Posts Tagged ‘techcrunch’

Posted on June 13, 2010 - by Wayne Sutton

This week in location: @Foursquare dominates location-based services news, @Gowalla says it’s focused and more.

What a week for @Dens @naveen @tristanwalker and the @Foursquare team. From @Mashable and @CNN partnerships to securing another round of venture capital, last week Foursquare was on a roll. Over at camp @Gowalla they posted a lengthy blog post about their focus and World Cup badges. Team @TriOut launched a HTML5 check-in web app and @Standford is graduating with the @Loopt Star app. Also a few other location based services made some news this week along with a ton of blog post still debating the value of location-based services. Here’s a list of location-based news from last week.

TLC + Foursquare = New Tips and Badges for Summer
by @jolieodell

TLC’s Foursquare integration will help users find venues conducive to enjoying the warm weather, including barbecue restaurants, zoos, amusement parks, swimming pools and the like. Users will be able to earn the TLC Summer badge by checking in at any TLC Summer-tagged location.

Checking in? Follow Mashable on Foursquare
by @lavrusik

Mashable is partnering with Foursquare to give you insider tips and recommendations when you check in. From New York City to Silicon Valley, our reporters and editors will be your guide as you explore your city.

Two Dudes, One Flip, and a Disappointing Lack of Focus
by @Gowalla

Keeping focused affects the development schedule, which features we implement and which we trim. It affects which spots get featured sooner rather than later, which promotions we engage and which we table, all via the filter of ‘Does this help make Gowalla the easiest way to share the places you go with friends?’ And we do our best to answer that question honestly: Adding a function within Gowalla that gives you hints at where to find items you’re missing might not necessarily help Gowalla be the easiest way to share places with friends, but adding the ability to upload photos at a spot–now that’s something that will help you share the places you go!

Stanford mixes in mobile social media for Commencement Weekend
by @Stanford

For graduating students, Commencement can feel like a whirlwind of events and goodbyes. But this year they’ll have a new tool to help them get the most out of Commencement Weekend: a social mapping application (and mobile rewards game) known as Loopt Star. Students who download the Loopt Star application onto their iPhone or iPod Touch will be able to follow their friends and earn a special Class of 2010 graduation gift by checking in to multiple Commencement events.

Location Based Services: Where’s the beef?
by @greggvm

The real value of course, outside of the tangible benefits of coupons, loyalty programs, gifts and savings, is on the social side of things and the convenience side. Imagine you’ve just finished dinner and you want to get a drink or a cup of coffee someplace else. Again, using TriOut as an example, you’d simply go to the app, or the mobile site in a browser if you prefer, and you’d see a list of those places close by. A quick tap and you’d see what your friends think of the places, see photos of the venue, available menu items, etc. That’s convenience.

Flook Builds Location-based Offers Right Into Its App
by @martinsfp

The partnership with voucher, sale and discount search engine Geocast, which it will formally announce later today, sees Flook automatically select the relevant offers from Geocast’s catalogue for inclusion in Flook’s content stream. BView vouchers will be presented as just as any other content is within the app. “Booking forms” will be built in, allowing users to take advantage of the offers without leaving the app.

Is this Foursquare or Bore-square?
by @Markwschaefer

One part of the experiment was becoming a mayor. I wanted to see what happened when you were crowned king of a location. This happened fairly quickly when I was the first Foursquare visitor to a local barbecue joint. “How sad. This location has no mayor” it reported. So the next day I went back and became the mayor. Great for the restaurant but what did I get out of it? An electronic award. Hmmm.

5 Reasons Higher Ed Can Forget about Location-Based Services
by @Inigral

While they might not be a marketing goldmine for higher ed, location-based services are far from dead in the water. But let’s face it, we’re not Starbucks and we’re not giving out frappacinos. You’re welcome to keep the technology on your radar, but for now keep it out of your marketing playbook.

