2WAY Summit Preview: Who’s Leading the Future of Location?

According to comScore, 16.7 million people used location check-in services in March 2011. More than 12.6 million of those people did so through their smartphones. The rise of the smartphone and location services are inextricably linked as platforms like FourSquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places and Google Latitude become mainstays in people’s digital arsenals.

Yet, in 2009, the location market did not exist. Foursquare and Gowalla were just getting off the ground and the notion that your phone was tracking your every movement was not of great concern to the public. How did we get from zero to 16.7 million in a matter of years?

Sponsor

Make It A Game, People Will Come

FourSquare launched right before South by SouthWest Interactive in 2009 and took the conference by storm. It was the first mobile-based check-in game that gave users any real incentive to tell people where they were in real life through the Internet. Badges and leaderboards had digital denizens bopping around Austin telling everybody what they were doing, and where.

At its launch, we noted that Foursquare provided users with incentive, saying, “Foursquare…adds a competitive element to the interaction, as it rewards you for checking in.

Foursquare’s primary competitor was Gowalla, which also had a March 2009 launch at SXSW. Checking in indeed became the thing to do.

If you were a giant geek.

The potential of location-based applications was readily apparent. It could be a cool game for users, a marketing tool for advertisers and local merchants, and a way to gain valuable data on the whereabouts of smartphone users. Two years later, we now see that tracking data is a big deal.

Checking In to the Feature Wars

Fast forward about a year or so. Foursquare, Gowalla, SCVNGR and, a little later, Facebook Places are all in a race for mind and market share.

Foursquare and Gowalla, having started at the same time, were the first to go head-to-head in adding features and attracting users. Partners were signed and incentives were launched, such as Foursquare with restaurant reviewer Zagat and Examiner.com and SCVNGR with a multitude of partners including the Boston Red Sox and Boston Globe.

Gowalla added comments and photo capability to location in March 2010, almost exactly a year after launch. Any location service that thinks of going anywhere these days has to have a full array of social capabilities – pictures, recommendations, comments and the like.

Foursquare has become the undisputed leader in the check-in game. Gowalla has tried to innovate new features to stay in the game but not much has really been heard from the service since last December when it unveiled a redesign that got mixed reviews.

Facebook Places & The Mainstream

Facebook launched its long-awaited Facebook Places in August 2010. It has seen moderate use but has not reached the type of critical mass that Facebook hoped it would when it launched. Instead, Facebook Places is just a competitor in the battle. What Facebook Places did do, however, was make the location check-in a near household term.

The day after Facebook Places was announced, Foursquare said it was registering more people than ever. The tech community stated that the war for LBSN (location-based social networks) was on.

Next page: Marketing, Development, Deals

Pages: 1 2