Location based technology has a serious problem right now: checking in is not a natural behavior. Taking out your phone, switching on your GPS, opening your foursquare application, waiting for your places list to refresh, selecting a venue, checking in, deciding whether or not to push the checkin to Facebook and Twitter…it’s all too complicated. Mainstream audiences are never going to go through all of that the way early adopters are doing today. If tech companies want to take LBS mainstream, they’ve got to make it convenient, valuable and secure.
Editor’s Note: We will publish video from the press conference later this afternoon.
Loyalty 2.0. This morning at SCVNGR‘s press conference, and following Foursquare’s recent 3.0 launch, a barefooted Seth Priebatsch laid out the company’s newest strategy as he preps to leave Boston to deliver the keynote speech at SXSW in Texas.
As we guessed, the company has made a foray into the daily deals space (with their own gameified spin, of course) dubbed “LevelUp.” The idea is to morph the benefits of location based gaming and daily deals, to help turn and drive new customers into loyal regulars. In doing so, LevelUp blends check in, challenge and reward into one small, bite sized unit — one that’s both easily digestible and meaningful to small businesses.
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
A smartphone app offering rewards for customers of Buffalo Wild Wings created by Scvngr.
Local mobile advertising will be a new media darling market. BIA Kelsey has reported that mobile local advertising in 2011 will reach $692 million and climb steadily to over $2 billion by 2014, and Google has recently gone on the record to say that this market is their priority. In addition to businesses and advertisers, we will see carriers playing major roles in the acceptance and understanding of location-based services in countries all around the world next year.
Do smartphones make us smarter?
Mobile marketing confusions abound.
Two recent mobile marketing fails show just how much confusion there is about smartphones, apps, and geolocational social networking among consumers—a host of confusion that makes mobile marketing initiatives very tricky.