Foursquare Now Experimenting with Badge Rewards
by @jbruin

The future for Foursquare will be defined by adding more value to service, which Crowley says will happen through more partnerships and more sophisticated features. The hope is that the company can engineer ways to encourage interactions between users who are checked-in to the same venue.

Foursquare Stats: The Importance of Check-In Time
by @ryantaft

These are only a few of the benefits to knowing when your customers are checking-in at your venue on foursquare. Keeping a close eye on the Time Breakdown section of foursquare Stats is extremely easy, and very useful.

Geotoko Piggybacks Location Services For Local Business Campaigns
by @MobileMW

Geotoko gives businesses a dashboard, where they can create a designated site for a promotional campaign. That site will then aggregate check-in and geolocation info from Foursquare, Twitter and Gowalla (with Brightkite, Facebook and others to follow) for the business’ location along with the details of a campaign or promotion- such as prizes, free gifts, etc.

Yelp & Foursquare: Utility vs. Hipster Chic
by @gsterling

You may or may not agree with that perspective. I’ll offer a kind of ironic rejoinder to that view: Yelp, by adopting check-ins and badges, is now exposing a much larger audience to these game concepts and thereby potentially helping to mainstream them. By copying Foursquare, Yelp could be helping the site ultimately by “acculturating” people to LBS gaming.

Only 10% Of Businesses Would Pay For Foursquare: Survey
by @sengineland

Only 10% of businesses that are currently using Foursquare as a free marketing tool are willing to pay for the service; that’s one of the interesting survey results presented last week during the “Location Services: The New Local Search?” session at the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle.

Andreessen Horowitz To Win The Foursquare Investor Badge
by @Arrington

Andreessen Horowitz, despite rumors that they were pulling out of discussions with the company weeks ago over concerns that too much information was leaking to the press, is the last venture capitalist standing. The fact that founding partner Marc Andreessen is on the board of directors of Facebook, a key partner or competitor of Foursquare, may be the factor that put them over the top.

Foursquare’s Yelp problem (they just got time to figure it all out)
by @scobleizer

This week I downloaded a new Yelp app onto my iPhone. In it Yelp included a copy of Foursquare’s badges, which reward people for checking in frequently. Sometimes you might get a swarm badge for checking into someplace that has a lot of other users checked in too.

TriOut News:

TriOut launches API along with a new HTML5 check-in web app for Android and iPhone users
By @waynesutton

The second announcement was the launch of the new mobile experience for Android and iPhone users at http://mobile.TriOutNC.com. The new mobile experince is an HTML5 web app built on the new API. With http://mobile.TriOutNC.com it brings an entirely different look and feel to TriOut and focuses on a faster check-in experience, a better way to see your friends activity, finding nearby places, and upcoming events.

Location-based post on SocialWayne.com
Google announces location-based search tagging and post coupon feature. Will Google Latitude be the most important LBS?

Podcast #13 – The future of location-based apps? Checking in with @LawrenCecoburn & @DoubleDutch the build your own location-based startup.

Presentation: Location Based Marketing in 2010

Did you read any interesting location-based articles last week or have a comment about any of the above articles? Let me know in the comments.

Posted on July 31, 2009 - by Wayne Sutton

16 reasons why I'm not quitting the iPhone

So today, famed tech blogger, Michael Arrington @arrington of TechCrunch wrote a blog post called, “I quit the iPhone“. Arrington has a large audience that reads his network of blogs and is very successful and popular in terms of his events that he plans in the technology space. In other words Arrington has power and influencer depending on how you look at it. Either way Arrington and I both bloggers and entitled to our own opinions. I would like to think we have a lot in common but he’s a lot more successful than I am at the moment but lets hope that changes in the near future. Nevertheless this isn’t about Wayne vs Arrington but just my thoughts on why I’m not quitting the iPhone for another mobile device.

Here are my reasons.

