My presentation on the business application of location-based service Foursquare from last week’s AMI FutureComms workshop:

Here at Thinq we like to plan for the person using the device, rather than for the device itself – devices such as the recently released (to unprecedented anticipation) Apple iPad. But here I get stuck…. Just who will use the iPad?

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Ham? Maybe.

Wine? Quite possibly.

Limited strenuous exercise? Almost certainly.

There are a number of reasons why my fingers might feel fatter in 2010, that’s “twenty ten”  people, not “two thousand and ten”. Stop wasting good syllables. A problem shared is a problem halved, so I decided to discuss my condition with a few close friends. Turns out a number of the folks I surveyed were also suffering from podgy digit disorder. After much contemplation we uncovered a common factor in the way we all behaved over the Christmas holidays.

We had all spent more time playing with our iPhones. From DoodleJump to Tweetie we’d all been tapping, swiping and pinching far more than your average working week and it was starting to have physical effects. Or so we thought. Why else would we be tapping a back link when we were trying to hit the search field?

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foursquare is a cross between a friend-finder, a social city-guide and a game that rewards you for doing interesting things.

Yesterday was a good day – it was inadvertently brought to my attention that foursquare is finally available in Perth! And, it comes only a couple of months after its Australian debut in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

Here’s how it works:
Using a mobile app, mobile web or SMS (US only), users voluntarily check-in at a variety of locations – cafes, stores, bars, parks – and in doing so alert friends of their whereabouts… perfect if they’re in the area and keen to drop in to say hello. It’s also possible to check-in and keep the location private – designed for those times when three’s a crowd.

When checking-in, users can share tips (i.e. try the frites at Little Creatures!) and add activities to personal to-do lists. Check-ins earn points; there are extra points awarded for going to new places and the user who has checked-in most at a given location becomes the “Mayor”. Users can also unlock badges by checking in at interesting places… it’s a competition to explore your city!

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OK, so Gartner recently revealed that Smart Phone sales were up 27% (whilst standard mobile sales were down 6%). The iPhone was a major contributor with 13% of all new handsets sold in 2nd quarter 2009 up from 3% in the corresponding period of 2008.

I haven’t seen a personal device get traction like this since the Sony Walkman in the 80s and there’s a real simple reason. It’s not the phone, the phone is actually rubbish – it’s the promise of a truly decent mobile web experience. The crux of which lies in the ability to zoom in and out with ease – funny that whilst the cynics were saying that mobile web will never work because the screen is too small, Apple invented a way to take screen size out of the picture…so to speak.

And Joe Public loves this new type of web experience. According to AdMob’s April 2009 Mobile Metrics Report Apple’s iPhone accounted for 43% of all mobile web traffic despite having just 8% of all handset sales in the same period. So, mobile internet usage is on the march and yet many digital marketing folks don’t seem to be paying attention.

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