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Posts Tagged ‘Local Businesses’

Foursquare’s New Site Design Starts To Roll Live As Gossip Girl Pays Homage

Since its launch almost exactly a year ago, Foursquare’s website has largely had the same basic design. Tonight, it looks like that’s finally getting updated.

While it looks like the update is still in the process of rolling out to all the pages, Foursquare.com now clearly has new system-wide toolbars, a brand new sign-up page, as well as some new settings. You might also notice a new, name-only logo.

While it’s been clear for a while that Foursquare has been working on a site redesign, only in the past few days have signs started to show that it was coming. For example, a completely revamped History area showed up a few days ago, one allowing for venues to have categories as well as show which friends you checked-in with at places.

The biggest part of the changes currently rolling out is to the sign-up page. The new step-by-step process looks highly influenced by Twitter’s sign-up page (which they too tweaked a few times over the years). The process now allows you to sign up, easily find friends already using Foursquare via Twitter or Facebook Connect, as well as link up to those aforementioned networks. After you do that, there’s a one-page rundown of what you can do with Foursquare (such as download one of the mobile apps, earn badges, and explore cities).

These sign-up pages are important for convincing new users to not only sign up, but also showing them what to do. With Foursquare signing mainstream deals left and right, they’re going to need this.

Something else that appears to be new: an option in the setting page for  letting local businesses see that you have checked-in at their venue. When you click the link to learn more, it says:

We allow verified venue owners to see statistics about checkins at their venue. These stats include recent visitors, most frequent visitors and most popular checkin times. You can always opt out if you’d rather not share this data with the venues you visit.

Sadly, with the redesign, there is still no way to check-in from the site itself. You have to use one of the app, the mobile web, or text messaging to do that.

Speaking of mobile apps, Foursquare is about to launch a completely redesigned iPhone app as well. All of these moves are necessary if Foursquare is going to keep up with its better-designed rival, Gowalla (which also just revamped its website).

Something else interesting from tonight: apparently the concept of “checking-in” made its onscreen debut on the popular TV show Gossip Girl. Co-founder Dennis Crowley noted the move and tweeted out a picture of it captured from the show. While there is no specific mention of Foursquare, it’s pretty obvious what they’re paying homage to. And Foursquare actually has paid homage the other way, with its “Gossip Girl” badge.

The move towards the mainstream continues.

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Google Adds Real-Time Updates from Business Owners to Place Pages

Google just launched an interesting update to its Google Local Business Center that makes Place Pages more interesting and interactive. After claiming their business through the Google Local Business Center, business owners can now easily post short updates about their companies on their respective Place Page. In addition, businesses that have been claimed by their owners will now feature a badge that highlights the fact that the actual owner of this business has claimed and improved the page.

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With Place Pages, Google aims to offer “a webpage for every place in the world.” Most users access these pages through searches on Google Maps.

As Google points out in today’s announcement, business owners can use the new “post to your place page” feature to post updates about their businesses directly from their dashboards. This gives local businesses the ability to send out updates about new products or – in the case of local restaurants – to highlight daily specials and new menu items.

It’s also good to see that Google is now giving local business owners the ability to make it clear that they have claimed their Place Pages and improved them with updated information (opening hours, phone numbers, etc.). Even though Google is quite good at generating this information automatically, getting the information directly from the business owners is likely to improve the quality of these listings and will make the information more trustworthy.

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Google Adds Spatial Search to Maps API

The battle for the hearts and minds of geo developers creating map-based apps is on. Last month, Twitter turned on its geo API, and services like SimpleGeo and the GeoAPI are offering to do a lot of the heavy lifting for startups that want to create cool geo apps. Not to sit on the sidelines, Google just tweaked its Google Maps API so that it now supports spatial search and search feeds.

Spatial search allows developers to search an area of map for particular features. Their apps would call these searches through a search feed, which can search a boxed area or within the radius of a certain lat/long point. Geo search results can be sorted by different attributes such as distance. Plug this spatial search into Google’s growing directory of local businesses and a developer perhaps could use the API to build an app which shows restaurants or shoe stores within a boundary on a map.

