Posts Tagged ‘Geo-Location’

Posted on April 20, 2010 - by Wayne Sutton

The Undiscovered Value of the Check In / guest post by @LawPower

Louis Gray wrote a great piece titled “Should boring married people check in on location apps” which I felt needed a response. His experience is something I’ve seen many times before, he becomes the mayor of his house, checks in at the various gas stations and furniture stores, then questions the value of checking in. I say, come to North Carolina and use TriOut for a month. You’ll never look at checking in the same.

The “check in” doesn’t have to be a no-value, self promoting act. It can actually help you find places to go and people to meet. TriOut is based in the Triangle area of North Carolina; Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill. We’re more than just a location based service, we’re a service to our community.

We treat every user check in as a positive vote for the location you’re checking into. You wouldn’t keep going back to a place you don’t like, right? If you do, you know full well you’d give it a bad review, like the DMV or a horrible automotive shop.

Using this information, we developed a “popularity” index for locations based on the number of people who have visited, how often they visit, and what they rate the place. We can determine which restaurants in Raleigh are the most popular, which museums in Durham you should check out, etc. This is much more accurate than a simple “5 star rating” you get from other sites.

What makes this system even more valuable is when you’re looking for new places to explore. We have a “Places You’ll Probably Love” section in our search results. What this does is takes all the locations your friends have been to, calculates how popular they are with your friends, then returns places which you haven’t been in to, in order of popularity. My wife and I have used this just about every weekend to find new restaurants to try out, and the beauty is, there’s always something new to try.

We like to call it “organizing the word of mouth.” Your friends are out there going to some great places, eating at some great restaurants. Unless you catch them say it on Twitter, or have a conversation with them about it, you’ll never know. Because they check in at locations, and add photos and reviews of places they visit, we can share their impression of the location without you having to ask.

I’d say the “check in” is the most valuable technology that has popped up in the last year. Just as Twitter has become a system for communication, checking in will eventually become the way we get recommendations and find places to go. All it takes now is for more companies and developers to realize the power of it.

Guest post by Lawrence Ingraham from April 4th, 2010 on http://tri-out.com/blog

Disclaimer: I’m a partner with TriOut a location-based startup in NC where I serve as the Business development/marketing strategist.

Posted on February 25, 2010 - by Wayne Sutton

What's happening with @TriOut ? A Location-Based Social Network for NC.

If you’re live in the Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, NC area also known as the Triangle and/or follow me on Twitter I’m sure you have seen a few Tweets about @TriOut. TriOut which stands for Triangle Out is an idea that was first conceived in October 2009 by Lawrence Ingraham @Lawpower (founder of TriOut). Lawrence knew I was a fan of location-based apps and said we have the perfect community in North Carolina to launch our own location-based service.  After a few meetings over coffee and iPhone app beta testing, I joined Lawrence in helping make TriOut go from an idea to a reality. Mostly in #vampiremode at night.

Fast forward 5 months later and last week we held a launch party at the RTP Headquarters with about 100 attendees and  launched the website http://TriOutNC.com for non-iphone users and the community.

Ealier this week we emailed our first newsletter to our subscribers thanking everyone and announcing our first check-in special with 3 local  Dairy Queen locations and a top 5 Empire Eats check-in contest. It has been a pleasure working with Lawrence and we’re excited about the future of TriOut. Thanks for the support NC and if you’re not subscribed to our email newsletter you can do so here and on our blog.

Take a look at our first email newsletter below from TriOut with more details about the launch party, check-in specials and our contest.

TriOutNC.com launches

Hello everyone Last Wednesday, at the RTP Headquarters (@theRTP) around 100 people were in attendance from early TriOut beta users and bloggers, venture capitalists and, programers/developers, along with friends and family – as we officially launched TriOutNC.com and removed the invitation-only mode for the TriOut iPhone app. We would like to thank our sponsors and everyone who was in attendance. You can read the official press release here and recap post here. Also check out some the photos here by John Rees.

Mad Treats, Inc, Dairy Queen Check-in Special

Another announcement we made at the launch party was our “check-in” special with Mad Treats, Inc. at 3 local Dairy Queen Locations.The current specials are available at the locations: DQ Grill & Chill (New Bern Ave) DQ Grill & Chill w/Orange Julius(Morrisville Carpenter) DQ / Orange Julius (Brier Creek) After you have checked-in you’ll see one of the following badges for either a Buy one Medium Blizzard, Get the Second Free or get $1.00 off any smoothie. From there just show the badge to the cashier to receive your TriOut “check-in” special. Be sure to join us at the Triangle FreezeUp! FreezerBurns Live! @DQ on Monday, March 01, 2010 7:00 PM – 10:00 at the DQ Grill & Chill w/Orange Julius(Morrisville Carpenter) location hosted by Gregory Ng. You’ll recieve 10 TriOut points for attending and you can RSVP here: http://freezeup.eventbrite.com

Top 5 wins free $25 Gift Certificate at Empire Eats via Check-in Contest.

