The Hotlist is going mobile. The service, a trend-tracker that connects users with upcoming events in the area and across their social networks, is now available as an iPhone application.
Although location-based social networking (LBS) apps like Foursquare, Gowalla, MyTown, Brightkite and Loopt may be all the rage right now - in terms of media hype at least - reports have shown that only a relatively small handful of early adopters are actively using these apps on a regular basis (a few hundred thousand up to 4 million, depending on the service).
Instead of tapping into the niche market of LBS users to find local hotspots, The Hotlist figured out a different way to surface these so-called "geo-trends": by tapping into Facebook and Twitter instead. The service analyzes public events and other data across social networks in order to offer a personalized "things to do" application. But up until today, that app was Web-only.
Research firm Canalys is today reporting a surge in the worldwide shipments of Android smartphones. Thanks to Android-based products from HTC, Motorola, Samsung, Sony Ericssion, LG and others, smartphones running the Android operating system grew 886% worldwide in Q2 2010.
Also in the U.S., the largest smartphone market in the world, Android devices collectively represented a 34% share of the market during the quarter. With growth of 851%, Android became the largest smartphone platform in the country.
"In Google we trust." That may very well be the motto of today's young online users, a demographic group often dubbed the "digital natives" due their apparent tech-savvy. Having been born into a world where personal computers were not a revolution, but merely existed alongside air conditioning, microwaves and other appliances, there has been (a perhaps misguided) perception that the young are more digitally in-tune with the ways of the Web than others.
That may not be true, as it turns out. A new study coming out of Northwestern University, discovered that college students have a decided lack of Web savvy, especially when it comes to search engines and the ability to determine the credibility of search results. Apparently, the students favor search engine rankings above all other factors. The only thing that matters is that something is the top search result, not that it's legit.
A study from wireless billing vendor Validas has revealed that Verizon Wireless smartphone owners are now exceeding the data usage of iPhone owners, who are currently restricted to AT&T. According to the study, average data consumption on Verizon smartphones is 421 MB as opposed to 338 MB on the iPhone. Out of all the vendors, Verizon Wireless has seen the largest data usage increase over the past year, jumping from 33.4% to 42.9%.
Are location-based mobile applications like Foursquare, Loopt and Gowalla just hype? That's the potential, at-a-glance takeaway from a new study released today by Forrester Research. Only 4% of U.S. online adults have ever used location-based apps such as these, and only 1% out of those that use them do so more than once per week. Meanwhile, 84% said they weren't familiar with these apps.
What's worse, for marketers hoping to tap into a diverse and savvy audience of shoppers, diners, and other local consumers, the details on audience make-up are disappointing. According to Forrester, LBS users are 80% male and 70% are aged 19-35.
So should marketers stay away for now until these services mature? Absolutely not. And here's why.
Mobile loyalty card application CardStar is today announcing integration with popular location-based service Foursquare in its newly updated iPhone application, CardStar 3.0. Now, as CardStar users present their mobile phones to merchants for scanning, they can also be automatically "checked in" to that business on Foursquare.
The CardStar mobile application, which offers a network of over 2,000 merchants, has been downloaded 1.5 million times, according to its CEO, Andy Miller. Over 600,000 "active uniques" now use the CardStar app in 160 countries worldwide.
The potential market for Foursquare just got a whole lot larger.
Marketers take note: a new study from research firm Gartner has discovered that a majority of today's consumers rely to some extent on social networks to help guide them in purchase decisions. Despite this fact, social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and others, while critical, are currently an underutilized aspect to the marketing process, the report says.
But not everyone using social networks is worth targeting equally, as it turns out. Instead, there are three types of online personalities that make up just one-fifth of the consumer population but are the key influencers in the purchasing activities of 74% of the population. Gartner calls them Salesmen, Connectors and Mavens.
Consumers will have downloaded 25 billion mobile applications to their smartphones by the year 2015, claims market research firm Juniper Research in a report released today. That's an increase from less than 2.6 billion applications in 2009.
Part of this projected increase is due to the launch of additional "app stores" worldwide, including those in large markets like China and India. However, cautions the report, just mimicking Apple's model alone may not be enough. "Customers are buying the iPhone for the apps," says report author Dr. Windsor Holden. "That's not been the case with other handsets."
This blog was founded in 2003 on the philosophy of a read/write Web - a Web in which people can create content as easily as they consume it. This trend eventually came to be known as Web 2.0 - although others preferred Social Web - and was popularized by activities like blogging and social networking.
It would be easy to say that the 'social' element is still the primary part of today's Web, since the popular products of this era enable you to say what's on your mind (Facebook), what's happening (Twitter), or where you are (Foursquare). All of these are mostly social activities. But more significantly, these and other products output data that will increasingly be used to build personalized services for you.
MasterCard recently launched a new mobile application called "MasterCard Marketplace Overwhelming Offers," which delivers daily deals to iPhone users. Despite its mouthful of a name, savvy shoppers planning on purchasing a big-ticket item in the near future may want to keep an eye on this one.
Like the popular Internet retailer Woot (just bought by Amazon), the app provides deeply discounted items, available in limited quantities for a limited time. At 12 p.m. Eastern (GMT - 4:00) every day, a new deal is posted to the mobile app, offering "door-buster" type savings of 50% or more on brand-name products from a network of over 28,000 merchants.
