OK the location war is on in earnest and Gowalla and Foursquare seem to be at the top of the heap in terms of popularity and fighting the battle to be at the top. This though is only the beginning of location centric applications, and I’m not going to speculate on who is the best (cough Gowalla!) here.
My belief is that location centric applications are going to be the next big wave (trust me it’s a small wave right now). The idea of checking into a location through a mobile phone opens up so many doors, too many to describe in one post.
The first awesome opportunity that comes to mind is when a business can tap into the Gowalla and or Foursquare data or API (or both) and push through deals and or specials to the application interfaces, so that when a user checks into the pub, restaurant or whatever the location is, they simply receive a push notification or an SMS of a special deal for checking in their, like a free beer, or half price meal that the user can then claim for checking in. Or perhaps another alternative is within the interface of the chosen location software, the user can browse through nearby specials within a given radius, from 100m to 1km.
I love the countless opportunities this opens itself up for. Oh the above idea is mine, get your own :0) HA HA!
SXSW Interactive Checkin Visualization from SimpleGeo Inc. on Vimeo.
This is the data SimpleGeo collected from the eight geolocated data providers (FourSquare, Gowalla, Twitter, Flickr, Bump, Brightkite, BlockChalk, and Fwix) during the South by SouthWest Interactive Festival. The live datastream was available on http://austin.vicarious.ly, but we thought people might enjoy a conference retrospective in data. If you’d like to have access to this data and more, and/or outsource your entire geolocation infrastructure to the experts in massive geodatasets, check out http://simplegeo.com; we’re in Beta right now, with a full launch at the end of March!
Created with Processing (http://processing.org/ ).
Maps from the OpenStreetMap project (http://www.openstreetmap.org ).
Music: “Pocket Tanks,” Eliran Ben-Ishai (DNA-Groove).