As some of you may have noticed every Monday morning the @TriOut Twitter account sends out a Tweet of the top 5 TriOut users for the week. With the new TriOutNC.com website you can see the leaderboard updating in real-time. We’re please to announce the Empire Eats Top 5 TriOut Check-in Contest for the week of February 22 – 28. The top 5 users for the week will receive a $25 gift certificate at one of the following Empire Eats locations below. You can read the full contest details including how to get points here.

Thank You Launch Party Sponsors

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TriOut | 4501 New Bern Ave.STE 130-252, Raleigh, NC 27610 919.295.0824 | contact@TriOutNC.com| icons via http://icondock.com.

Posted on January 20, 2010 - by Wayne Sutton

6 Ways to show your location with location based app widgets

As the rush to location based app supremacy continues going from check-in to Twitter seems to be the default way to share your location status. Next up the obvious is to show your location on your blog for readers to stalk you, I mean to track your offline movements. Brightkite, Yelp, Whrrl and Google Latitude provide their own code for creating a location based widgets. Recently fans of two of the popular location based social networks/apps in 2010, Gowalla and Foursquare have created custom widgets allowing you to add your recent check-ins or favorite location to any website. Brightkite doesn’t call their location widget a widget but a wall because it shows all of the users who have visited a location but nevertheless it’s a widget.

Below are 6 Ways for you to show your offline location with location based app widgets.

1. Google Public Location Badge – http://www.google.com/latitude/apps/badge

2. Yelp - http://www.yelp.com/bling

3. Whrrl: http://whrrl.com/widgets (have multiple ways to embed locations/stores)

4. Gowalla via WP-Walla wordpress plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-walla/

5. FourSquare PlaceWidget for WordPress: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/placewidget-for-wordpress/

6. Brightkite – http://brightkite.com/wall

Photo by Factoryjoe

Have you seen other location based widgets and would you add one to your site?

Posted on January 15, 2010 - by Wayne Sutton

Location Based Poll: What is your favorite Location based social network/app?

We’re only 14 days into 2010 and if there was one social media / technology prediction that everyone have been accurate about so far, it is that location based apps will be the next big thing. Now with 15 plus location social networks available many have already deemed Foursquare the clear leader, and if you look at the compete website numbers you’ll see why. After purchasing foursquare.com around August, their website numbers have passed some of the early location based social networks in just two months by more than double.

I don’t have all the data on how many users each location based social network has, but I do know that despite what many believe, the location based war is still very much wide open. For businesses looking to implement location based marketing to reach out to their customers, I suggest looking at all of the options and find out which location social network / app your customers are using before starting any with geo marketing.

To help businesses with their decisions and to provide me with some research data, I’m interested to see what is your favorite location based social network. Take a second and vote in the poll below. Also feel free to let me know why it’s your favorite location based app in the comments.

If you want to connect on Brightkite, Foursquare, Gowalla or Whrrl you friend on one or all of the profiles below:
Brightkite: http://brightkite.com/people/waynesutton
Foursquare: http://foursquare.com/user/waynesutton
Gowalla: http://gowalla.com/users/waynesutton
Whrrl: http://whrrl.com/person/7392180/Wayne_Sutton

*Disclosure: I’m a partner with TriOut.

Posted on December 21, 2009 - by Wayne Sutton

Location based apps by the numbers & the month @FourSquare passed them all, but why?

As we get closer to 2010 one of the items I’m sure you have read on probably every end of the year predictions post is that location based apps are going to be big in 2010. Locations based apps are not new for example, Brightkite has been around since 2005 and was clearly growing as one of the leaders in the location based market. I’m not sure who came next but soon to launch was Whrrl, Loopt, and now we have Gowalla and Foursquare. Foursquare has been all of the buzz latley and by looking at the compete.com numbers they’re on one roller coster ride up the vistors chart.

I was told in August is when they switch domains from playfoursqare.com to foursquare.com but regardless from September to now Foursquare their traffic growth has been amazing. Moving into 2010 not only Foursquare but all of the location based apps will have tons of competition with new apps launching such as stalqer, nextstop, TriOut. I’m sure more to launch in 2010 as looking back on a 2008 post from Read Write Web saying Location-Based Social Networking to Generate $3.3 Billion by 2013.

Besides all of the buzz as being labeled as the next Twitter by the early adopters and social media enthusiast what do think is the reason for Foursquare recent growth?