The Location Hype

It’s an ongoing hype right now for startups to make location based applications and services. We see apps like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite and Google Latitude taking over our Twitter and Facebook stream and everyone hopes that we like to know where they are just at the moment. We don’t. But that’s another story.

Brightkite and Latitude has another approach and they just displaying where we are and sometimes notify us if someone we know is nearby in the same area. With Brightkite we can “Check in” and post photos and texts. Latitude is just a complement for the rest of Google’s web based applications, you’re supposed to be online all the time on the service but iPhones can’t do it because it can’t multitask. It’s much better on Android phones though.

Foursquare and Gowalla on the other hand is more like games. When I watched the founder Dennis Crowley from Foursquare making a presentation and I noticed that he focused on the gaming part of the app. Why should you walk the same way every day, if you’re walking another way the next day it will give you points. Why will you stay at one bar all night and why not go to a lot of bars instead? It’s easier to be spontanious if you have something to look forward to. He also said that they are hacking the city, and if you try out the service you will see it. It’s really possible to hack the city. Gowalla is about the same but it’s much cuter and you get rewarded with digital goods.

I’m focused on Foursquare and Gowalla because these two apps are perfect for marketing. Now I’m just waiting for Starbucks to make their own competition to visit 15 different Starbucks and get a cup of coffee for free or Pizza Hut to do the same thing. I wonder how many companies that wants to become featured spots to check in at, I would love to buy one on Gowalla. If I was the company then I would have done exactly that to market my position. You can also set up location based competitions for your costumers to do to get something and I assure you that they will do.

One more thing they can do to make money on the location based service is to sell them as tourist guides. If you don’t know what to do in a city then it’s perfect to check out near spots to visit.