1. The iPhone OS is the best mobile operating system in terms of usability, period.
2. I don’t want to carry around two devices. Arrington said he will use a Palm Pre and an iPod Touch.
3. I don’t live in a heavily metropolitan area and AT&T 3G service works great for me. I hardly have a drop call but I do notice a difference when I travel to larger cities such as Atlanta and Austin and the service is not as good with more users on AT&T’s network.
4. Apple’s iPhone app store is better than the upcoming Windows Mobile app store, Blackberry, Nokia and Google’s

Photo via http://www.insidefacebook.com
5. The iPhone has the best applications to access social networks such as LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook etc. Not to mention the new Facebook iPhone 3.0 app is going to be awesome.

6. The iPhone has best Twitter Apps as a matter fact, the App store has to many Twitter apps.
7. I have access to apps that get kicked out of the app store via the Cyida App store. because my I choose to jailbreak my iPhone.

8. I don’t have to wait for AT&T to allow tethering on my iPhone because I already have it via PdaNet without any additional charges.

9. I like to use my iPhone 3Gs for jogging with NikePlus even though the NikePlus site has way to much flash on it’s site but that’s another blog post rant.
10. I own a MacBook and use MobileMe to sync my bookmarks and files that I can access via my iPhone. Plus Apple just released the iDisk iPhone app
11. I enjoy over-the-air calendar and contact syncing with my iPhone using Google Calendar, iCal, Google Contacts and Address book along with my email.

12. The iPhone has the best apps for mobile blogging.
13. I can use the iPhone with iTunes and the Amazon music store.
14. I can run iPhone apps in the background via the backgrounder app and make Skype phone calls over 3G.

15. I have two choices for an app store, Apple’s app store and the Cyida App store.

16. I can theme my iPhone if I choose to do so via the Winterboard app in Cydia.

Those are just a few of my reasons why I’m not quitting the iPhone. I know some are very tedious and Mr. Arrington did say he would be using an iPod Touch therefore he’s not completely leaving Apple or the App store just the iPhone. Also Arrington did acknowledged that he believes the iPhone is the best mobile phone in the market, quote from the TechCrunch article “I’d move to the Palm Pre because I believe it is the best phone out there other than the iPhone 3GS.

But don’t get me wrong, I’m not completely in love with the iPhone or Apple or AT&T and not happy about the recent decisions to remove existing apps or prevent some apps from seeing the light of day in the app store such as GV Mobile, and Google Latitude native app. Also I’ll be very surprise if GPush or a few other apps will ever see the light of day in app store. I’ve been waiting for Qik and Ustream.TV live video streaming apps to be released and only time will tell if Apple will approve them. If not I hope others follow GV Mobile leads and join the Cydia app store, something both Qik and Ustream have already done.

What are your reasons for sticking with the iPhone or did Arrington post convince you to leave AT&T and switch to another device?

Posted on May 7, 2009 - by Wayne Sutton

How to launch your own TinyURL service using WordPress. Yes, I have one too: s1w.com

As you know the conversations about TinyURL services have really taken off the last few weeks. We have seen reports about bit.ly raised $2 million in funding, the diggbar launches with tons of controversy and just yesterday Twitter ditched TinyURL for bit.ly. The bit.ly team must be either real excited or real nervous about their future, either way congrats to them. Also a new custom TinyURL service called Awe.sm just launched that provides custom url and statics for your own domain name at $99.00 a year. But what if you wanted to launch your own TinyURL service for let’s say, the cost of a new domain name $7.99, one hour and another wordpress install? That’s what I’ve done with the help of a few blog post. Here are the links for your reading and the outcome.

Instructions – Installing Your Own WordPress-Based DIY TinyURL In < 1 Hour
The results from following the instructions from the link above:
I have http://s1w.us domain name which stands for Short ones by Wayne. that auto redirects to socialwayne.com
I have a PressThis bookmarklet that creates a custom TinyURL using s1w.us, example: http://s1w.us/twtconf is from http://socialwayne.com/2009/05/05/twitterconferences/
I have a wordpress login to monitor stats using WP-ShortStat and Wassup.

