Posts Tagged ‘trioutnc’

Posted on November 19, 2010 - by Wayne Sutton

TriOut version 2.0.2 with more awesome. Now supports Facebook Places Check-Ins

Guest Post by Lawrence Ingraham @lawpower, cofounder and lead developer of TriOut

The latest update to the TriOut iPhone app hit the App Store today. Version 2.0.2 brings some great performance enhancements and increased stability. I think we’ve fixed the Photo Upload bug once and for all.

Most importantly, we’ve integrated the new Facebook check in system within TriOut. In order to take advantage of this, you’ll need to re-authenticate Facebook in the app to approve check in access. Just tap on Settings >> Facebook to approve. Then the next time you check in, select Facebook from the menu of services and we’ll check you in on Facebook. It couldn’t be easier.

We’ve also added a new Help menu to get new users familiar with the app. The help menu shows the first time you launch the app and is always available in the settings menu. We hope this clears up any confusion users have had trying to check in.

Your feedback is extremely important to us. We beta tested TriOut v2 for 4 months prior to release but are still finding bugs and tweaks to make it better. If you find a crash, a bug, or something you just can’t figure out, please let us know either by email or through our feedback. We want to make TriOut your go-to app for connecting with your friends, tell us how to make it better.

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 June 10, 2010 - by Wayne Sutton

Presentation: Location Based Marketing in 2010

Today I spoke at the Triangle AMA Social Media Boot Camp about location based marketing. Below is my presentation which includes a definition of what I believe location based marketing is/should be. Take a look below.

Location based marketing is the interaction with customers by their location offering value based opportunities to increases customer loyalty and social sharing in which you can measure.

What are your thoughts on location based marketing?

Posted on June 7, 2010 - by Wayne Sutton

TriOut launches HTML5 location-based check-in web app for Android and iPhone users plus API

Since TriOut launched the iPhone app back in December one of the most asked questions was when will TriOut have a native app for Android and other mobile platforms. While we haven’t launched a native app yet, this past Thursday during the TriangleTweetup, TriOut founder Lawrence Ingraham @LawPower made two announcements bringing TriOut closer to having a native app for other platforms and helping TriOut Android users have a better experience.

The first announcement was the launch of the TriOut API. The API provides methods to interact with our system, pulling location information, providing check in for your users, pretty much anything you can find in the TriOut system will be available. With the launch of the API we’re excited about the possibility of other apps being by developed using the TriOut platform such as a new iPhone app and/or Android App. The TriOut API was also used for inclusion with Check.in and you can see full documenation at http://api.trioutnc.com/

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 with 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. The new app also supports check-in awards/badges, access to your messages and soon you’ll be able to update your settings all from the web app.The mobile app works great for Android users and although it’s not a native app we think it’s pretty darn close. Here are a few screenshots of the app.

Here’s what one Android user tweeted about the new mobile app.

For Blackberry and Palm TriOut users, you can still check-in by using: http://m.TriOutNC.com

We’re very excited about the API and the new mobile web app as our goal is to make it as easy as possible for you to “Explore the Triangle”, check-in, post reviews, and see what your friends are up to. Thanks for the support and let us know what you think in the comments.

What are your thoughts on native apps vs web HTML5 apps for checking in?

Posted on April 18, 2010 - by Wayne Sutton

Is the future of location-based services that great or should they sell, sell, sell?

Remember this scene from the movie Trading Places?

Yesterday Ben Parr co-editor at Mashable wrote an article called “Dear Foursquare: This Is Not the Right Time to Sell” in which he discusses the uncertainty of the location-based industry and recent rumors of Yahoo buying FourSquare for $125 million. It’s an interesting argument to make if the Foursquare team decides to sell or work towards being the “next big thing” as they have been called by so many industry leaders. In the post Ben highlights 5 factors to consider should Foursquare decide to sell or not: Those factors were:

Potential market size: Currently, Foursquare has almost 1 million users. But what is its potential market size? It’s essentially anyone with a smartphone capable of GPS. And while that number is relatively small now, it’s rapidly rising.

Competitors: Foursquare’s primary competitor is Gowalla, but it has been breaking away from the app ever since the South by Southwest conference (SXSW) in March. It also faces competition from Yelp and potentially Facebook, which will likely be revealed next week at Facebook’s F8 conference. Yet despite these external threats, Foursquare has a commanding lead and all of the media’s attention.

Potential worth: Foursquare’s worth around $100 million currently — can it reach $500 million? $1 billion? $10 billion? Where is the ceiling?

Business model: Foursquare currently burns more cash than it takes in — can it create a business model that will make it profitable and sustainable? I believe there’s a ton of potential in location-based advertising, especially now that Apple and Google are helping pioneer this market.

Exit strategies: If Foursquare were to turn down the Yahoo offer, who would be able to buy it? Or is there legitimate potential for an IPO?

Here’s my comment on the article
Ben, as a Foursquare user/friend of the team and with the current state of yahoo, I understand your post title and the points you make about selling. But as someone with a location based startup (http://TriOutNC.com) I think if Foursquare decided to sell right now, it wouldn’t be a bad idea. Just look at recent Ning news. Also the LBS space is getting more crowded by the day and they have a lot more competition beside Gowalla. The last time I counted there were over 17 different LBS apps and we haven’t seen what Facebook will launch as you mentioned. But we do know it will be big for the LBS industry and it seems almost weekly that Google is making their apps location aware.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe in the team, that they can succeed and continue to grow their user base along with showing their value but a $125 million buyout vs raising $3 & $5 million in a competitive uncertain space sounds like a good number to me. Would you have turned down the half billion from Google like Yelp did?

But hey, what do I know, I’m just a LBS geek from North Carolina. Good luck Foursquare either way and nice post Ben.

Also see:

• Location Based Poll: What is your favorite Location based social network/app?
• Check-Ins are Coupons. Game Mechanics are Bulls***. Show Me The MONEY or Go Home (Loser).
• Your feedback and results from the location based social network/app poll

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

It’s one of those cases where you agree but disagree with someone but only time will tell for everyone in the location-based industry.

To answer my own question, “Is the future of location-based apps that great or should they sell, sell, sell?” As we continue to grow and market TriOut, I believe the answer is yes, the opportunity is that great but we’re hyper-local to NC and have our business strategy with financial goals in place. For the rest of the location-based apps, good luck. What are your thoughts?