Placecast’s ShopAlerts service, which delivers retailer and merchant offers and discounts to consumers via their mobile phones, is announcing new functionality today—integration with mobile smartphone apps.
As we’ve written in the past, ShopAlerts is a white-label geofencing platform for businesses that want to deliver geo-triggered offers to their customers on their mobile phones. Consumers can opt-in to receiving text messages in a variety of ways—at the store, online, via text-message, mobile websites or on Facebook. Geofences are virtual areas set around physical locations; when an opted-in consumer is inside a geofenced area, she receives a message from a business, including a discount, notice of a sale, directions to a store or other content.
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AT&T is betting big on location-based shopping alerts through a partnership with Placecast. AT&T is debuting a branded ShopAlerts service, which will deliver special offers and discounts to consumers via their mobile phones when they are near a participating store or brand (initial brands include HP, KMart, and JetBlue).
The program is currently available to AT&T customers in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco who have opted-in to receive Shop Alerts, but AT&T plans to roll the program out nationally by summertime and increase the number of participating brands. → Read More
Placecast is announcing a fairly significant partnership with European carrier O2 to enable geo-fence marketing campaigns for a number of brands for the carrier’s users.
Via, O2 More, an opt-in service for O2 customers; brands like Starbucks and L’Oreal will send the carrier’s users exclusive offers and information via SMS and MMS on their mobile phones when they are inside a geo-fenced area around a store or other location. → Read More
As more and more geolocation apps hit the market, there is an enormous amount of data from these applications that can be mashed up to provide greater use to consumers. Location-based advertising and marketing service Placecast is hoping to help developers sort through all this data with the debut of LocalBox, an ‘all things location-based’ data funnel that allows carriers, handset manufacturers, and app developer communities to add location-based information from any source into a mobile operating system or software development kit (SDK) at scale.
LocalBox, which is in private beta, sources data about location in real time from a number of different open API’s, such as those for Foursquare, Citysearch and more, and then reconciles them all to a specific place. In addition to pulling in point of interest data from many different sources, LocalBox cleans up this data for duplicates, erroneous listings, and different expressions of a location, and then normalize them all to a single, correct location in real-time. → Read More
Text-message advertising startup Placecast is partnering with Location Labs to potentially extend the reach of Placecast’s ShopAlerts service to over 180 million potential consumers in the US. Location Labs offers developers an API that gathers location data from carriers such as AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile.
Location Labs’ API will be used for Placecast’s ShopAlerts, which are location-triggered mobile text messages sent from brands to consumers. Consumers can opt-in to receiving text messages in a variety of ways—at the store, online, via text-message, mobile websites or on Facebook. → Read More
If you want to know why you can never trust a survey commissioned by a company trying to bolster its market position, just look at the slide above. Placecast, which is a text-messaging advertising service, commissioned a survey by Harris Interactive to measure consumer’s attitudes towards, and acceptance of, text-message marketing on their mobile phones.
The survey (embedded below) has some useful data for location-based marketers. But it reads more like pitch deck for Placecast. Guess what it finds to be the most valued activity on mobile phones? Yup, text messaging. And what do consumers think about location-based social networks like Foursquare? Those are the least valued, according to the sample of consumers asked, with only 5 percent of respondents rating it as the most valued activity (and skewed more towards men than women). In other words, Foursquare is a geek activity. Geo-marketers should really focus on text messaging, which just so happens to be the business Placecast is in, not those geo social apps where Placecast doesn’t play. → Read More
Have you ever tried to check into a place on Foursquare or some other geo service only to find that there are 10 names for the same location? For instance, Foursquare has tons of different “places” that are all inside Grand Central Terminal in New York City. There is Grand Central Terminal itself, but there is also Track 32, 34, 108, and so on. You can also check into the Blimpies or Hudson News inside the terminal, or the “5:22 Express To Grand Central Terminal” which is not a single place so much as it is a moving train (literally). While there are times you want to have the granularity of being able to say, “I am in front of the central ticket booth with the clock,” nine times out of ten simply checking into Grand Central Terminal is sufficient for most people.
