Mobile marketing has changed a lot in the past couple of years. Geo-targeting uses your smart phone’s GPS to find out where you are, allows you to “check in” to a location, and deliver targeted messages to you based on that information.

Leaders in the geo-targeting space include Foursquare, Gowalla, and Loopt (plus LooptStar). They are similar in many ways, but each offers a different twist on an increasingly familiar theme. They enable local businesses to find and attract consumers in new ways, such as offering coupons or special offers to regulars based on how many times they’ve come in. Like many start-ups, none have mastered the monetization aspect of mobile marketing, but there are clearly endless opportunities here.

In order to give people incentive to use the apps, various forms of social “rewards” are used that essentially turn exploring your city into a game. We are social creatures, and while some of these rewards may seem meaningless or frivolous, there is an attraction to them as they create an element of social status within communities. A large part of the appeal to people in large cities with lots of friends is to make sure you never miss the action, but I believe the jury is still out as to the real social value of this once the initial allure wears off a bit.

While this isn’t intended to be an in-depth review, I’ll discuss some interesting distinctions of each:

Foursquare – I’ve been on Foursquare for about a year now. It’s been amazing to watch the database of local places grow since it depended on the community to enter locations. Now it’s rare that I go somewhere that isn’t already there. The person who frequents a location the most becomes the “mayor” and some establishments give benefits for that position. You collect virtual badges for achieving certain things, like being in a place with at least 50 other people (Swarm) or hitting 4 clubs in one night (Crunked). You get the idea. Foursquare made a gamble by creating a new database of locations and friends, but it seems to have paid off. The most compelling thing about this is the special offers that are based on your location. When you check in somewhere, the app will tell you if there is a nearby special, or one at the place you are (a free drink for 10 check-ins for example). While Foursquare has exploded in the past year, I haven’t seen a congruent explosion of the specials offered by businesses.

LooptStar is a spinoff of Loopt, which was historically a more informational type of app. Their new entry enters the “rewards” space more heavily. The thing that LooptStar does that I believe will give it an advantage is use Facebook Connect to leverage the largest existing social network rather than wait for everyone to find their friends on yet another new one. They were later to the game, but I believe this will give them an edge in the long run. In LooptStar you become a “boss” rather than a “mayor.” But the rewards look to be more tangible than FourSquare.

Gowalla benefits from being on all major mobile smart platforms, including Blackberry and Palm. They also rely on partnerships with existing travel-related services to offer “trips” and share those with your friends. While Foursquare provides community tips based on your location, Gowalla focuses more on directly exploring your friends’ favorite locations to learn more about what they like rather than the community at large.

All of these apps feature basic sharing with your Twitter and Facebook feeds to let people know what you’re up to. Yelp has entered the space by adding check-in to its feature set and you can bet that Google is going to be all over this with its massive business database and Android mobile platform. The problem these sites have is that they have established brand and culture that make it harder to break into new areas.

While this space is fascinating to watch, it still has a long way to go. The apps depend largely upon smart phones such as iPhone and Android, which represent the minority of the mobile market. Also, I feel that any app that requires you to actively check in to a location rather than simply knowing where you are is going to appeal more to geeks and early adopters than the majority of people. It can be very distracting to interrupt your social experience. “Wait guys… I have to check in here first…”

What’s the alternative? Remember Minority Report, when Tom Cruise’s retinas were scanned everywhere he went? In that version of the future, you didn’t even need a device to tell the network where you were. Cameras were so ubiquitous that they knew anyway. Scary? A bit. Possible? You bet.

This post was featured in ePiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter | Other ePiphany Articles

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Fun, Gadget, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, ePiphany Featured Story

If your business has a website, you want it to be accessible to the widest possible audience.  In terms of viewing it in a web browser on a standard desktop computer, this means testing it in a wide array of browser (IE, Firefox, Safari, etc) and operating system (Windows, Mac) combinations.  The site design then often needs some tweaking so that it functions as consistently as possible across those combinations.  This cross-browser testing is a standard part of the site creation process, and something that a company like Astek will handle without you having to worry about it much at all.

In order for a website to display in a way that is at all useful on many mobile phones, a wholly separate site design is needed.  See Katie Hawkey’s article in this ePiphany for more on the actual details of mobile website formatting. The decision as to whether a mobile format for your website is necessary requires some cost-benefit analysis.  Lets consider some statistics and trends.  The percentage of total web traffic over mobile phones was at 1.26% by the end of 2009, having doubled over that year (source).  I was unable to find any more recent numbers, but given the trend it would be reasonable to put it near 2% by now.  A more telling number is that 35% of US adults say they access the internet with their phones, up from 25% in 2009 (source).

So, a really significant number of people are using phones to look at websites, although they probably still use their computers more often.  But if they check your website once and it comes out all jumbled on their phone, you have left a bad impression.  Another wrinkle is whether a visitor’s mobile browser even needs a separate mobile-formatted design.  Smartphones like those on the iPhone and Android platforms have web browsers which can view websites pretty much the same as desktop web browsers.  Other phones, including all current Blackberry models, have web browsers with a very limited way of presenting websites.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Gadget, Technology, Web, ePiphany Featured Story

As you may have heard, Astek recently launched the iPhone 4 App, Light Beam! We’ve been having fun finding all the amazing uses for the app including flashlight (duh), strobe light, bike safety flasher, a way to help your friend find you in a crowd (at night the flashing light can be seen more than 2 blocks away!) and most recently as a “brush” for drawing in light.

