While it’s always a good idea to look forward and broaden your marketing mix when it comes to technology, a new study shows that expecting a huge, at-scale ROI from such cutting-edge location-based services as Foursquare might be a bit premature. Research given to us today by marketing and tech firm Forrester shows that only a tiny stratum of the population is consistently using Foursquare
Geolocation service Loopt has just rolled out a new feature that lets users find out when their friends are nearby, whether or not they check in. The feature, which has been in beta for the last few weeks, takes advantage of the background location feature of the Loopt for iPhone and Android apps. For example, if I’m at a bar or restaurant and my friend is around the corner (assuming we both choose to share our location information with one another, of course), we’ll get alerted that the other is nearby.
E-books have hit a significant milestone. In each of the last three months, Amazon reports that sales of books for Kindle have outpaced the sale of hardcover books, and that growth is only accelerating. In a statement, Amazon says that, “over the past three months, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 143 Kindle books
RIM has just added a new geolocation feature to its Locate Service toolkit, which will permit BlackBerry developers to use cellular tower data when grabbing location data for their apps. This will ultimately enable apps to use cellular towers to approximate location if a user is in an area without GPS coverage
Despite the bungled launch and short hiatus, Twitter Places is back in action. The feature has huge implications for the geo-location space and the location-sharing movement.
The Foursquare-Google Maps mashup FourWhere has just added support for Gowalla and Yelp. The data from the three services is then displayed on a Google Map. While this in and of itself could be helpful and cool — especially for finding additional information or reviews about a location — Sysomos (the company that created FourWhere) has also used intelligent matching to combine similar venues
USA Today has partnered with location-based social network Gowalla to bring its travel content to the network’s users. Gowalla users who follow USA Today and check in at major U.S. airports will receive airport and airline news and features from the news organization’s Travel section and online community.
While Mark Zuckerberg may have a plan for simplifying Facebook’s privacy controls , apparently the social networking site has still not decided how it’s going to implement location-based features. During a Q&A session on Facebook’s privacy controls today, CEO Mark Zuckerberg was asked about what role privacy will play in Facebook’s location-based features. His response was twofold: First, he was not prepared to discuss the company’s new location-based features because it has not finished building them yet and, secondly, he admitted that frankly the company doesn’t know what exactly it’s going to do with geolocation yet.
Yahoo announced today that it has acquired Koprol, a location-based social network in Indonesia. The service is similar to Foursquare and Gowalla , enabling users to connect and share photos, reviews and other information in real-time using their mobile phone browser.
When Google upgraded their Local Business Center to Google Places , it launched the opening salvo in what we expect to be a long war for local advertising dollars.
