Location based social network Gowalla has struck a pretty significant partnership today—Disney. The startup is teaming up with Disney Parks to create a branded, Gowalla-powered destination for park-goers to explore Walt Disney World and Disneyland Resorts.
People are able to view park happenings with custom Gowalla Disney Passport pages for Disneyland and Walt Disney World Resorts that include maps featuring a check-in stream, a list of popular places, curated trips, and more. → Read More
It’s a bad month to be Foursquare or Gowalla. Ten days ago, 900-pound gorilla Facebook announced Facebook Deals for Facebook Places (i,e., location-based coupons) and check-ins for third-party apps. A day later, Pew Research reported that, despite all the hype, the use of location-based services is actually declining in America, from 5% of the online population in May to 4% last month. Forget the fabled hockey stick; that’s more like a broken pencil.
Why? Because they’re not giving us any good reason to use them. Look at their web sites. Gowalla proclaims, “Discover the extraordinary in the world around you.” Foursquare says, “Unlock your city.” To which I say: “Oh, come on“ — and it seems I speak for approximately 96% (formerly 95%) of the population. I have no interest in enlisting in a virtual scavenger hunt, or unlocking merit badges — what is this, the Cub Scouts? — or becoming the narcissistic “Mayor” of my local coffee shop. Thanks for the offer, but I’m afraid I already have some semblance of a life. → Read More
It’s no secret that both Foursquare and Gowalla are expanding their location-based social networks past the check-in, developing other incentives for consumers to use the services. Gowalla, in particular, has focused on adding innovative features to its platform to make the social network more interactive, through photos and comments. Most recently, the startup added local highlights, which allows users to essentially tap into their social graph to not only see what’s popular in a particular location, but also provide contextual information around what are the best sights, places, restaurants and activities in a particular locale. Today, Gowalla is adding a few more features for businesses that help the network move beyond the check-in, including City Pages, Verified Businesses and Venues; and the Stamp Calendar. → Read More
Today, Foursquare has announced the arrival of version 2.0 of their service. This version has been the subject of much speculation for several weeks, as everyone wants to know how Foursquare is going to keep their momentum alive. With Facebook Places now out in the wild, and slowly rolling out around the world, Foursquare is well aware they need to move beyond simply being a check-in service. So have they?
As we suspected a couple months ago, there is a new emphasis on both Tips and To-Dos in the new version of Foursquare. Specifically, in the iPhone app, these features now have their own separate buttons for the first time. And on venue pages, it’s now easy to both add a tip or mark a venue as something you want to explore (to-do) later. → Read More
If you didn’t think the check-in was a commodity before Facebook launched their Places feature, you likely do now. But Gowalla has known that for awhile, and that’s why they’ve been moving to extend the service and build on top of the check-in. Comments and photos came several months ago. Today brings another nice addition: Highlights.
The best way to think about the feature may be to think back to the “25 Things About Me” meme that spread throughout Facebook last year. The meme asked you to answer a set of 25 questions and send the answers to your friends. Gowalla Highlights is similar in that they want you to tag about 20 real world places based on a set of criteria. For example, you’re asked to name you favorite “Date Night” spot, the place you think has the “Best Tacos,” your “Alma Mater,” and your favorite “Watering Hole,” among other things. Each of these answers reveals a bit about who you actually are, and where you spend your time. → Read More
Leading up to Facebook’s location announcement, there were two schools of thought. Either you thought Facebook Places was going to destroy Foursquare. Or you thought that this new service would help the startup by bringing more awareness to the location field. It appears that the latter is happening.
“Just heard from The @HarryH that today was @foursquare’s biggest day ever in terms of new user signups,” Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley just tweeted out a few minutes ago (@HarryH is the Twitter name of Harry Heymann, Foursquare’s engineering lead). → Read More
Today at an event in Palo Alto, CA, Facebook unveiled its new Places product — essentially their check-in utility. Obviously, there has been a lot of talk about what this means for the current players like Foursquare and Gowalla. Well, Facebook is partnering with both of those guys. We hinted at this possibility a couple days ago.