Being able to ask for all the interesting places within a 10 block radius or within a county opens up all sorts of possibilities. Creating geo apps is getting easier and easier with all of these geo platforms springing up. And of course there is nothing stopping developers from mixing and matching different layers of geo data from different APIs.

(Hat tip to Bob Hitching at Geome.me)

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How Google Will Infiltrate the Real-World: Mobile Coupons, Barcodes, and Visual Search

The rapid growth of the mobile web is a force that could be disruptive to Google, a company who built their search engine for a desktop-based world. On the handheld, all bets are off. Anyone with an innovative concept for improving mobile search could gain ground, possibly even overtaking Google as the top search provider for mobile devices. But don’t worry – Google hasn’t been ignoring this trend. The company has been busy prepping various initiatives designed to get people googling from their mobile phones. From scannable barcodes to an innovative visual search app that lets you perform searches by taking photos, Google is slowly revealing how they plan dominate search in the real world too.

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Google Does Barcodes (Again)

Google hasn’t given up on barcode scanning just yet. Although a failed Print Ad program featuring barcodes for newspapers was shut down at the beginning of the year, that hasn’t stopped the company from giving barcodes another go. This time, the venue isn’t the old-fashioned newspaper, but local businesses. Through Google’s Favorite Places program, over 100,000 of the U.S.’s most popular local businesses will receive stickers sporting Google’s logo, a scannable barcode and a message reading “we’re a favorite place on Google.” Business owners can post these decals to their store windows to show off their respectability and popularity – and you can bet many will.

Customers scanning the barcode will be taken to that store’s “place page” which reveals various details about the business including hours of operation, reviews, photos, directions, phone numbers, brands carried, menus (if a restaurant), and even mobile coupons if available. In addition, users can “star” (rate) the establishment and submit their own review, if desired, turning Google Local Businesses into a Yelp-like user-generated reviews service.

While this initiative has a better chance for success in introducing barcode-scanning to the U.S. market than the Print Ad program did, there’s still going to be some confusion on the part of consumers as to how to get started. Google notes in their Favorite Places FAQ that many modern smartphones including the iPhone, Blackberry, Droid, and other Android devices offer barcode scanning applications, but no links or suggestions are provided. This leaves consumers with having to figure it out on their own. In addition, feature phone owners whose more basic devices include cameras may also wonder if there is software for their phones, too. In some cases there is, but the less tech-savvy mainstream user base has no way of discovering that without taking the time to do some research on the topic.

Perhaps Google should have introduced a cross-platform barcode-scanning application of their own? If they had, it could have definitely helped push the technology adoption forward. It’s almost surprising that they haven’t yet done so especially considering that their latest search rival, Microsoft, has. With Microsoft Tag, for example, you can create your own barcode-like “Tag images” as well as download mobile Tag-reading software.

Mobile Coupons

As mentioned above, the Favorite Places’ barcodes will link to pages that support mobile coupons, assuming the business chooses to offer them. However, these coupons aren’t limited to “favorite” businesses – any business listed on Google Local Search can use this feature. Announced late last month, Google introduced the mobile coupon feature to their Google Local Business Center program which lets any company offer coupons that consumers can access right from their mobile phone. At checkout, the shopper just needs to show the coupon on their mobile’s screen to receive the discount.

Visual Search via Mobile Photos

Google Visual Search is an upcoming technology still in development which was revealed on CNBC’s “Inside the Mind of Google” segment on December 3rd. This innovative mobile application aims to provide an even more intuitive way for interacting with the real world via your mobile phone. With Visual Search, users with phones running Google’s own mobile operating system “Android” will be able to take a photo of their location and use that to trigger a Google search. In order for this to work, advanced algorithms have to match the photo with those stored in a massive database on the backend.

Initially, this service could be used to provide information about various landmarks, businesses, or other notable locales, but really the possibilities are endless. Eventually, the same technology that recognizes landmarks could recognize other objects, too, like products on store shelves, billboard ads, or street intersections. It could even recongize people. As sci-fi as that sounds, that last technology already exists today. Other companies and startups have been working on facial recognition including Polar Rose which identifies people in your Flickr and Facebook photos, Face.com offers two applications for identifying people in Facebook photos, a concept technology called Augmented ID does mobile-enabled facial recognition, and Apple’s iPhoto offers facial recognition, too. And, of course, so does Google’s own photo service, Picasa.

