Google latitude checks in with National Chains

Google  is all ready to compete with  location-based mobile check-in programs as foursquare, Facebook Places and shopkick. Google Inc. is adding check-in offers from national chains including American Eagle Outfitters and Finish Line to its Google Latitude app.

American Eagle Outfitters is offering up to 20% off a total purchase for check-ins, sandwich shop Quiznos a free sub when consumers buy one sub of equal or greater value, and Finish Line $10 off on purchases of $50 or more. Radio Shack is also participating and Macy’s will soon join in.

Now consumers can check in to receive discounts at thousands of locations across the U.S., Google says in a blog post. To check in, a consumer opens the app and taps a button to activate the GPS that senses the consumer is within a store or other location.

To gain access to deals and discounts and to share their locations with friends, app users check in using Latitude. Users can make their way up Latitude’s three status levels as they make return visits to merchants. They also can monitor their levels to see how close they are to reaching the next tier. At each level, merchants offer various discounts and rewards for checking in.

• Each time a user gains a higher status, she can unlock any available check-in offers. 
• These can range from discounts to a free snack where users can see both available and locked offers at places. 
• To redeem an offer, a shopper selects it from the merchant’s Latitude Place page, taps Redeem and presents the offer on her phone to the merchant.  

Google Latitude is available for smartphones running Google’s Android mobile operating system and for Apple Inc.’s iPhone. To start unlocking offers with Latitude, consumers need to update to the latest version of Google Maps for Android. 

Latitude requires Android verison 1.6 or higher. iPhone uses can download the Latitude app for the iPhone, which comes with Google Maps pre-installed.The Google app, uses a smartphone’s built-in GPS technology to pinpoint the location of a consumer.

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New York Public Library Partners With Foursquare

The New York Public Library announced a new partnership with Foursquare Wednesday that gives patrons a special “Find the Future Centennial” badge.

The new badge celebrates the hundredth birthday of the library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on 42nd Street. To earn the new badge, Foursquare users can check in at various NYPL locations in the Bronx, Staten Island and Manhattan.

Users who obtain the badge will get a one-year Foursquare Friends Membership which will provide them with special perks, including photo ops in front of the Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III Trustees Room fireplace. Additionally, mayors at various locations will be included in a drawing for tickets to LIVE from NYPL events and behind-the-scenes tours of the Map Division.

In a press release, Dennis Crowley, CEO and co-founder of Foursquare said, “The NYPL has been a New York institution for 100 years, and it’s pretty amazing to see them starting their next 100 by embracing new ways to reach their fans.”

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Facebook Event Checkins To Compete with Foursquare

 

Facebook is testing a new feature that would let users check-in to their Facebook events.   According to AllFacebook.com some iPhone users are now seeing the option to check-in to events they're attending.

This feature would allow Facebook users to  check-in to their Facebook events. Facebook, it seems, has taken yet another page from Foursquare  and is heavily inspired by " Checkins " after it introduced  Facebook Places.

The “Check-In” button in Facebook only appears on the day of the event. Users must also be geographically close to its location. And while little is known about other applications of the feature, it’s safe to assume that it will complement both FB’s Deals and Events, presumably allowing folks to someday check-in to locations and win promotions, something similar to Foursquare and Groupon.

A Facebook spokesperson says that "We're currently testing this and it will be available with the next iPhone release."

According to AllFacebook.com, the check-in option shows up only for items you've confirmed you'll be attending and only when you arrive within the event's geographic area.

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The 20 Rudest Cities Ranked By Foursquare

If you travel around the world, you sometimes find yourself marveling at just how many different cultures can intersperse every second word with an expletive.

It's a talent that some might say the British have turned into something resembling an art form, as long as you have a refined interpretation of what constitutes art.

I am therefore expleting with joy that an English city has been named, by the politically correct techies at Foursquare, as the world's rudest.

How did Foursquare come to this conclusion? Well, in a post on the the company's engineering blog, Matthew Rathbone, an engineer who describes himself as a "proud British midlander" (this may be a first), explained that Foursquare is looking to make sense of all the data it has at its disposal.

