On Friday at TechCrunch’s Social Currency event, there was an interesting panel discussion on the Local Web with Yelp’s CEO Jeremy Stoppelman and Google’s VP of Product Management at Google, John Hanke. Moderator Erick Schonfeld says that he find himself using these local apps like Foursquare & Gowalla to see what’s around him, but adds: “I want it to tell me for this category of things to tell me what’s nearby and then also what’s nearby and who has a deal.”

Below John Hanke and some of his insights into what’s happening with the local web right now.

“It’s a great time to be building a company in this space.”

“We’ll see a lot of simplified local, things like click-to-call and we’re going to start to see the RPMs go up, so the money will be there so we can start to build businesses. What we’re seeing the confluence of gaming dynamics, and offers through services like Groupon. We’ll also see advancements in HTML 5 and lots of services emerge in the geo-loco area.”

“The success of Groupon is that there’s a direct relationship. Coupons are one way to get people through the door and close the door. It’s about understanding about when people is asking about a place, we want to show local results that are relevant & add meaningful information to that place – we want to add relevance. A good local site adds good rich information and doesn’t just regurgitate.”

Adds Erick, “the success of Groupon is the social component, it’s not between a single consumer and a merchant, but it’s about bringing togehter a group of people (30-40), so they can offer a discount for that group. There’s value to the consumer and value to the merchant.”

Below Yelp’s CEO Jeremy Stoppelman and his insights.

Re: the advertising and promotional opportunities, there’s the growing popularity of connecting people when they’re searching for something local and tracking that info – it will make it easier for companies to advertise. That’s part of the success of Groupon. Hopefully we’re moving towards a world where we track those decisions.”

“I’m not sure the group concept is as big of a deal as offering great values for consumers.”

Below is the video of the fireside-chat with Yelp’s Jeremy Stoppelman and Google’s John Hanke:

Because Groupon was raised so many times in the Stoppelman/Hanke interview, I decided to include the interview that Schonfeld and Arrington did earlier in the day with Groupon’s CEO Andrew Mason:

Author Jaron Lanier talks to the AlwaysOn crowd at Stanford this past week about his thinking behind where the Internet is going, where it should be going and why what we think is Open today is more ‘big brother’ than you realize.

“If everything was really open, Google wouldn’t have a reason to exist,” he says. “Both are not operable or separable from each other. You can’t have the Linux model without the Steve Jobs model and vice versa. They need each other.”

He adds, “When industrialization took off, there was a huge anxiety about fear of being obsolete – that is a lot of what motivated Marxism. Re: Obama’s decline in popularity, you’ll also find that fundamentalism is going up as well. If modernity isn’t working, you’ll always see fundamentalism going up as well.”

Not unlike Andrew Keen’s sentiment on the ‘crowd mentality, he suggests that what you really get crowds and crowd mentality is mediocrity. With crowd sourcing comes homogeneousness of the human. He says, “if you ask a crowd to invent something, I see no evident of it happening,” and discounts the examples people bring up again and again: Linux and Wikipedia, although not in a way that suggested that they don’t and haven’t brought value. Below is his talk.

In the following two videos, he takes questions from the audience and from moderators Jamis MacNiven and AlwaysOn founder and producer Tony Perkins.

Elizabeth Tinkham, the Global Lead at Accenture moderated a panel this afternoon at the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit on ‘entrepreneurship.’ They discussed the venture community, raising capital as a woman in the current landscape and the kind of mentorship (with examples) that led to their success today.

On the panel was Donna Wells, President and CEO of Mindflash, Victoria Ransom, Founder & CEO of Wildfire Interactive, Lisa Stone of BlogHer, Hilary DeCesare, of Everloop, Carol Realini, CEO of Obopay and DoubleTwist’s Monique Farantzon.

AlwaysOn kicked off at Stanford last night and Guy Kawasaki moderated a panel entitled The Anatomy of a Successful Start-up in 2010. In the discussion was Mike Lee, co-founder of Tapulous, Chris Barbin, CEO of Appirio, Barry Silbert, Founder/CEO of SecondMarket, Treb Ryan, CEO of Opsource, and Doug Knopper, CEO of Freewheel.

Guy asked the panel whether it was a good time to start a company and what were each of the entrepreneurs doing differently today than they did in 1999.

A few random insights and thoughts that came from that thread:

Cloud computing is just starting to sort itself out through all the hype and monetize, so while challenging, its just starting to get going and there are lots of opportunities here to ‘get it right.’

Additionally, the sentiment was that “there’s a ton of capital but not a need to take it hastily….there’s so much more you can do on your own today — you just don’t need a lot of infrastructure anymore, even for an enterprise business.

Says Doug,”the world has gotten a lot smaller.” Others agree and have outsourced, tapped into resources outside the U.S. One had a resource in China with a 415# and between local numbers and Skype, there’s no reason not to be connected any time of day or night.

What about the role of the VC moving forward? It felt like the whole panel was opting for ‘any other way.’ In other words, with how easy it is to build infrastructure today, why get a VC on board unless you absolutely have to, although a VC does play a role outside of hard capital of course. A great VC can do pattern matching really well.

They also noted how much smarter prospects and employees are getting – today, they wan to “see a plan – they want to know the metrics and see a vision; its not good enough anymore to hear that the CEO has one.

Guy asks, “so how do you roll out a launch today? Mike says, “you need to think about how you build a company that the big boys are going to be interested in….how do you make your solution or service more compelling than anyone else….in other words, make something that someone like Apple CAN’T ignore. He says, “if you have something that resonates with users, they’ll use it, tout it and give you the buzz you need.”

Building buzz and testing things out with consumers is still key. Treb says, “the only friend you have when you’re a Series A start-up is buzz – you need to find out early on what works really well and what doesn’t.”