The Grand Central problem is replicated across many popular places in Foursquare and other places databases. According to mobile marketing startup Placecast, location datasets show similar mismatches up to 40 percent of the time. → Read More
Following the location-based frenzy that took place at this year’s SXSW festival, my colleague MG Siegler highlighted a definitive issue when it comes to checking in on various social networks like FourSquare, Gowalla, Loopt and others. The problem is that each of these check-in services has their own places database, which means that a place on Foursquare may be slightly different than a place on Gowalla, even though they’re technically the same place. Moreover, within many location-based social networks, there are duplicates for some venues since people are allowed to create their own. Location-based advertising and marketing service Placecast is hoping to resolve this problem by launching its Match API, Rosetta Stone like-database for location venue data.
Placecast’s free Match API will enables location content providers and location-based application developers to refer to a location in any number of ways, and validate that those references resolve to one true location for each check-in. In more simple terms, the API will take duplicate listings for a venue and combine them into one listing. The API translates data across services and matches it for accuracy, regardless of the ID system. And because the Placecast Match API is an open system, Placecast’s Match API enables companies working with location data to use any (or multiple) ID system and resolve to one true location. For example, if I check-in to the lobby of the Hilton Hotel and a friend checks into the restaurant at the Hilton Hotel, the Match API would resolve these and show both as the same location. → Read More
Placecast, a startup that creates a location-based mobile marketing technology, has raised $3 million in Series B funding from Quatrex Capital, ONSET Ventures and Voyager Capital. This brings Placecast’s total funding to $8 million.
Placecast recently debuted its technology, called ShopAlerts, that allows retailers bring people into their stores by sending them text messages when they get near their retail outlets. Here’s how ShopAlerts works. Consumers can opt-in to receiving text messages in a variety of ways—at the store, online, via text-message, mobile websites or on Facebook. Once the technology has been activated, consumers will be alerted when they are near a location that they are interested in or when the brand is offering sales and specials. → Read More
For brick and mortar retail shops, the biggest challenge right now is actually getting foot traffic in their stores. Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that retailer North Face is attempting to bring people into their stores by sending them text messages when they get near their retail outlets. That technology, called ShopAlerts, is powered by location-based advertising startup Placecast and is launching today as a full-fledged marketing service for retailers.
Here’s how ShopAlerts works. Consumers can opt-in to receiving text messages in a variety of ways—at the store, online, via text-message, mobile websites or on Facebook. Once the technology has been activated, consumers will be alerted when they are near a location that they are interested in or when the brand is offering sales and specials. ShopAlerts’ technology uses “geo-fences,” which are virtual boundaries that can be targeted via location-based marketing. Retailers can customize alerts to fit their brand and strategy. On the consumer side, ShopAlerts will only send maximum number of 3 messages within a given week from a retailer. And users can opt out of the program by texting “stop” back to a text message. → Read More
Editor’s note: Is Apple going too far with its restrictions on developers? Alistair Goodman thinks so and explains why in this guest post. He is the CEO of 1020 Placecast, a location-based mobile advertising startup.
Apple’s recent behavior bears an increasing resemblance to carriers with respect to the walled garden they are creating around the iPhone. Restricting applications, restricting the use of location on the device, blocking Flash, and now potentially taking advertising in house—these moves are taken from the carrier’s playbook with the hope of locking out meaningful competition. Ironically, Apple may very well become the barrier to open innovation in mobile in much the same way as carriers have been before the iPhone came along.
What is clear from the announcement to developers last week about plans to deny some apps that deliver location-based advertising is that Apple intends to control the flow of marketing dollars on the iPhone. Less clear are their plans for sharing the wealth with the ecosystem—but if you look closely at acquisitions like Placebase, key hires and patent filings, what emerges is a potentially more ominous view of a company that can only compete in the direct advertising business head-to-head with Google by seizing control of location-based advertising. → Read More
Location-based marketing platform Placecast has raised $5 million in funding from Quatrex Capital, Onset Ventures and Voyager Capital.
Placecast’s platform uses proprietary algorithms that weave together location information and other data from audiences across the web, mobile, and email. Placecast then analyzes inventory, segments audiences and targets ads for maximum relevance for advertisers and publishers. Placecast manages all of a publisher’s web and mobile inventory, as well as serves targeted ads and messages into outgoing emails. → Read More
