, new content, or sponsor advertisers through the LightPole application, email, or SMS directly from the LightPole Publisher interface.
Custom statistics
LightPole can provide partners with custom statistics related to channel, POI, mobile posting, consumer usage and other mobile transactions. LightPole will work with partners to develop custom statistics and reporting.
Sponsorship and campaign support
We are also eager to assist in the development of a consumer-focused mobile marketing campaigns including the development of any necessary Web-based, customer-specific widgets, campaign setup, module installation, and launch.
Web-based custom user portal
LightPole can develop a partner-branded version of the LightPole Website to support the partner’s consumers. Customization can range from a simple co-branding of the website to a complete functional and user interface redesign.
Conclusion
LightPole is a content network optimized to provide fast and easy connectivity between our partners and their consumers of location-relevant information for distribution to mobile devices. LightPole partners can choose between multiple delivery options for the one that best suits their technology needs and business objectives. We can help content owning partners to mobilize and monetize that content. We can help mobile marketing services partners to enhance their offerings with location-specific information to make campaigns more context-relevant and compelling.
