Tag Archives: Geolocation

Flickr CC: Daniel Greene

When Foursquare, the coolest lbs kid in town, favourite of approx. 3 million users with 200 million check-ins, was down earlier this week, the social web reacted with frustration, sad tweets, and hunt for alternative check-in services.

Apparently, the most dedicated Foursquare users hooked on rewards and badges even chose to stay at home , until they were able to collect rewards of their check-ins.

“We are hearing from many users (they want to remain anonymous) that they are staying at home until the service is restored. One user called us on our tips hotline noting that it just “isn’t worth going out if you can’t get a badge”.”

The concept of check-in also continues to heat up among businesses, especially fashion industry going gaga over the new ways location based services allow brands to interact with, as monetize their customers. Good example of how hot it is, Swedish retailer giant H&M just launched their first Foursquare campaign in Sweden, regardless the fact, that use of location based services is still fairly moderate in Sweden. Gowalla holds the pole position with 35 000 users against Foursquare’s 9 000 users. The buzz and eyeballs around the campaign evidently are worth as much.

Sharing location was seemingly hot concept already back in 2007, when Facebook filed for a patent on general sharing location mechanisms. The patent was granted this week, adding an extra twist on the already competitive space.

Map.pr Finds You Interesting Places With Help Of Groups

The one not afraid of patents and competition is Swedish Map.pr. Map.pr is all about location around groups and interests, based on the idea that your friends make the best maps. Map.pr uses places from Foursquare, building enhanced search on top to let you find cool places nearby recommended by your group members. No need to trust the “Giraffe sign”  I’ve been one of the beta testers, and since its release in July, the app has already had thousands of downloads.

When you check in with Map.pr, you still check-in with Foursquare, so you don’t miss out on any badges or mayorships. But what’s unique to Map.pr, with any check-in, one can also check-in with a group one belongs to. To give a sense of a venue’s popularity, unlike Foursquare, Map.pr iPhone app also shows how many individual and team check-ins a venue has. Anyone can create its own group, and the possibility to create and add venues via Map.pr is being added in the next coming update. Until now, it’s only been possible to check-in to already existing venues.

There’s no native Android app on the roadmap, instead an updated mobile web version with check-in functionality is round the corner. Check-ins with Facebook Places, which hasn’t reached Nordics yet, aren’t yet allowed by Facebook API, but instead Map.pr is about to integrate with new Facebook Groups, released earlier this week with both privacy blunders as upsides, to let you share check-ins within a group, private or open. As before, one can share check-ins to both Facebook and Twitter. Gowalla users have, for now, been left out of the service.

Map.pr White Label To Boost Businesses’ Customer Engagement

Cartomapic, the startup behind Map.pr, was founded early 2010 by a team with backgrounds in Google Maps and Spotify, surely qualifing regarding domain competence within location and app design. But, as all social check-in services, they’re about understanding and triggering human behaviour. Since grouping and categorizing venues as function isn’t considered a long term competitive advantage, Map.pr needs to do something else differently. One way is to monetize by competing with a more attractive price model on partnerships than its established competitors. It also plans to offer its solution as a white label, letting businesses create their own branded check-in services around events, releases etc. I find the idea of focusing on aggregating check-ins and information from several location based services, e.g. like Buzzd does with hottest venues nearby right now, compelling. By also aggregating check-in info into a comprehensive recommendation system for groups, I could see how Map.pr just might find its way to the end of the rainbow.

Paula is online strategist and startup evangelist. She blogs at paulamarttila.com and here at Bub.blicio.us.
Connect with her on Twitter, LinkedIn,
Drop her email at paula.marttila[at]gmail[dot]com

RateItAll’s new geolocation solution, Double Dutch, promises to be the Ning of location-based social networks

By Marissa Louie, March 25

RateItAll, a top consumer ratings site headquartered in San Francisco, recently launched its white label  location-based mobile social network platform, Double Dutch (http://doubledutch.me). It received noteworthy coverage and rave reviews at SXSW in Austin. And it’s a blast to test drive.

The premise: Imagine if you were to take an app like Foursquare or Gowalla and limit the audience to a specific niche, like pick-up basketball players or attendees of the World Cup. That’s what Double Dutch promises with its white label solution, specifically for B2B customers including conference and events organizers, companies that work in multiple locations, and more.

Essentially, it is the Ning of location-based social networks.

CEO of RateItAll, Lawrence Coburn, emphasizes, “Double Dutch is exciting because it allows any company, community, or organization to get up and running with a best in class geolocation app in a matter of weeks.”

RateItAll is wise to enter this space since it can augment the geolocation service with over 5 million consumer ratings native to RateItAll, collected over the past 10 years. Think of it as importing Yelp ratings into Foursquare.

This is powerful because it provides the extra edge of consumer validation for almost any given location – if you check in somewhere, you can see what RateItAll users have rated the site. With Foursquare and Gowalla, you cannot view historical reviews of a location.

Additionally, the lack of privacy on Foursquare and Gowalla have caused concerns and unwanted implications. Lawrence Coburn says, “Location data is very useful, but it’s also very personal. The private label nature of Double Dutch allows communities to enjoy this functionality, but within the safer confines of a smaller, more trusted group.”