Representatives from both Gowalla and Foursquare were invited to take the stage at the event to talk about how they plan to leverage Facebook’s new Places API. Both will allow you to check-in and publish the data to your Facebook feed. Your badges and pins from each of those apps will transfer over as well. As we expected, Facebook is playing nice with these guys — and they’re clearly excited to play nicely back given Facebook’s 500 million users. → Read More
For those placing bets on which startup Google will buy next in its impressive social shopping spree (Jambool, Slide, etc.), you might want to lower your wager on Gowalla, at least for now. According to founder, CEO Josh Williams, Google has yet to initiate takeover talks with the the location based service— although, he says reading the market speculation “made me smile just a little bit.”
Google or no Google, Williams remains adamantly upbeat, even as competition escalates in the scorching hot LBS market and rival Foursquare sprints ahead. At last count, Foursquare has racked up about 2 million users, while Gowalla is pushing ahead with a more modest army of 400,000 users. You could attribute some of Williams’ optimism to a recent pick-up in Gowalla’s numbers— according to his figures, the service is adding a couple thousand users a day now, a 50% increase from last month and the percentage of daily active users is increasing at an even faster rate— but Williams also seems genuinely comfortable with Gowalla’s pace, at least for now.
We got a chance to talk to Williams via Skype about competition, the new API (and why it took so long), the “6 commandments” and his fascination with the “real check-in,” video ahead. → Read More
Earlier today, location-based service Gowalla formally unveiled their new Check-In API. This is big news because it means third-party apps can write to Gowalla’s API for the first time. Looking over the documentation for this API reveals some interesting things. Notably, there are six “commandments” that Gowalla says developers should follow.
Behold, Gowalla’s 6 API Commandments: → Read More
You could make an argument that one of the things holding back the growth of location-based service Gowalla was that there was no full API support. After all, rival Foursquare has had their full API rocking and rolling since last November. But after today, you won’t be able to make that argument anymore.
Gowalla has just formally announced that their Check-In API is now available to all developers. This is an extension of the API Gowalla released this past February. Notably, that API was read-only — but today’s addition brings full write capabilities to the Gowalla ecosystem as well. → Read More
Atoms and bits are coming together in interesting ways. A slew of geo apps like Foursquare, Gowalla, and Loopt let you leave digital markings in the real world whenever you check into a location. Stickybits lets you put barcodes on physical objects which invokes a message, photo, or video which can be passed around with the object. And now we are beginning to see startups figuring out ways to control real-world objects with people’s phones and computers.
Of course there is AnyBot, the $15,000 remote-controlled robot. But even that is too complicated and expensive for the masses. Yesterday, one of the 11 TechStars companies that launched called GearBox showed an early version of an iPhone app that can control a robotic ball (see video below). GearBox wants to wants to help developers build games which involve players controlling a real robotic ball with their phones. → Read More
In the battle of Foursquare versus Gowalla in the location space, Gowalla is often thought of as “the pretty one.” But Foursquare has been attempting to improve their look and feel recently with a number of changes. The latest comes today with new profile pages.
As you can see, the new user pages have a much cleaner design. Just as with the recently redesigned venue pages, Tips are now more clearly labeled and To-Dos are explained better. It seems clear that Foursquare is trying to move the service beyond the check-in and attempting to provide more utility to users with their other features. → Read More
Yesterday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt sat down with a group of reporters after his panel at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA. He said he was open to taking any questions, so I decided to ask him about Foursquare.
It’s a particularly interesting question for Schmidt because back in 2005, Google bought Dodgeball, the company Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley previously started that was similar to Foursquare. Crowley and Dodgeball co-founder Alex Rainert famously left Google in a huff in 2007. A couple years later, Foursquare was born. → Read More
While rival Foursquare seems firmly focused on the business side of things, Gowalla continues to focus on building a beautiful product. The next step in that comes on Wednesday when the service will unveil a way to make customized Passports.
