Concept
Big American media brands massively use Foursquare for their marketing efforts. HBO, Warner Brothers, New York Times, Bravo, History Channel en Metro News have all made commercial deals with Foursquare. This mobile service is aimed at “sharing experiences” when people go out. Users can check in with their smart phone and check at the Foursquare page at which hospitality place they are (cafe, restaurants etc). They can leave comments about these places. Users can also score points by frequently checking in. By this they earn a certain status which is rewarded by badges.
Business model
The service wants to make money with it by sponsoring deals, not with advertisement. The deals made with the big media companies have several services: e.g. Warner Brothers serves Foursquare members with tips for romantic places in their city and remembers the client when a film is starting, TV broadcaster Bravo serves Foursquare members with discount coupons when they check-in at certain places. The American restaurant guide Zagat serves restaurant tips and the New York Times visitor can win a special Vancouver badge. All these services are only delivered via opt-in. The Foursquare member has to give permission for the services.
Foursquare has now 200.000 members and figures are rising quickly. The servers get more then 1 million check-ins per week. Applications are available for Android, i-Phone, Palm, Windows Mobile and Blackberry. Foursquare started the service in a couple of cities but is now available worldwide.
So indeed it seems that Locative media and business are finding each other.
Check out this video, which is recorded at TED.
Amsterdam is picking up the new Google Buzz social networking tool that was announced last week. Google has linked Buzz to Latitude as well (depending on the privacy settings). This means that people can see where their friends and what they’re doing. It’s interesting that not only your friends are visible, but all Buzz users nearby. This opens a lot of possibilities for creative minds and discussions on the privacy issues!
LG Digital has announced that a full A3 sized e-paper that will be introduced in April. The novelty in LG’s latest marvel, is that it makes the physical distribution and the every day hustle of printing millions of newspapers obsolete. The Gutenberg era of mechanical reproduction is changing into digital reproduction. The smell of ink and the touch of fresh paper soon will be nostalgia. Newspaper corporations are sluggish and conservative in their approach to new media. The distribution costs rise dramatically and the product is a static, disposable, environmentally unfriendly medium. What is the USP of a news paper? Is it the content? The Smell? Selling Paper? Selling emotion? A combination of these elements? In this post, I will briefly elaborate on the contemporary distribution. And I will propose a distribution model that is based on digital reproductivity and its positive effect on the contemporary environment, distribution and costs.