To foursquare or not to foursquare – that is the question

This is something I’ve been internally wrestling with for a couple weeks after my recent introduction to foursquare. For those of you who don’t know what foursquare is, it’s a location-based social media service where users “check-in” at venues and can earn badges and become the “mayor” of venues with enough check-ins. I’ve tried to tell friends about it, but the only reaction I’ve gotten is, “Dude, telling people where you are over the internet? That sounds really creepy.”

At first, broadcasting where you are over the internet does sound creepy to me. However, with the increased emergence of social networking tools like foursquare – Google Latitude, for example – is this type of behavior becoming more and more popular? Being constantly plugged-in? To quote a recent tweet Nate Riggs left me about this subject, “@adambudd – no, you are right [about 'creepiness']. But there’s a lot of people that think twitter is creepy. I’ll bet people thought email was creepy too…”

I guess it’s kind of like when the TV was first invented, there were those who were against it, saying it would never catch on. But, look at the TV now – it’s where nearly all of the population gets all of its information and entertainment. In this sense, is foursquare the new TV? Will it truly catch on, or is it a passing trend? Only time will tell, but for now, let me know what you think of foursquare. Do you use it? Why do you use it (or not)? Will it catch on (or has it already caught on)?

Rise of the Mobile Application (More Commonly Referred to as the ‘App’)

June 29, 2007. That’s when it all started. To many people, this seems to be just an arbitrary date. But to me, it marks the start in a mobile application revolution, the start of a revolutionary idea of what could be in marketing and selling through technology. What I’m referring to is the launch of the original iPhone. Again, many may respond with, “So what? How could a phone revolutionize marketing, sales, and brand recognition?”. Well, in this blog entry I’ll tell you how the iPhone (Apple) and it’s primary competitor, Android 2.0 (Google) have and will continue to inspire ideas of what could be in technologically driven marketing and sales.

In 2007, the iPhone introduced the term that has been popularized as the “App” (short for Application) through their App Store. This ‘App’ grew from a simple concept to an explosive new way to deliver content to customers and increase consumer interactions at a scale that was previously unheard of. Below is a simple graph of the explosive growth of the App Store over the last 3 years (June 2007 – March 2010).

(obtained via tech.fortune.cnn.com)

Sure, in the very beginning, companies weren’t willing to jump on board the “App train” so to speak because of fears that the App was “just hype”. Surely now the numbers can’t be denied – the App Store increases visibility to potential customers and increases brand loyalty should companies choose to create an App to diversify their services. In the mix of these 30,000+ Apps available, there a quite a few companies who have chosen to take advantage of the brand recognition creating an App can create, some whose services are already online (Amazon, Google, etc) and some who are not thought of as traditional online sources (Target, The Gap, etc).

Here’s a hint to a lot of companies out there: if someone has created a 3rd party App for your services, chances are there’s a large, untapped market for you to exploit (UPS was one of these but has since wisened up and created its own, UPS Mobile). Here’s another hint: if your competitor has created an App, chances are you are losing business because of your failure to adapt to changing market conditions. News organizations have also followed suit, especially those hit hard by continuously falling newspaper subscriptions (AP News, New York Times, etc). Banks have also dove in to the App pool (Bank of America) in order to increase usability and make people like me jealous (Chase, where is your Android application?!). Although the reception of a chosen few Apps could be considered lukewarm at best, the potential is there to continually revolutionize the way the market works, and should a few companies fail to follow suit, they could see themselves left in the technological dust.

Even more exciting for me (as a Droid user), the Android App Market is seeing even more explosive growth than the iPhone App Store is experiencing currently, with their App Market growing by more than 100+ Apps per day (and that’s a number from December ’09 in which they experienced a 22% market growth!). How much longer can the world’s largest companies continue to ignore the brand recognition and loyalty they can gain from creating a simple App that can increase customer retention and usability? If anything, the creation of an App proves that companies can be innovative and really listen to what their consumer base wants. If large companies don’t watch out, smaller companies who take advantage of Apps and the potential it brings (equal playing field?) could really be the David to the large company’s Goliath.

To the reader – what do you think about iPhone and Android Apps and how do you think companies could be positively affected by making an App? Should they create Apps, or am I crazy and spewing irrational hype over a passing trend?