YPG Canada announced today that it will join Foursquare’s venues project. This will provide Foursquare with the 1.5 million business listings in YPGs YellowAPI. Existing YellowAPI developers will conversely have one-stop access to Foursquare’s API.
The venues project is meant to improve Foursquare’s listings and its API. For YPG, this move boosts its efforts to support application development in Canada through its own YellowAPI. This distributes its its brand, listings and advertisers into the LBS developer ecosystem.
This is admittedly easier in the less competitive Canadian market, but has positioned YPG well. Tying up with Foursquare should further solidify this and distribute its listings and advertisers in ways that have branding and/or advertiser retention implications.
RFID technology is commonly used in transport systems (such as Oyster) and for tracking logistics. WeSC's KarmaTech concept, designed by students at digital media school Hyper Island, sees RFID used for linking the real world with social media.
By placing an RFID tag into each WeSC shoe (or any shoe for that matter), you can create a network of people that could have access to their social networking services, as well as special location-based deals and services.
Ricardo and I were talking about this exact thing - an RFID tag in a shoe that interacts with a venue checkin - it could also interact with screens or really anything inside the venue too
In its first report on the use of “geosocial” or location-based services, the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life project finds that 4% of online adults use a service such as Foursquare or Gowalla that allows them to share their location with friends and to find others who are nearby. On any given day, 1% of internet users are using these services.
It seems a week doesn’t go by without an announcement about a new location-based services platform, while the so-called incumbents (Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, etc.) are tying desperately to add new features to generate revenues and grow their user base.
Agencies and brands however, are still “just experimenting” with location based services and not making significant investments, hindering adoption and mass market consumer appeal.
David Fieldhouse, co-founder and director of strategy at Lucidity Mobile, said, “Large agencies and brands rely on scale to make their business work, so when it comes to emerging services it really is difficult to convince them of the value.”
“When you talk to brands about using mobile vouchers they initially get quite excited, but then it gets really technical and you just see the clients’ eyes glaze over and the whole thing gets dropped,” he said.
One of the key reasons for this slow to adopt approach is the lack of analytics tools designed to help agencies measure reach, frequency and ROI.
Well, it appears we’re making progress. In the last month three new analytics platforms have entered the market.
via asifrkhan.com
Getting out the vote is key for Republicans and Democrats on election day next Tuesday, but whether a Foursquare check-in badge for polling places will help promote voting is anyone's guess.
A non-partisan group of digital political consultants, tech firms, and civic organizations, including Foursquare, has unveiled the check-in badge, which features a red, white, and blue U.S. flag-inspired design. By checking-in at their polling places using the badge, voters will notify friends and followers that they voted.