If you’re not familiar with FTP, PHP or customizing wordpress I suggest that you hire someone (hint) if you would like to create your own TinyURL service using the option above. Another option for WordPress users is the RevCanonical plugin. RevCanonical “generates a short url for your pages, as well as adding link shortening discovery.” For example by installing RevCanonical my default post url: http://socialwayne.com/2009/05/05/twitterconferences/ was shorten to http://socialwayne.com/pin . You’ll also need a bookmarklet called Shorten to display the custom RevCanonical URL.

For bit.ly and wordpress users, the creator of RevCanonical has a plugin called TweetMe that will auto create a bit.ly URL or use your own domain’s RevCanonical url and send a tweet for each new post. This seems to work well versus using TweetSuit or TwitterTools to auto send a tweet when you publish a new blog post.

Corvida asked on FriendFeed: “What’s URL shortener do you use?” My response was bit.ly and idek.net now I can add my own TinyURL service to the list, http://s1w.us

Some of you may be asking why create your own TinyURL service? For me it was, I wanted more control over my links, I thought it was good for SEO and sharing on twitter and I thought it was a super geek cool thing to do. But here’s a blog post called: 10 Reasons To “Roll Your Own” TinyURL Using WordPress, if that’s not good enough for you.

The only thing left for me to figure out is how to add my custom s1w.us or RevCanonical url to my post like TechCrunch has (see image below).

More links about creating your own TinyURL service:
Create Your Own Short URL and Keep the Branding to Yourself
URL Shortening Hinting
la petite url

Have you created your own TinyURL service or thought about it? Did you ever think TinyURLs would be this big?

Posted on April 10, 2009 - by Wayne Sutton

Newspapers & media vs the internet, our fav. games, plus would we buy a CrunchPad?- episode #013

Today on Talk Social News:
Newspapers & media vs the internet, our fav. games, plus would we buy a CrunchPad?

The podcast:
Talk Social News daily 013 – length 20:00 download or click to play:[audio:talksocialnewsdaily013.mp3] Subscribe to podcast in iTunes:

Posted on March 8, 2009 - by Wayne Sutton

Twitter poll & feedback: What would you do without Twitter, build your own community?

If you have been reading the tech news lately then I’m sure you have seen the rumors about Google buying twitter and that Facebook tried to buy twitter? On Saturday Techcrunch posted an article from Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt interview with Charlie Rose, saying that it was “Unlikely” that Google to buy Twitter.  On Friday, I was thinking about the same topic and posted a tweet saying:

If twitter goes down or purchased & closed, where will you send everyone to contact you?
Take a look at the results below curiosity of @twickie

The results are mixed but Facebook seems like the place everyone will try to communicate and with all the changes that Facebook has made recently it’s not a bad idea. For me, my #1 goal is to create a self hosted or managed solution to where I can stay connected with every single twitter follower I have.  How?  First blog rss subscriptions, you can subscribe here: http://bit.ly/18i5X7 or the big orange button on your right . Next email subscribers, I’ve been collecting email addresses on every site I have, take a look at waynesutton.tv & wayne-sutton.com . Soon I’m going to launch community.socialwayne.com using ning.com and I’m working with a company to launch a mobile sms marketing campaign to build a mobile database but for now you can text get waynesutton to 762763 .

Update: http://community.socialwayne.com is now live, join!

Why the need to collect users or create a community backup?  It’s simple we have come to depended on twitter and don’t forget how felt during the failwhale season of 2008.  Plus if you can create or build your own community, it increases your social capital which you can use to possible create brand partnerships or other networking opportunities. More on social capital here: Digital Urbanite . Don’t worry as a twitter fanboy, I’m still tweeting as usual but now with everyone on the twitter bandwagaon and buyout talks showing up every other week, I’m just being a little cautious.  Also we’re three months into 2009 and still waiting on a twitter business model and I’m not sure how that will effect the use of twitter.

For those of you who missed the tweet, take the poll below and fell free to leave a comment on your thoughts about building your own community; why or why not.
[polldaddy poll="1437470"]

What would you do without Twitter?