Location, deep breaths and lines in sand

It’s about that time again. Time to take a deep breath and erase that line we’ve drawn in the sand. Think back 10 or 15 years when cell phones had finally become portable and affordable enough for almost everyone. We all did it, we said “Fuck it, I guess I’m going to let people call me whenever they want.” Well now we’re at another tipping point and it’s name is Location.

I hear a lot of people say things like “I don’t want people to know where I am all the time” or “What benefit can FourSquare possibly have?” Well, when it comes to the latter, a lot. Not only are businesses starting to offer discounts to location Mayors, but as a business owner you can promote events and daily specials through the application to people that are ACTUALLY WITHIN WALKING DISTANCE OF YOUR BUSINESS. It’s the most targeted, targeting advertising gets. And it’s only going to get better.

With Facebook launching location based services soon, we’re going to see how half a billion users are going to impact developers of location based advertising. Since Facebook will be utilizing an API for location, companies like FourSquare are going to grow more exponentially than we saw happen to Twitter. That means bigger discounts, “swarm” discounts and real value to offer business partners.

It’s also fun to track where you’ve been and see your travel patterns using tools like weeplaces.com

FourSquare Visualization by WeePlaces.com from Eric Wu on Vimeo.

I’m sure we’ll see a lot of localized companies (here’s looking at you BlockClub) take advantage of Facebook’s API and start to really interact with their customers in ways that 5 years ago seemed crazy and annoying (remember the short lived TXT Marketing concept?).

Sure, we’re going to experience some growing pains with location. That’s to be expected, in the early days we’ll see 50 companies doing it totally wrong for every one brand that “gets it.” But like with Twitter, brands and users will come around and the disparity between “power” location users and the general public will start to shrink. Before you know it you’ll be walking into the mall and your smart phone will buzz and using your previous check-in history as a guide will let you know that Store X is having a sale today, and you’ll be happy about that.

Location sharing is a good thing. For consumers, for businesses and for the evolution of this thing we call social media. So take that deep breath, say “Fuck it,” and turn on location.

Please feel free to Re-Tweet this to your friends. Email me if you think I’m way off base or just wanna chat. If you’d like to publicly mock me you can find me on Twitter.

Cheers.

Introducing the Apple iPad

First thoughts…

The new Apple iPad (C) 2010 Apple

It’s official, the Apple tablet product has been launched and it’s called the iPad. At first glance it seems like a large iPhone which, I suppose it pretty much is. But think about what you could do with a larger iPhone for a minute…

Yeah you could do a lot of REALLY cool stuff and that’s exactly what Apple is hoping for. From a UI standpoint I can see why some people are upset that it’s not running a full scale version of OS X, but what kind of device would that have given us? You would have had to choose a lesser of two evils scenario: Expensive and fast or inexpensive and slow. I think Apple made the right decision to use an OS based on the iPhone OS. It’s sleek, simple, millions of people already know how to use it and you don’t need a super processor to run it well.

What really gets me excited about the iPad isn’t the fact that almost all of the AppStore’s 140,000 apps will run on it or that all the apps you’ve already downloaded for the iPhone will transfer right over (both of which are true by the way) I’m most excited about the revisions to the apps and new apps Apple includes on the device. Mainly Mail, Calendar and the Book Store.

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