In this example, he looked at all the world's English-speaking cities. (Glasgow was out, then.) He analyzed which of them featured Foursquare tips including words that might not be welcome at a place of worship.( source:cnet )

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Getting Around in London Via Foursquare

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FourSquare Data On Check -ins:Infographic

Data from Foursquare indicates that of the top 10 retail brands using the platform to get mobile users to check in and check out deals, eight saw growth in their check-in numbers during the week before to just after Christmas.

Some of those, Macy’s and Best Buy, saw substantial Foursquare traffic increases—25% for Macy’s, and 19% for Best Buy. Wal-Mart, Barnes & Noble, Target, Apple and Costco also saw week-over-week increases in Foursquare use at the time.

Obviously these growth percentages are only part of the story—just as Foursquare is only part of the location-based mobile services ecosystem, with 5 million users. After all, both Forrester Research and the Pew Internet & American Life Project have produced research suggesting how few Americans actually check in over Foursquare, Gowalla, Whrrl, CheckPoints, Loopt, Shopkick or any of the other platforms now available. The Pew Internet data, published last November, suggested that as few as 4% of Americans online have used location-based services.

Foursquare has a lot of data about users . Foursquare lets users earn badges based on where they check-in, how often, and with whom . Foursquare uses OAuth to let users  share these places.

WhereDoYouGo is an ITP project that creates a custom-colored heat map of your Foursquare haunts. You can generate maps for any city you've used Foursquare in. It was written in python and runs on Google App Engine. The team also acknowledges the following projects: Mike Knapp's OAuth library, the Google Maps API, the gheat-ae (and gheat) Google Code projects, jQuery, and Blueprint CSS.
(via Gizmodo)

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Half a Million and Growing: Foursquare gets Additional Funding

Location-based service Foursquare June 29 said it raised $20 million in series B funding from Union Square Ventures, O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz.Incidently foursquare has just turned one year on March ,2010 

Foursquare intends to use these funds to  hire more engineers and build out infrastructure to increase their  appeal beyond today's 1.8 million users  Foursquare's 1.8 million users vie for points, badges, mayor status and sometimes discounts by checking into bars and restaurants from their mobile phones.

The game serves as an example of how location-based advertising might work beyond simply luring smartphone users to retail stores by pinging their handhelds with advertisements. Foursquar lets users compete while connecting them with businesses they patronize.Users frequently 'check-in' with the app to update their current location, which is then broadcast to their friends.

Foursquare  has recently  partnered  with Starbucks who will now be offering a barista badge after five check-ins.

The New York Times reports “Starbucks plans to use Foursquare data less for business intelligence and more for getting feedback about what customers like and do not like. Frequent customers will also get rewards and more meaningful prizes, like invitations to special events, photo-sharing or online reputation scores.”

Starbucks is the first national retailer to partner with and provide a loyalty program on Foursquare. Lots of local/regional bars/restaurants/etc. have tapped into the potential of Foursquare, but the Starbucks partnership really seems to legitimize the opportunity for big brands to connect with their fans on Foursquare.

Foursquare started out in 2009 with limited availability in only 100 worldwide metro areas In January 2010, Foursquare changed their location model to allow check-ins from any location worldwide. As of March 2010, the service had 500,000 users internationally.

Foursquare is already working with some local businesses in rewarding customers based on the data behind foursquare usage.By elusively combining location-based tracking with user reviews, the practical application takes on a gamer’s mentality to “check-in” for greater exposure to new and familiar locales.

Foursquare's  CEO Dennis Crowley, who sold his previous" location-based company Dodgeball  to Google five years ago, this time is determined not to go the same route . Foursquare has earlier rejected  offers from Facebook and Yahoo.  
 

These companies, along Google, Twitter, Gowalla, Brightkite, Loopt and others, are all seriously investing in location-based services to stimulate more interaction among users. The idea is that the advertisers will go where the users are.

Foursquare is growing faster than Twitter did at this stage, going from just 1 million users in April to 1.8 million through June, adding around 15,000 users per day.

source:eweek.com

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