I am a powerful (addicted) facebook user but, only after arriving Madrid, I have noticed one interesting phenomenon - lots of my tech-classmates have been checking-in at various bars, restaurants or even in gyms or IE Business School. Only until being mentioned in my IS class, FourSquare has entered my life.
What is FourSquare
FourSquare is a program for smartphone that changed the mindset from thinking “What are you doing?” and “Where are you?” to “Where are you and doing What”.
The rules of the game:
1) Users check-in at venues such as restaurants, gyms, schools or even at their own home.
2) the most visited user at a specific venue becomes mayor and may be eligible to collect badges or enjoy benefit or promotion such as free beer or meal. So in order to collect those badges and points for becoming a major, users need to return to the venues regularly and, therefore, provide sales revenue for those venues.
How does FourSquare derive its revenue:
Although FourSquare is not making a big revenue, its outlook appears to be very bright. According to a comment from businessinsider.com: Foursquare is starting to build the foundation of a revenue model on location-based marketing services. Foursquare is planning paid services for three tiers of businesses: small, privately owned stores and restaurants; brands with retail chains, such as Tasti D-Lite; and huge multinational marketers such as Pepsi. For bigger brands, Foursquare is developing an analytics dashboard so businesses can track who's coming into their stores. Then, deals could be sold against impressions such as web ads, clicks such as search ads, or a completely new model: cost per check-in.
Therefore, it would not be a surprise if FourSquare is going to be acquired by other giants such as Yahoo or Microsoft in the future.
Final Concerns:
Despite being a neat program, there are also concerns for FourSquare. For example: 1) I do not have data plan on my iPhone, immediately FourSquare becomes useless. If there is another program that imitates FourSquare but without using data, FourSquare might be threatened. 2) Venues may engage free-riding without paying FourSquare for marketing fees.
Can anyone teach me how to transfer from word document to the blog? Apparently cut and paste creates un-identical fonts.
回覆刪除Hey! regarding your first concern, of course is a data plan required which is actually standard now and almost everyone which smartphone has. I know that now as students we may not all have data plan =( but believe me, after the MBA you will have! =)
回覆刪除Saludos!
Guerson