Who has more check-ins at Boston's Logan Airport--Facebook Places, or Foursquare? How about at Cowboys Stadium in Texas, or Hotel Piazza di Spagna in Rome? How startup Foursquare is holding the behemoth that is Facebook at bay, by the numbers.
In the battle to be mayor at your coffee outpost, it's easy to
overlook the stat that only 1% of smartphone owners use location-based
apps more than once a week. To nudge more folks into joining the
geo-craze, TripAdvisor and Groupon are adapting data from Facebook
Places and Foursquare to make their recommendations more real-time and
relevant, based on where you are and what your friends most recently
liked. "People have all this location knowledge they're waiting to
release and share," says Laurel Ruma, cochair of this Santa Clara
conference.
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"What our clients are struggling with is: How big a deal are social media and location-based services, and how much of it is just sound and fury?" says a senior VP of Applied Predictive Technologies, which runs data analytics for Starbucks and Subway.
Already gearing up to make a splash at this year's SXSW, the company today launched Gowalla 3 for Android. But the real news at SXSW will revolve around Gowalla's new rewards system, which could rival deals platforms of Foursquare and Facebook Places.
"I mean, we're so small that anybody can probably swallow us up tomorrow for the right price," says Holger Luedorf, Foursquare's VP of mobile and partnerships.
According to a report released Friday by Forrester Research, location-based services such as Foursquare and Gowalla are attracting the wealthier demographics.
Check-in service Gowalla launches iteration 3.0 today, an entirely redesigned and rebuilt version of the location-based app that blurs the lines between its competitors Facebook Places, Foursquare, Twitter, and Tumblr.
Foursquare's pilot program, launching today, breaks away from Facebook Places and Gowalla with badges and discounts based not only on locations but your reasons for being there.
Gowalla, the geo-location competitor to Foursquare, is going to Disney World. As part of a new deal announced today, Gowalla will provide its unique “check in” service to all of Disney’s U.S. parks and resorts.
