Marketing, Development, Deals
LBSNs have proved that there is some type of market for check-ins, location-aware apps and games. It may be a small market, though, as a recent survey said 77% of people do not care to have their location known through their smartphone.
But there is a dedicated group of users who use Foursquare and check-ins to keep in touch with friends and find new places to visit. So, the user base is there.
But monetizing a user base is easier said than done. The first thing that Foursquare did in this realm was to add its recommendation feature. In and of itself, recommendations do not seem like all that big of a deal. Yet the feature produces a huge amount of data, and data is a big piece of any Internet-based company’s puzzle.
Foursquare also has a few APIs that it can license, such as the Venue API that it released in March. A step towards monetization for a startup is the ability to let other startups build on top of your platform and Foursquare seems ready to take that step.
Recommendations can eventually lead to local deals and group-buying. It comes as no surprise that daily-deals service Groupon announced in the past month that it is partnering with location applications to help it unleash Groupon Now, its location-based real time deals engine. Both Foursquare and Loopt have joined with Groupon.
Facebook also launched a deals program in April. There will probably be a future marriage between Facebook Places and Deals.
More Than Just The Check-In
The check-in is just the start of the location-based market. From local question-and-answer sites like the stealth startup Hipster to deals like Groupon Now and contextual applications like It Happened Here, there are a lot of possibilities for users who are willing to let their smartphones know their location.
What is coming next? That is always one of the hardest questions to answer in any industry, let alone a fledgling and unpredictable market like smartphones, location and technology. We are going to do our best to figure it out, though, at the ReadWriteWeb 2Way Summit in New York City on June 13/14. On Monday the 13th we will have a session: Foursquare and the Future of Location with Alex Rainert of Foursquare and Dan Patterson of ABC News Radio. Sign up and hang out with us in New York City for two days as we take a deep look into the future of the Web.
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