Established behavior + niche need = successful business I’ve uttered this equation several hundred times over the past few years and I look for these qualities in every business model I review. In the fall of 2009 Brian was at a Phoenix concert in Phoenix. As the concert started, he looked around and saw hundreds of people pulling out their smartphones to tweet, post pictures to Facebook, shoot...
What’s the difference between location based marketing and location based services? Other than spelling, location based services is a subset of location based marketing. I’ll give two examples to help spell out the difference. Location based marketing – A person checks into Foursquare and sees and offer for that business such as 15% off for the next week. They find the products...
We’ve been hearing the term hyper-local thrown around and declared the future of social media/mobile for the past year. Sounds great. Now, what the hell does it mean? At 30,000 ft, hyper-local means instead of saying Denver, you’d break Denver out into its constituent parts such as Highlands, Capital Hill, LoDo, LoHi, Edgewater, Cherry Creek and WashPark. Something, only locals would...
I keep hearing people that say mobile (web/app) needs to be “stupid simple” for people to use and although I do believe that usability is important, mobile does not need to be stupid simple. It needs to be smart. Smart like a Swiss army knife. For mobile, smart is: Easy to use interface – Usability is the number one reason why Apple’s smartphone has taken the smartphone...
Finally got to watch the webinar that Placecast put on and there was a portion of the presentation that really got my attention. It was the Sonic Burgers case study. They used location based SMS marketing to attract customers which is going to increase in popularity with businesses like Placecast. What they did that I thought was interesting was allow for other venues to act as triggers for the...
Aloqa is another great example of personalized location based services. Enjoy!
I’ve been reading up on the latest methods of location determination (LD for those that love acronyms) and I have to say that if mobile is going to get to the level of detail it needs to be, we’re going to have to employ better methods (and maybe technologies) that allow the users precision. I’ll list out the three methods I’m aware of and their strengths/weaknesses. GPS...
Way back in July (sound familiar?) I posted about Twitter, geo-targeting and location based services combining to create what I referred to as conduit marketing. (Also talked about it here and recently here.) About a month ago I heard of a company called Schmap and how they were using Twitter to essentially create the foundation for this type of service. They call it Geotweeting. (Brightkite does...
This past Friday, I had the good fortune of speaking with the founders of Brightkite, Brady Becker and Martin May. I got the ball rolling by walking through the front door and accusing Brady of being Martin . . . Fortunately things got better from there. Once we sat down, they told me they had just finished an interview with the Wall Street Journal the day before and had also made a TechCrunch...
Recently (and reluctantly) I signed up for Twitter. I only say reluctantly because there is a good chance that a constant feed based on my life will be somewhat less than what I would like it to be. Or it may be more PC to say different from what I think it should be. I have two young children and my ability to travel and do the things that I used to do have been somewhat hampered by my need to...