In the early days of the gold rush to create location aware and contextually relevant mobile applications for smartphones, I was constantly bombarded with business plans that showed revenue models driven from advertising. Although advertising is a plausible way of earning revenue, there is a high level of inherent risk since those businesses are largely at the mercy of market rate CPMs/eCPMs and available ad inventory (unless you have a rockstar in-house ad sales team). Ad inventories are beginning to improve as advertisers are becoming more and more aware of the high interaction and engagement rates of mobile ads. However, for startups looking to differentiate in their niche, monetizing solely through ads is a risky road to travel. That being said, I believe that ads are still relevant  for *lite* versions of apps that supplement a paid model of some form and for monetizing certain consumers that would not otherwise become a paying customer.

Tim O’Reilly wrote a short article last week on the convergence of Advertising and E-commerce and I thought he hit the nail right on the head. He says that “E-commerce is the killer app of the phone world. Anyone whose business is now based on advertising had better be prepared to link payment and fulfillment directly to search, making buying anything in the world into a one-click purchase. Real time payment from the phone is in your future.” I completely agree. Square is a great example of real-time point-of-sale (POS) coming to iPhone.

In the article, O’Reilly arrives at this conclusion by making a few theories about what can be expected from the marketplace based on some recent announcements and common sense:

• Google, Apple, and Microsoft will announce e-commerce programs akin to AdSense, in which retailers will register with “app stores” to allow physical goods and services to be bought as easily as apps
• We can expect announcements of partnerships between phone providers and Amazon or Wal-Mart to fulfill mobile e-commerce requests

There are a number of mobile apps that are positioned well to capitalize on some of these trends such as foursquare and other mashups of local and geocoded information. IMHO, there is a more exciting category that is only starting to gain excitement. Companies like Layar, Tonchidot (Sekai Camera), Mobilizy (Wikitude) and TAT (Recognizr) are creating augmented reality browsers and applications that use location data and combine it with image recognition technology to recognize specific people or places in the physical world and allow the application user to interact with them in some capacity. I strongly believe that these are some of the fundamental technologies that will make this category of future applications possible. By linking interaction of location-aware data through to payment and fulfillment functions, one can point a phone at a local pizza restaurant and order a pizza to their home en route. Another example may be pointing a phone at a friend and performing a money transfer with only a few clicks.

What killer apps can you think of that combine hyperlocal, e-commerce and fulfillment?