Posts Tagged ‘Smartphone’
If the darling of 2010 applications is to truly take hold Foursquare still has some work to do. A location based mobile application; the mobile marketing community is watching Foursquare’s adoption and usage with great interest.
It’s pretty simple. You put the app on your Smartphone and it links with GPS (and even Facebook if you want it to) and wherever you are you can ‘Check-in’ to let fellow Foursquarer’s (my term not theirs) know where you are and even invite them to ‘Swing-by’ (their term). These ‘updates’ can also be posted on Facebook automatically.
So say you are in Manhattan at your favorite watering hole. You check in to let your friends and followers know where you are so they can stop by if they are nearby. You can also make comments on whatever establishment you are in – good or bad. If you are the person to visit a particular establishment more than anyone in the network you are then deemed ‘Mayor’ of that establishment.
You gain ‘badges’ for checking in the first time and when you check in more than 3 times per week at a location you then get a ‘local’ badge. I cannot resist the temptation to think ‘we don’t need no stinkin’ badges’..but that’s not apparently how the folks at Foursquare feel.
The marketing implications? I’m not sure just yet. A few of my marketing associate friends are using it probably out of the same curiosity that I have – to learn more and see how people use it. But the whole check in thing while ok can be a bit much. There’s no way to not invite someone to ‘swing-by’ so wherever you check-in you invite people to swing by. This may not always be the way you’d want to go. If you check in when going home do you really want people to swing by?
One way Foursquare could be used is by companies that have sales and other employees on the road visiting clients and prospects. If integrated with a platform like Salesforce.com Foursquare would be able to show that the agent was at the location on the sales report. GPS is a wonderful thing – and big brother like at times as well.
At present it seems to me that Foursquare is primarily an urban-oriented tool. So that people could actually ‘swing by’ if they are in the neighborhood. Suburbanites and those in even more remote locations won’t immediately have as much use for it. But for some reason I think Foursquare is going to take hold and be a big-time force in the future. I’ll let you know if I figure that out and if you have any ideas on that I’d love to hear them.
A small article in today’s (December 10) NY Times – AT&T to Urge Customers to Use Less Wireless Data had me shaking my head. Here is a link to the article – http://bit.ly/8IgbCg. For those that do not know AT & T is the primary carrier for the Apple iPhone. With nearly 100,000 iPhone apps and with a substantial number of all-inclusive data plans it’s no wonder that the network is fast becoming overloaded.
They told us years ago that these days would come. When we first installed cable modem service a number of years ago the fear was that as more people adopted cable modem service to access the internet the ‘stream’ would become exceedingly clogged thereby slowing down overall communication. While I have not experienced more than one or two occasional slow-downs (apparently in our area we have some of the fastest service around), I fully expect that things could get worse before they get better.
What I found to be the most interesting statistic in the article was that 3% of Apple iPhone data traffic accounts for 40% of AT & T’s wireless data transmissions. So AT & T wireless is considering a pricing scheme that would ‘address the usage’. So I interpret that as what iPhone users that are on unlimited data plans are getting now will soon have to pay more. That strategy has been attempted (unsuccessfully) by frequent flyer programs and I suspect the same will be true of data plans. The horse is out of the barn folks and people are accustomed to getting it for a low flat price. Good luck with that.
An AT & T spokesman emphasized that the company would first focus on educating consumers about their data consumption in the hope that doing so would encourage them to cut back, even though they are paying for unlimited data use.
“We’re going to try to focus on making sure we give incentives to those small percentages to either reduce or modify their usage, so they don’t crowd out the customers on those same cell sites,” he said.
How do you think that will go? Companies are encouraging people to use their Smartphones to a greater extent but the provider is hoping people will use them less.
So at this moment I am happy to be a Blackberry Storm customer since the Verizon network is notably superior to AT& T, (ask any iPhone user about the frustrations of making phone calls on their iPhone) and there are so few apps for the Storm (a feature I don’t like but I guess is some sort of weird benefit).
Like Charlie Brown would say – ‘I can’t stand it’. Or understand it.
When I was in Tokyo earlier this year in March my friend and I went over to Akihabara which is the area in Tokyo that has all the newest gadgets and technology. I was interested in this since innovative technology often comes out of Japan. The most prevalent thing I saw there were cute little ‘computers’ called Netbooks which now have become the rage here in the United States.
Much less expensive than a traditional laptop (they start as low as $ 400 maybe even under that), Netbooks are much smaller and lighter than a laptop, have full internet capability and just a few applications like Word/Excel etc. They are more user friendly than a smart phone since you can actually type on them without having to correct spelling errors (or intuitive word spelling that comes with many smart phones) to anywhere near the degree that occur when typing on a hand held smart phone.
Since I have been doing so much traveling the idea seems intriguing to me. Until I realized that I have been using my laptop as a Netbook all along. It’s just heavier and has more features that for the most part I never use. I log into our company server and work remotely as do so many people. All the applications I need are contained on the server and I really don’t have much use for the ones contained in the hard drive of my laptop. Sure I have the option of using the apps on my laptop hard drive and I occasionally use them (when I am working on the plane without internet access) but as we head to the ‘cloud computing’ world the need for applications on a hard drive is lessening every day.
So while I can think of myself as an early adopter I am not ready to toss my laptop in the junk pile just yet but that day is coming. Of course once I have a projectable keyboard off my smart phone (that will host the same apps that I have on my Netbook) the need for a Netbook will also go by the wayside. Maybe that day will come before I make the switch to a Netbook. I hope so.