We recently asked Astek staff and friends to use Light Beam in front of a long exposure camera to draw original light art inspired by a series of 1949 LIFE photos featuring Pablo Picasso drawing in the air with just a flashlight.

http://www.life.com/image/72386434/in-gallery/24871/picasso-drawing-with-light

We couldn’t be more pleased with the results! Our “Light Beam Artists” used the steady beam as well as strobes at various speeds to create some really cool works! We video taped their movements to produce these images as well! I can’t decide which I like looking at more, the video of the “light dances” or the beautiful final images! Please check out our videos and let us know what you think! If you want to submit your own Light Beam drawings we encourage you to do so at our Light Beam for iPhone 4 Facebook Page!

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Katie Hawkey Categories: Fun, Gadget, Marketing, Social Media, Technology

The Astek team is pleased as punch about our latest iPhone app, a flashlight that takes advantage of the new LED camera light in the iPhone 4.

But Light Beam is much more than just a flashlight! It’s the app that could save your party AND your life!

Light Beam is the iPhone 4’s brightest and easiest flashlight using the built-in LED flash! It includes a strobe light and SOS emergency beacon.

Features:

• Uses iPhone 4 built-in LED for brightest light possible.
• Intuitive, elegant design.
• Flashlight: Auto-on when app is opened for quickest access.
• Strobe Light: Bring the party with this ultra-bright strobe light. Or increase visibility for extra safety on your bike at night. Easy-touch slider allows you to control the speed.
• Emergency SOS Signal: Activate with the tap of a button. Beams a repeating SOS Morse code signal via the LED light.

Download Light Beam for iPhone 4 now!

Here’s a screenshot of Light Beam:

Check it out and if you don’t have an iPhone 4 please tell your friends!

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Fun, Gadget, Technology

There was a lot of buzz this morning about when exactly iPhone users could get the iOS 4 update via iTunes since Apple gave no time for the release today.  It seems like it was made available at 10 AM PST.  And yeah, I know that because I was checking with some frequency.  I have a 3GS version of the iPhone, which is the last hardware version they made, before the iPhone 4 which is just being delivered this week to the early adopters.

3GS owners get most of the benefit of the new system update, with the exception of the Face Time videoconferencing feature which uses the new phone’s secondary camera.  The new iMovie app will also only be available for the new hardware apparently due to intensive processor requirements. 3G users get everything else except multi-tasking, and strangely, no wallpaper configuration either.  And 1st generation iPhone users are totally out of luck here.

In any case, I’ll say that my favorite thing about the new OS so far is the All Inboxes feature, which combines my work and personal email in one place.  So I no longer have to poke poke poke between them.  It also collates your email by thread, which is something I’m used to as a gmail user and appreciate.  Folders for organizing my apps is also nice, and I like the ability to now easily set the background for my home and lock screens.

The multi-tasking functionality seems pretty cool too.  I’ve played around with the interface for browsing and switching among concurrent apps.  It’s a pretty slick UI, no surprise.  I’m looking forward to the ability to listen to audio outside of the native iPod app while browsing email, the web, etc.

Here’s a couple good rundowns with more information about what iOS 4 is all about:

• A higher-level list of 6 highlights.  #1 is very important – update your apps in the app store to get the full benefit of multi-tasking!
• An in-depth walkthrough of almost everything that’s new in this version.  Very readable though.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Fun, Gadget, Technology

It’s true.  The availability of cheap cameras, editing software, and online video hosting services has set an extremely low barrier of entry to the world of digital video.  However, to a beginner, putting all the pieces together might be a little intimidating.  Not to fear!  Getting a video on the internet is only as complicated as you want to make it, and you can maybe even do so using resources you already have.  If you use the one-take editing technique, you can skip the video editing software part altogether.  Just shoot your video, and upload it directly to a free hosting service like YouTube.  Let me outline the basic choices you have for each of three main areas: cameras, hosting services, and editing software.

Cameras

Webcams and Mobile Phones
I start with these together since you may already have one or both!  These days, many laptops and monitors come with embedded webcams, and most mobile phones can take video.  Some phones, like the iPhone for instance, can upload video directly to YouTube.  It doesn’t get any easier than that!  And if you don’t have a phone that takes video, or an embedded webcam, buying a webcam may well be the cheapest way to get started.  You’re not going to get HD quality at the low end of the price scale, and you’ll be constrained by having to be connected to your computer, but you can find useable webcams for around $20.
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Andrew Crowe Categories: Fun, Gadget, How To, Social Media, Technology, Web, ePiphany Featured Story

Apple had one of their big press conferences today, the centerpiece of which was the reveal for the new iPhone operating system (OS 4).  It has many small updates, and several larger ones.  The thing that most people are talking about is the introduction of application multitasking.  Previously, when you switch from a third party application to any other application on the iPhone, the original app in effect goes to sleep.  This is annoying for things like streaming audio, when you want to continue listening to a stream while you look something up on the web or send a text message.  Apple is now making it possible for streaming audio to continue in such a situation, as well as allowing background applications to do a few other specific things like send notifications to the foreground of the phone.  It’s not quite true multitasking, but it’s probably enough to make most people happy.  People that have the latest 3GS hardware that is.  Those with earlier hardware versions are out of luck.

