Om Malik might be missing the (non-burning) LBS boat

Think locally scale globally! It's one of my core strategic pushes for entrepreneurs in this country. This is a massive industry in the making!

No one of the newer LBS (location-based services companies) has yet reached Google revenues, Facebook potential or Twitter scale. But in a recent post, respected tech writer Om Malik appears to poo poo the potential of the current crop of LBS start-ups:

My problem, of course, is not with the technology per se, but with its implementations. With the exception of Foursquare, most LBS startups have not found a way to even briefly engage me. Many of them are going to meet a fate no different that that of a moth flitting around a flame on a dark summer night. So in case you hadn’t noticed, I am a tad skeptical about this notion of geowars.

Maybe he's right. Maybe none of them will reach the stratosphere. But that's sort of like knocking the dozens (thousands) of PC companies in the early 1980s. No one could realy know in the early days who would be the next Compaq, for example, but the industry was about to explode. That's what I think about LBS. Hyperlocal is hyperglobal. Think, America, at the hyperlocal level -- and figure out how to scale that across the planet.

Godspeed!