Your Gowalla Passport is essentially your profile page, but Gowalla organizes it in a way to highlight some of the core features that help them differentiate themselves — namely: pictures, comments, stamps, and pins. Beginning on Wednesday, you’ll be able to completely customize the design of this area. Gowalla will provide you with a few themes designed by their team (a heavily design-focused team), or you can build your own. Previously, these custom passports were only available as a premium feature viven to select partners such as LIVESTRONG, CNNMoney, and USA TODAY. → Read More
Heavy Foursquare users, you have a new app to get immediately. Future Checkin is an app that allows you to check-in to your favorite Foursquare venues automatically when you’re near them. You don’t have to do a thing besides simply have your phone on you and this app will check you in while running in the background with iOS 4.
Developer Tim Sears says he was actually inspired to make this app by our posts about iOS 4 background location and check-in fatigue. Check-in fatigue in particular is a growing problem. A number of heavy users of Foursquare that I know (myself included) have been complaining in recent months that it’s getting a bit tedious to have to pull out your phone each time to check-in to a venue. Particularly venues that you frequent. Future Checkin absolutely solves that. → Read More
At Google I/O in May, the search giant indicated that they were about to take their commitment to location to the next level. Sure, Latitude had been around for a while, but everyone knew that Google could do more in the space. The announcement of some new location APIs seemed to a big part of the solution. And now comes the fun part.
Today on their Geo blog, Google is announcing that they’re beginning to open the Places API for business. The first developers getting access? Those working on check-in services. → Read More
Forget about checking-in to venues. Apparently, the new thing to do is to check-in to whatever you’re doing — like watching television shows, or reading a book. It’s something that Hot Potato offers, and they’re in the process of being acquired by Facebook. It’s what GetGlue offers as well, and they’re already seeing over 4.5 million ratings and check-ins a month now. And today, the service is announcing a new exclusive partnership with HBO.
Starting on August 1, when you use GetGlue to check-in watching one of HBO’s hit shows, you’ll earn exclusive stickers designed by HBO. If you’re aware of Foursquare badges or Gowalla pins, it’s the same idea, except based around content. The three shows HBO has selected for this promotion are True Blood, Hung, and Entourage — three of their hottest shows. → Read More
Perhaps you recall that late last year, Google was in discussions to buy Yelp. Despite a supposed offer of $550 million plus earn-outs, Yelp walked away from the deal. But that isn’t stopping Google for entering Yelp’s business. Today, Google continues their fast-moving assault on local and location with a revamped Google Maps for mobile.
Central to Maps for mobile 4.4 is Google Places, the newer component of Maps which shows you, you guessed it, places nearby. But it’s much more than just another layer in Google Maps, with this release on every Android phone (1.6 and later), there will now be a dedicated Places icon that appears in the Android app launcher. So yes, Google just basically gave Places its own new app. → Read More
Location-based social networking service Brightkite has experimented with the concept of badges in the past, threading in the footsteps of Foursquare and Gowalla, who have popularized if not pioneered the now-familiar virtual loyalty and rewards system.
Last May, the startup partnered with coffee chain Starbucks to create a set of branded badges, self-reportedly the biggest brand integration they had done until then.
Today, they’re ramping up their badging efforts. → Read More
Location-based social network Gowalla is teaming up with CNNMoney for Money magazine’s annual “Best Places To Live” list. The top towns on the list have their own Gowalla hot spots, which are linked to from each city profile. For instance, the top Gowalla hot spots in McKinney, Texas (No. 5) include the Landon Winery, Pub McKinney, and Coffee N Cream. If you are within 25 miles of the top 25 cities, a notification will pop up on your Gowalla mobile app directing you to the “Best Places” page.
Partnerships such as this one with big media and brands are a good way to get more exposure for geo apps like Gowalla and Foursquare (which also pursues such high-profile partnerships vigorously). The partnership also adds a mobile component to an otherwise staid—albeit popular—list of best cities. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
