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March 4, 2011
 

Foursquare + Amex @ SXSW

Interesting promotion Foursquare and Amex have developed for SXSW this year. It's all pretty benign and promotional, but the last paragraph points to where Foursquare could get a whole lot of #winning in the future. Via BI

Here’s the basic gist: American Express cardholders will be able to tie their cards into their Foursquare accounts beginning next week. This will allow Foursquare users to get special offers from merchants simply by swiping their cards to pay for things in Austin. 60 local merchants will apparently be involved in the promotion. So what type of deals will Foursquare/Amex users get? The main ones will be “spend $5, save $5″ deals, WSJ reports.

There will be other offers pushed out to customers via mobile devices as well. One thing that’s not a part of this partnership: checking-in. You won’t be able to swipe your credit card to check yourself in to a venue just yet, we hear. But eventually, that is a part of the plan as the program evolves. Also not a part of this partnership: money for Foursquare.

This isn’t a revenue-generating program for them. Instead, it’s a test of a way to eventually make money. And if it works, there’s potentially a lot of money to be made down the road. Foursquare could become the loyalty layer on top of credit cards. That could be a win for credit card companies, for venues, and for Foursquare.

Will be interesting to see where this goes. 

Filed under  //   American Express   Amex   Foursquare   SXSW   loyalty   small business  

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December 13, 2010
 

Foursquare-powered door lock

Erin Sparling and Nicholas Hall of apartm.net show off their new door lock, powered by Foursquare. Check in at the door and the door unlocks. Location is getting cooler. 

Filed under  //   Foursquare   auth   check-in   privacy   security  

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August 19, 2010
 

Facebook Places logo is a four in a square

4sq

Kudos to Tim Shey/TechCrunch for finding this. Even more kudos to the graphic designer at Facebook (or whichever design shop they're using) who came up with it. If Facebook Places succeeds in crushing Foursquare (or even just marginalizing it), this could go down as one of the better, more vindictive logo designs. Not only is it clean, but it carries this really aggressive message. Notice how the placemarker also conveniently doubles as a spade, effectively stabbing the "four in the square". Evil genius.

Filed under  //   Facebook Places   Foursquare   design   location   strategy  

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March 25, 2010
 

Location Wars at SXSW

Speaks for itself. It's a little long (i.e. you get the point pretty quickly), but if SXSW was intended to be the one of the early, important skirmishes of the nascent location wars, this is how Foursquare fared against Gowalla, Twitter, Flickr and a few others. Incidentally, Foursquare is widely believed to have been the victor. It's still early though.

Filed under  //   Flickr   Foursquare   Gowalla   SXSW   Twitter   Vicarious.ly   check-in   location  

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December 2, 2009
 

Square: Designing a Better Mobile Payment

There's a lot of buzz out there about Square these days, not just because it was started by one of the original twttr folk, Jack Dorsey. Like all innovation and social media observers, I see a lot of very interesting applications come through my Google Reader every day but Square was of particular interest to me. Earlier in my career I worked in a card merchant services product management organization and remember being impressed by the wireless card terminals that enabled people to accept credit card transactions remotely. As passe as that seems now, back then, that was pretty cool. This wireless offering was targeted as somewhat of a niche market - transient or mobile merchants like cab drivers, flea market booth sellers, etc. While there were obvious benefits to the solution (chief among them: being able to accept credit cards as payments and lower interchange rates) there was one key problem. The cost of the equipment and the contract required to use the service. I forget the exact cost, but even today, these devices aren't cheap. However, merchants had few alternatives.

Enter Square. While I'm not personally sold on the *long*-term strategy of a business built around the credit card (because of the emergence of pay-by-phone, Pay with Facebook, etc.) Square has developed a really sharp solution to an immediate need that has plenty of legs for *at least* the next 15 years. In addition to the basic concept of turning a smart phone into a merchant terminal (which is fantastic) there are a lot of other things to like. 
  • Integration via the headphone jack. Fantastic way to ensure the most smartphone users will be able to adopt.
  • Beautiful, digital receipts. I've attached the sample from Square's site. Just fantastic. Lots of information displayed in a clean, readable format. We sort of get inured to the elegance of design sometimes, but really pause and look at that receipt. Now pull out the receipt you got at Starbucks this morning. Compare. Yea, it's pretty impressive.
  • Payer photo verification - Nifty and thoughtful fraud prevention tool that shows the image of the card holder at the time of transaction to allow the merchant to compare.
  • Contract-free - This is a big one. People don't like contracts. No one wants to get suckered into a commitment with something that may be awful. Square's approach here is spot-on from a user's perspective.
  • Baked in loyalty card - I recently posted on the fantastic opportunities that Foursquare will afford small businesses in the loyalty program department. Square is right in the mix here too. From Square's site: "If you frequent a place that accepts Square, we’ll let them know you’re a repeat customer. That 10th cappuccino may be on the house, no paper coffee card required." In addition to being a great standalone option for merchants, I'm sure there could be some great synergies between Foursquare and Square (e.g reduced fees if you use both Square and Foursquare together perhaps?) down the road.
These are just a few of the admirable attributes of Square's offering. I can almost hear the slow-clap applause from mobile merchants everywhere. Now, some images from Square's site:

(download)

Filed under  //   card   credit   foursquare   loyalty   mobile   payments   square  

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November 30, 2009
 

Foursquare: Democratizing the Loyalty Program

Reading Pete Cashmore's prediction on the imminent rise of FourSquare got me thinking about one of the key principles surrounding FourSquare's attraction: status. Just like airline medallion programs, Slashdot's karma system, Facebook's fans, Twitter's followers, status is a key component of social capital. Everybody wants to be somebody and achieving status through any of these vehicles is a visible way to demonstrate and wield social capital. 

So on its surface, Foursquare is sort of unremarkable in the social capital space because it's not very different from any of these other status-based programs, which attempt to engage their best customers. In the world of finance, some banking and investment options are only available to high-net worth clients while cards like Visa Black are only accessible to the elite few who meet certain rigorous criteria. While it feels brutally oligarchical and elitist, this approach does makes sense for these companies. Wealthy customers and clients are important for banks because these customers are more likely to have large deposit balances, investments and loans. Providing them services that reward them for keeping their business in one place is a good perk for the customer but also good business for the bank. 

It's no different for the Mike's Pub on Foursquare. Danny, who holds all of his company's happy hour functions at Mike's pub, is a key customer for Mike's Pub. Providing him status and exclusive offers is a great way to keep him loyal. But without Foursquare, identifying these customers could be a lot more difficult. And therein lies the power of Foursquare.

Foursquare provides a dead simple and engaging platform through which any small businesses can establish a loyalty program. Reading through Foursquare's information for businesses page reveals the amount of thought they've put into the matter. Customers are enticed to be loyal patrons so they can accrue status. Meanwhile businesses reap the benefits of understanding rich data about their customers. With an open API now available, the ecosystem of apps surrounding Foursquare is bound to explore. Small business owners may soon be able to harness Foursquare as an analytics tool to help them understand a tremendous amount of information about their customers. While young, I can see the potential for Foursquare to deliver a potentially huge win for small business owners.

Taking a walk back to the financial services arena, I wonder how Foursquare might be applied to banking. What types of behaviors might banks use such a localized loyalty program for? Could someone who deposits money at a certain ATM with regularity become the mayor of that ATM? Might that person then be rewarded with perks like having ATM fees waived while they were the sitting mayor? 

Just a thought but an interesting example of how Foursquare can bring loyalty programs down to a much more granular and localized level than ever before.

Filed under  //   business   finance   foursquare   loyalty   small business   social   status  

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