WHERE, Inc., a hyper-local location-based media startup, announced today that it received approval from the U.S. Patent Trademark Office for their “Auto-Snap” location-relevance technology.
Auto-Snap works by creating an association between a person and a place, which enhances the ability to “derive intent resulting in improved relevance of place recommendations.” Put simply, it’s a technique to identify better context surrounding where a person is at any given time.
The tech uses attributes such as distance tolerances, landmark patterns, temporal patterns, knowledge of business attributes, knowledge of event occurrences, season or weather knowledge, common place names, user saved places and other types of factors and techniques to identify and utilize the most complete location-based data set surrounding a user in real-time. WHERE then uses this ability to serve hyper-local location-based advertisements to users via its various mobile apps.
Since launching in March of 2010, the WHERE ad-network has added over 100 publishers and delivers over 1 billion ads per month, the company says. The company claims over 3 million active users for its consumer applications that help users “discover, save and share local places by putting the best local information at users’ fingertips,” and by serving the aforementioned ads in a highly relevant manner.
“With Auto-Snap we are able to determine location relevancy and intent of a consumer,” said Walt Doyle, CEO of Where, Inc. “With this technology, we can better understand the context of a person’s location and improve the match rate for content and ads delivered on our network. Auto-Snap lets us know if a user is at home, in the office or at a favorite restaurant giving us the unique ability to improve the overall WHERE consumer experience and better align the relevance of the WHERE Ads we deliver.”