Location based apps developments.

von | Apr 8, 2010 | Blog, Digital Culture, Marketing Trends, Mobile Marketing

Foursquare and Gowalla are continously improving and updating their services. Latest news:

Foursquare is cracking down on cheaters. If your phone’s GPS determines that you’re not close to where you want to check in, you are not rewarded any points or mayorships.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t work with my iPhone, it won’t let me check into my Office, even though I am sitting in it. Looking at Google Maps, though, it seems that my GPS does indeed place me correctly.

This is a good move nevertheless. In the last month during my trip to Thailand I could well check into locations here in Hamburg whenever I wanted, enabling me to keep up the battle for the mayorship of your office here…

Gowalla in the meantime adds realtime feeds and activity streams based on the PubSubHubbub protocoll. This should enbale much more interesting mashup opportunities (since it is apparently faster than the user-specific RSS feeds that Foursquare uses). If this is the case it could yield an important differentiator for Gowalla, which to me seems to desparatly need something to effectively compete with the larger competitor Foursquare.

So, what did I miss?

von | Apr 6, 2010 | Blog, Digital Marketing, Marketing, Social Media Marketing

After 3 weeks of vacation, I am slowly digging through my RSS Feeds to catch up with whatever happened during my absence. Here are a few links of stuff I dugg up:

  • A new study with 1,500 consumers shows the influence of social media participation on buying intent: „over 50% of Facebook fans and Twitter followers say they are more likely to buy, recommend than before they were engaged.“
  • Will it blend? Of course the iPad also blends: http://bit.ly/9lXbOB (and you can fold it, too, apparently). Tom Dickson of BlendTec is at it again. It hurts, to watch that!
  • John Bell offers an interesting definition of community manager vs conversations manager.
  • Google goes from „fan“ to „like“. I don’t like this. The reasoning: users click on „i like“ more often than „become a fan“. Of course they do. My opinion: once Facebook changes that, users will click on „i like“ less often, because of the fear of too strong committment.
  • Trying to plan the next social media campaign? Let the social media planner help you.

I am sure that there is lots more, the arrival of the iPad and all the craze about it, for example. Or the hundreds of other news items about facebook, twitter and/or foursquare, that are surely still waiting for me in my RSS reader, but I am very much tempted to just press „mark all read“…