And Guy ends on a humorous note: Two things – “never surprise your board,” and at the end of the day regardless of what else is happening, “sales fixes everything.”

Below are two videos highlighting the majority of the panel.

I was in Detroit last week and bumped into Bob Tasca Jr. at the Dearborn Inn pub one evening. Like everyone else in the pub at the time, I was there to visit Ford’s headquarters for a Media Day. Bob is the son of Ford racing legend Bob Tasca Sr. who passed away this past January. He is credited with bringing us the Cobra Jet 428 engine. In the 1960s, he became frustrated at watching potential buyers leave his Rhode Island dealership because they thought the Mustang “just wasn’t fast enough.” So, he made the car faster by creating their own engine: Cobra Jet 428. Tasca is also credited with helping create the Ford Thunderbolt drag racing car. More about them at Tasca.com and TascaRacing.com.

Below are a few videos I shot — me directly asking Tasca questions and also observing conversation at the Dearborn Inn pub where other Ford dealers who came in and other car industry folks recognized Tasca. Every industry has their legends. Learn more about this one and Bob’s passion for Ford cars – he seemed committed to seeing me in a blue Ford Mustang convertible this year.

Ford’s Product Manager for Traffic, Directions and Information Services (TDI) David Gersabeck, sat with me last week at Ford’s headquarters in a brand new burgundy 2011 Ford Edge. In the front row, we played — and played. I spent time learning about their integrated mapping features, sweet (and easy) navigation of music, their new flattened command structure for getting what you need in a hands-free environment and more.

The flattened voice recognition tree structure allows you to get the same result using different commands, including music. For example, you can say radio station 98.7 or My Music, or Play Artist U2 and so on. Their integrated directions and traffic system allows you to set directions from Mapquest on your home PC and then access those directions from your car navigation system when you’re ready to leave home. Below David Gersabeck tells me more as we explore the new 2011 Edge together.

Below is an interview I did with Gary Jablonski, Product Development Manager for Infotainment systems at Ford last week in Dearborn Michigan. We’re in a red 2011 Ford Edge Sport and he’s showing me the latest new features and updates, including speech recognition and improved infotainment navigation.

Below are Fred Wilson’s insights from his keynote this past week at the Geo-Loco Conference in San Francisco. Immediately below them is a wrap-up summary on video from Robert Scoble.

“You should be able to give permission for how your information is used. An issue with large companies like Google is that they just may not be that capable of building private location-based services because their social graphs are not tuned for this kind of activity. When people start revealing their data, they want to know on day one that they get to define the terms and what they want to share and with who. There’s an advantage for start-ups and the entrepreneurs over the big companies, because the big companies have to roll back and undo the permissions you may have already granted.”

“How do you turn these services into businesses? Knowing where someone is in real-time right now if you have context about that, is an incredibly valuable marketing opportunity: it’s the holy grail for a merchant. If a merchant knows you’re nearby, they can make an offer or offer a coupon at the time when they’re highly incentivized to do so.

Revenue models around these businesses are fairly straight forward. There will be resellers and aggregators who create value for these services. I’m not worried about how you make money with these services, because those problems pale in my mind compared to the challenges around privacy, incentivizing user behavior and creating value for people for sharing that data.”

“What excites me is this: What if all the world history books were archived and integrated with a service like outside in and I could see what happened right here at the point where I’m standing in Rome 500 years ago?

When I go to a museum, there’s always a guided tour of the museum, but it’s the museum’s curated tour. What I’d love to be able to do is get Lou Reed’s private tour and another day, someone else’s private tour of a museum, or a walking tour of London. There are a lot of opportunities combining audio and mobile, as well as geo-tagging to create highly personalized curated experiences at places like museums.”

“I love the idea of open APIs but open APIs should also come with monetization – they go hand in hand. The API should monetize in the same way a site monetizes. You can’t just have an open API and not have it make money. Don’t try to hoard the data; use the data to get the monetization out into the marketplace.”

“The checkin will be a commodity if it isn’t already. You can get a Twitter style update on Yammer and Facebook, but that hasn’t stopped Twitter from being a large network that continues to grow and become more and more interesting every day. The same thing is true with checkins — you’ll get checks in Yelp and Facebook, but it doesn’t mean that the checkin services are in danger of not being monetized. What really matters is what’s behind the checkin. Can I protect my data, can I get valuable offers from doing this, where are my friends checking in? It’s all the other stuff that’s behind the checkin that creates the value to the consumers and to the brands. The tweet or checkin gets invented, the social bookmark gets invented — ALL of these social gestures get invented AND they get copied by everyone, but the innovator of that social gesture has gone on to build a really good business on the back of it. Commoditizing these “copying of social gestures” will not take the value of these gestures themselves.”

Below is Robert’s recap/summary:

At the Geo-Loco Conference this week in San Francisco, John Battelle interviewed VC Fred Wilson on stage, including the ‘word game’ – see results below:

JB: Research in motion – FW: Not good

JB: Facebook – FW: Juggernaut

JB: Gowalla – FW: It’s tough being the second fiddle

JB: Hewlett Packard – FW: Great company

JB: HP Palm – FW: Great acquisition

JB: Microsoft – FW: Dinosaur

JB: Apple – FW: Evil

JB: Boxee – FW: Promise

JB: Google – FW: Challenged (John asks: does Google have the DNA as a company or should they let someone else light it up for them? And on what they should do? Fred says they should buy Facebook.

Below are three videos of the interview in nearly all its entirety.

Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson did the keynote at today’s Geo-Loco Conference in San Francisco. Fred addressed current trends across the geo-location landscape and what the future will hold for LBS. He also shared his investment perspectives as well as where he sees opportunities going and why based on the way the market is currently evolving.