There is never a dull moment at Geogad as we work to improve your travel experience.

Geogad has added a new feature to make your travels even more uniquely yours. Now you can create mix and match the individual tour stops on Geogad to create your own customized tours. To create your own customized tour, just sign in and click on the “Create Tour” header option. You will be presented with a two maps, one showing the available tour stops and the other showing tour stops that you have dropped and dragged onto your own tour map. After you have picked the tour stops and arranged them into your preferred route, you can save your new custom tour. It is instantly available to you and to other Geogad travelers.

Your new custom tour can be streamed to your web browser or downloaded to your favorite mobile media device. Your new custom tour is free as are all of the other tours from Geogad.

This is just one small part of making Geogad your personal mobile tour guide.

I visited SF for a meeting today and listened to some podcasts from Ad:tech SF on the train. The main focus on several of the podcasts was how businesses could advertise or make money off of video and user generated content (UGC). Several of the points that the presenters at Ad:tech made were echoed in an article on WebGuild.

In an article called “Turning the Long Tail Into the Big Tail”, Jean-Marie Le Ray echoes what executives at the video advertising networks have seen. Advertisers are looking to target groups of users (for example, men ages 20-35) and just want to buy a spread of ads across many networks. It is great if they are concentrated in just a few sites, but it does not really matter. If the advertisers can reach the same group without having to pay big bucks to advertise next to premium content, they will do it. They are less concerned about being able to brag that they have advertised on the latest iTunes downloads of “Lost” than being able to show that for the same cash spread among 50 sites, they reached a higher number of people with a better response.

The part that I found most interesting in the article is

the first ad server that creates the RELEVANT mix to match advertisers’ needs on one side with the legitimate monetization expectations of content creators on the other side (matching the inventory of the latter based on the message of the former), will win the jackpot. Even if there are still a few unknowns.

Basically advertisers are interested more in well-rounded campaigns managed by an ad platform to reach their target audience. Meanwhile if anyone can figure out the magic formula for making money off of UGC, you will have their ad money.

Anyone who has a cell phone has experienced moments that just show that the wireless carriers are out of touch with their customers. My personal favorite was when I got charged for spam text messages from local businesses during my visit to Vancouver. I did not even realize that I had gotten the messages until I arrived back in the US.

I read an article today that shows another one of those disconnect moments between carriers and customers. In an article from FierceMarkets, the summary of a marketing report done by market research firm Pioneer Consulting points out that many mobile customers are getting frustrated with trying to share their user generated content over the cell networks and have taken to alternative ways such as Bluetooth, WiFi and WiMAX to distribute it to their friends and family. In a direct quote from the article:

The study suggests subscribers who circumvent the traditional content value chain could rob operators of as much as $16.4 billion in potential annual revenues by 2012, more than a quarter of the projected total revenue for the year in question.

Yes, you read that right. The article says “rob operators“. I love the way that it seems to suggest that the customers use of alternative ways to distribute content are actually stealing from the carriers by NOT using their networks. It suggests that customers somehow owe the carriers to use their slow, crowded and expensive networks. So much for market competition.

I suspect that the customers would prefer to use the cell networks since the other options could be more hassle. The idea that so many customers would go out of their way to find another solutions shows that the carriers may be paying too much attention to their revenue and not enough to their customers’ experiences.