The other big update, as I see it, is the new set of “Enterprise Features”.  These are things like VPN, Microsoft Exchange, and the ability to internally push applications to employee phones.  This is a direct shot a Blackberry, which still holds a large share of the corporate market.  I think a lot of companies are getting pressured by their employees to let them have iPhones as company phones.  And these features may well make that a more viable option.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Gadget

My first iPhone was the 2G model and I didn’t have many complaints about the voice quality or dropped calls — not any more than any other carrier anyway. When I switched to the 3G model, the voice reception became noticeably worse. At first I was content to blame the phone as it seems most people are. But I had to believe that Apple knew even the smartest of smart phones still had to be a PHONE first and foremost.

After tinkering a bit, I realized it’s very simple to switch the phone back into 2G mode. And guess what? I now enjoy the stable 2G reception from AT&T I used to. I have multi-hour-long conference calls with confidence. I can move around and not worry about dropping the call.

For data I typically just leave the wifi connected, which gives me high speed data most of the time (home, office, etc.). But if you find yourself sitting in the park or on the road needing to surf faster, just switch back to 3G. I wish the phone could use 3G for data and 2G for voice, but it’s a minor quibble.

To summarize, switch your iPhone to 2G mode and you’ll have:

Pros:

• Better voice reception and quality
• Longer battery life
• Envy from other iPhone users

Cons:

• Slower data speeds
• That nagging feeling that you’re not using the latest and greatest technology

So how do you do it? Just follow these steps:

1) Press the “Settings” icon/app from your home screen.

2) Press “General” (7th option).

3) Press “Network” (3rd option).

4) In the “Enable 3G” bar, it should say “On.” Press this and it will turn “Off” as shown below.

5) Just click your home button or back to “General” to save. It will take a few seconds to switch over, and then you’re good to go! If you need your faster 3G data, just switch it back any time.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Fun, Gadget, General, Technology

How do you Google? Chances are you start most of your Internet research at Google.com. You might also have a Gmail account or use Google Calendar to manage your life. And it’s a safe bet you’ve used Google maps and have your own opinion about the street view trucks making sure everyone can see your house. But there is much more to Google than meets the eye.

Google is many things to millions of people. What started as an innovative way to search the Web back in 1998 has grown into one of the world’s largest and most successful companies, now delivering results for more than one billion searches every day using its highly guarded secret sauce. Put simply, Google is what makes the Web usable.

Recently Google has taken great strides to integrate its numerous products and services into a suite of business applications called Google Apps, which can help you with corporate email, shared calendars and documents, groups, websites, and video.

The services are all Web-based, which means you don’t have to worry about servers, maintenance, etc. Just make sure you have a Web connection, get through the basic set-up, and you’re good to go. All the services are seamlessly integrated with each other at a fixed low per-user cost. Google even provides a handy cost savings calculator if you’re using Lotus or Exchange.

As much value as the Business Apps give you, Google’s free apps can deliver even more value. I encourage you to look into:

• Google Analytics to see how your Web site traffic is doing to improve marketing strategy
• Google Alerts to have industry or brand-related articles and comments delivered right to your inbox
• Google Reader to keep all of your blogs and RSS feeds in one place

While Google’s unofficial slogan has emerged as “Don’t be evil,” prominent tech leaders such as Steve Jobs have publicly objected to Google’s claims of holistic do-gooding. Let’s face it, Google is still an enormous company with responsibility to its shareholders. Good and money don’t always line up conveniently in that model, despite the best intentions.

Google continues to face challengers in the search space, such as Facebook, especially as social media continues to fundamentally change the way people access the Web and search for information. More and more people would rather get answers from people they know than the search giant. But stay tuned — Google may just master social search yet.

Keep your eyes open for Google’s latest experiment to revolutionize the way American’s access the Web with the fiber-to-the-home network.

Let me know if you have any questions about Google for Business or increasing your search rankings!

 This post was featured in ePiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter |  Other ePiphany Articles 

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Gadget, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web, ePiphany Featured Story

Road trains look like a very encouraging solution to automotive transportation. Essentially cars using wireless signals to automatically follow a lead car. I’ve long felt that if all cars were somehow connected and able to start and stop together that we’d all save a lot of time and headache on the road! Have you ever noticed how much time is wasted just waiting for the cars ahead of you to start moving?

Imagine how much better life would be if we could have transit time to do whatever we wanted. Work, sleep, read, you name it. I’m sure it will be awhile before they are ready for prime time, but I personally can’t wait.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Fun, Gadget, Green, Technology