Foursquare launched in Dublin towards the end of last week. Foursquare is a service that allows you to share what your location is to people you are connected to on the service. Most of it is done via a mobile phone. Smartphone or ordinary phone It has a prepopulated list of businesses for each city they’re in. So far so what. To encourage people to use the service it rewards you with a points system and a leaderboard to see how well you’re doing. The person that checks in to a location the most becomes a Mayor and they can be ousted etc.
A cool enough way to build a network and they’re already tieing in with businesses. Encouraging them to reward frequent users etc. They are also trialing hyper localised advertising which is going to be where the money is in the next few years, thus Google’s purchase of Admob yesterday for 750Million. Right now they seem to use data from Yelp but maybe we’ll see them tie in with a local provider like hmm WhoseView.ie perhaps?
One of the founders Dennis built Dodgeball a few years back and sold it to Google and was quite blunt at the crap way Google treated them after acquisition. Looks like this is everything Google could have done with Dodgeball. I’ve only been on it a few days but I love it. Right now it appears that there’s just around 100 people in Dublin using this. Tiny numbers but watch how it grows.
Maybe I should have done this as a top ten post and riddled it with keywords for traffic? Ah well.