Double Dutch offers both a standard app for the consumer market (non-customized) and a customizable white label application.

Some product feature candy that Double Dutch offers:

Non-customized features:

-Social check-in
-Friending
-Friends view
-Search and venue discovery
-Locals view
-Venue information
-Ratings/reviews
-Venue photos
-Rockstardom
-Achievement stickers
-Point system
-Leaderboards
-Facebook integration
-Twitter integration
-Push notifications

Customization options (white-label basis only):

-App Name
-Logo and iPhone artwork
-Venue data
-Custom tab
-Custom achievement stickers (coming soon)
-Color scheme (coming soon)

Given the heated tee-off between Foursquare and Gowalla at SXSW, Double Dutch has great market timing. Lawrence Coburn tells us, “As smartphone usage continues to spike, I expect to see more and more demand for location-based services. The timing for a customizable, white-label app like Double Dutch couldn’t be better.”

We agree wholeheartedly.

Get the free Double Dutch iPhone app at the App store: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/doubledutch/id336955484?mt=8

To request your own location-based network, contact CEO Lawrence Coburn at lawrence@doubledutch.me

About the Author:

Marissa is a contributor to Adotas and BusinessWeek. Follow her on Twitter: @malouie

Marissa Louie is the Founder and CEO of HeroEx, San Francisco’s affordable 1 hour delivery service.

Contact her at (510) 375-1941, or email marissa@heroex.com.

TechCrunch just reported that Twitter’s geolocation features are finally turned on, just in time for you to find everyone at SXSW. My own geolocation features on my Twitter account don’t seem to be active yet, forcing me to borrow a screenshot from TechCrunch (thanks guys!). As you can see, there’s a tiny blue marker that, when clicked, expands into the tweet-location.

Ok, I find geolocation on my Tweets a little creepy, but it’s the sort of thing I can see turning on for big events (like SXSW) and conferences. But for me, it certainly won’t be an everyday occurrence (or so I say now).

How do you turn on geolocation? For quite some time, there’s been a geolocation option in your profile settings. I imagine you just tick the On box. As TechCrunch said, “While Twitter’s geolocation feature has been live through its API since late last year, there was no sign of integration into the main twitter.com site until now.”  It’s worth mentioning that Facebook just announced it will start rolling out its own location features next month as well (via Mashable).

Additionally, Twitter has made a subtle but fun change to its user interface. (Come to think of it, it’s also a change that means I need to update every screenshot in a lot of my course offerings.)  We’re no longer Updating, now we’re truly Tweeting!

Update: Well, apparently Twitter changed it back to Update. Come on, Twitter – we liked Tweet!

Twitter’s been busy this week. Really, really busy.

First, they’ve rolled out that Retweet Beta to what has to be almost everyone. I’m not really a fan of it – I miss the personal WHY behind the retweet that I don’t get anymore, and I think it’s hard to see who the retweet is from at first glance. I’m glad my third-party apps are still using the old Retweet. I don’t really think I’m alone in my reception to the Retweet option.

Next, they’ve gone French. Twitter is now translated into both Spanish and French, just in time for the big Le Web event. Speak French? Twitter wrote the announcement en français.

Twitter also now knows where you are. Or rather, it could. Twitter has rolled out the API for geolocation. What this means is that third-party apps like Seesmic and FourSquare can start integrating the location of your tweets. I’m pretty sure that some mobile apps already do this, such as Twidroid, if you turn on the option. I think it’s just better integrated now. This is only in the API though, and hasn’t yet been implemented on Twitter.com. At the recent Social Media World Forum I attended, location-based anything was definitely one of the top topics. Twitter has also updated their privacy policy to reflect geolocation.

They’re not done yet. In what I think is the smartest thing they could have done, they changed the question. Back in April, I begged them to change the question. While we occasionally answer “What are you doing?” it led to terrible discussions with people who didn’t “get” Twitter. After all, What are You Doing? can lead to stupid discussions. I’ve always thought people were more communicating what they were learning, but “What are You Learning?” isn’t really a cool question. Twitter has updated the question to “What’s happening?”

Sure, someone in San Francisco may be answering “What are you doing?” with “Enjoying an excellent cup of coffee,” at this very moment. However, a birds-eye view of Twitter reveals that it’s not exclusively about these personal musings. Between those cups of coffee, people are witnessing accidents, organizing events, sharing links, breaking news, reporting stuff their dad says, and so much more.

The fundamentally open model of Twitter created a new kind of information network and it has long outgrown the concept of personal status updates. Twitter helps you share and discover what’s happening now among all the things, people, and events you care about. “What are you doing?” isn’t the right question anymore—starting today, we’ve shortened it by two characters. Twitter now asks, “What’s happening?”

So the folks at Twitter have been swamped. In the midst of all that, @lukester at Twitter was forwarded my Locked Out issue by a friend and in 10 minutes had me up and running again. I don’t know what took four days (other than, you know, they’re swamped), but I’m ever grateful to the awesome @lukester who gave me back access to Twitter and Twitter via mobile 3rd party devices, which is really important to how I communicate. Thanks Twitter!

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Cheers!
Tweet Michelle @writetechnology, send her technology news at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, visit her wine blog when you’re thirsty, and drop by her day job.