Image of Foursquare's board via Fortune
While some folks might attribute the rumbling feeling that hit New York this afternoon to a 5.9 earthquake in Virginia, Betabeat now knows better. It was the tectonic reverberations of defeat, as Facebook quietly phased out the Places feature of its mobile app which everyone was screaming for months would kill Foursquare.
In a Q1 2011 survey of its Wi-Fi Media Channel users, JiWire found that 44% made a purchase from a social shopping deal site, such as Groupon or LivingSocial, at least once a month. That includes 14% who do so at least once a week. Fewer than one-third of mobile Wi-Fi users said they never used social deals sites.
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via: Techcrunch
The mobile land rush is in full swing. Applications are being downloaded at a mind-bending speed, mobile media click-through rates are outstanding, and everyone in the space is working to create unique experiences that will drive everyday use.
But while mobile is rightly being treated as a core area of consumer engagement, too often it is being designed for as a smaller version of the desktop experience. This misses an opportunity to add real value to customers’ lives by being relevant in a mobile moment. As a guide for designers taking the mobile plunge, we have identified four ways existing brands have created powerful mobile experiences.
- Segment and Reduce Functionality
- Expand Your Product’s Use Context
- Take Advantage of The Social Nature of Mobile
- Create an End-to-End Experience for Your Customer
Check out the details at: uxmag.com
Most recently eBay integrated Milo into a few of its core products, including RedLaser. So with a single scan of a product in a store, users can see which nearby retailers have a product in store, and at what price. eBay also integrated Milo’s results into its own marketplace, allowing users to include local shopping tab in search results to check a product’s local, or in-store, availability directly from the eBay search results page.
But surfacing local product results and integrating barcode scanning only scratches the surface of local and mobile commerce and its potential. There’s no doubt that eBay is reaping the benefits of mobile commerce (the company expects to do $4 billion in mobile gross merchandise volume in 2011).
Local Payments
And eBay realizes that in order to really capitalize on local and mobile in the ecommerce experience, the company also has to be a part of the point of sale for local merchants. And eBay has a player in this race—payments giant PayPal. PayPal has been making its own small forays into local commerce and late last year launched a new version of its popular iPhone app that allows users to find businesses near their immediate location that accept PayPal as a form of payment. The feature rolled out in San Francisco initially, but we haven’t heard much about the initiative since last November.
Why? Well, scaling this feature broadly to other cities is a challenge for even a large company like PayPal. Not only do they have to find the local businesses, but PayPal has to teach them how to use their mobile apps as a payment mechanism. Wouldn’t it be much easier to acquire a company that could help PayPal and eBay do this?
WordSpy entry for SoLoMo
SoLoMo n. Mobile phone apps that combine social networking and location data. [Social + location (or local) + mobile.]
When asked why they don’t use location services, 58 per cent of respondents said they “didn’t see the point”. Despite teens being seen as careless with their online privacy, 45 per cent are avoiding location services because they consider them unsafe. 28 per cent said they didn’t believe their phones could run the software, while 16 per cent said they don’t use them as their friends don’t either.
Young people’s indifference to location services was highlighted when they were asked to score the services they are aware of out of five (‘One’ being pointless and ‘Five’ attributed to them loving it). Across all four services ,a score of three was the most frequent, indicating that they neither loved nor hated the products.
Let's look at Foursquare and Facebook. First, there's no doubt Foursquare is throwing off some impressive numbers (e.g. the company's recent announcement of 6 million users). It typically announces total, rather than active, users and that number is roughly growing linearly at present. Total users, by definition, of course, only goes up - yet according to compete.com, Web traffic has declined for five consecutive months, amounting to a 50% reduction in traffic over that period. And while traffic isn't the best indicator of usage, Web visits should be just as likely now as five months ago, and it's certainly not a positive sign of rapid growth in usage.
More details at the source..
You might say that the Go Game, an iPhone game launching this week at SXSW, is the best-researched project in the history of location games. Founders Ian Fraser and Finnegan Kelly have spent the last 10 years running a hacked-together version of the game at corporate team-building events for Google, Apple, EA Games, Zynga, Facebook, Microsoft, and Intuit.
"The managers at Intuit, the guys that do TurboTax--they love it too," says Fraser. And apparently so does every other company in the Valley. In fact, the Go Game is already pulling down $3 million per annum in revenue without any apps at all.
Until this week, the game worked like this: Your business would hire Fraser and Kelly to come out to your company's home city for a party or event, where they'd build a game for anywhere from a few dozen to a few thousand employees. They spent time before game-day traversing the neighborhood you select for the game and setting up what the founders call a "textured scavenger hunt." (Depending on the complexity of the game, your company pays $50 to $100 per player.)
New startup SNAP launches Wednesday to help businesses automatically connect the dots between their existing in-store loyalty programs and their customers’ social media behaviors. The SNAP service is now commercially available after having been piloted by Tasti D-Lite for more than a year.
Once deployed, SNAP’s patent-pending technology implicitly “checks in” the customer to his or her configured social networks each time a transaction occurs. The platform enables businesses to automatically reward customers with points, badges, discounts and the like for socially sharing that in-store activity back to Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare.
SNAP exists as a business layer that sits on top social channels. The system plugs into the APIs of Foursquare, Twitter and Facebook, but it has APIs of its own that not only allow for rapid store integration at the server level, but also enable SNAP to receive and track transaction data in real time.