Google Knows Mobile is the Platform of the Future

While it’s true that any company has a shot at dominating the mobile platform, you can’t count out Google yet. It’s clear the company is aware just how important this new platform is to the future of search and they have been busy designing mobile technology to take advantage of this new trend. From GPS-enabled turn-by-turn navigation applications to voice-enabled mobile search apps along with all the technologies mentioned here, Google plans to become the king of mobile search just as they are the king of web search today.

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Twitter Rolls Out New Sign-Up API, Citysearch First to Implement [SCREENSHOTS]

According to our sources at Citysearch, Twitter is opening a new Sign-Up API.

Citysearch wrote us to say that the API will “allow local businesses to integrate their existing Twitter presence or create a new account directly from the Citysearch business profile and tweet from their Citysearch profile page.” How does this new API relate to Twitter’s OAuth feature? What can a Sign-Up API do that OAuth doesn’t? Also, how did Citysearch get wind of this development before a general announcement was made?

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We were able to confirm that the API is, in fact, different from Twitter’s OAuth feature. Citysearch rep Brandi Willard told us this evening that Twitter has not yet made a public announcement about the API. “We’re the first company to implement it,” she said.

Willard continued, “There are a lot of options for the type of content you can show with Twitter integration. It’s pretty much the same functionality [as OAuth, but you can also sign up.”

“We’ve been talking to them for a while about integrating Citysearch with Twitter, and they were looking to bring on more smalll businesses. It just made sense.”

So Twitter is dipping into Citysearch’s trove of small, local businesses – and potential Twitter users – for the maiden voyage of its latest API. This makes sense in light of Twitter’s recent integration of geolocation information with some tweets, and it also makes sense from a monetization standpoint. Companies in the small, local business space could benefit a lot from sign-up and geolocation APIs, and many of these companies are already devoting significant chunks of marketing budgets to the online and interactive advertising.

Twitter is definitely a hot commodity for small businesses that can figure out how to use it, but we’re still unclear on exactly how the new API will work. Here’s what the sign-up looks like on Citysearch, and what the Twitter data will bring to a business’ Citysearch page:

We will bring you more news and technical details about the Sign-Up API in the morning, when we’ll interview more Citysearch execs and quiz them to our heart’s content.

In the mean time, the folks at Citysearch are happy to have another avenue to integrate Twitter data. “We really value having all the right content on our site to allow consumers to make an educated decision,’ said Willard. “We see social media as a big part of that, whether the content is generated on our site or elsewhere. The more businesses that sign up for Twitter, the more content we’ll have on our site.”

We applaud Citysearch’s new semantic, synaptic direction in aggregating content, and we look forward to learning all about how their new sign-ups will work tomorrow morning. Stay tuned!

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See That Funny 2D Barcode In The Store Window? It Might Pull Up A Google Listing.

What if every store had a bar-code sticker on its window so that you could pull out your iPhone, wave it in front of the bar code and get all sorts of information about that business—the telephone number, photos, customer reviews?  Starting on Monday, you’ll be able to do that at up to 190,000 local businesses throughout the U.S.

Google has mailed out window stickers with two-dimensional bar codes (aka, QR codes) to the most-searched for or clicked-on businesses in its local business directory. Anyone with a QR code reader in their phone can scan it to call up a Google Mobile local directory page for one of these “Favorite Places,” which generally includes a map, phone number, directions, address, reviews, and a link to the store’s website. (It’s a mobile version of Google Places).

Local businesses can also set up coupon offers through their Google directory page, which would turn the QR code into a mobile coupon, and help entice someone standing outside a store to come in: “If you found us on Google, you get 20% off.”

Japan is already QR-crazy. Google wants the U.S. to be next. In conjunction with the QR code sticker roll-out, Google is also giving away 40,000 Quickmark QR Code Reader apps for the iPhone, which normally cost $1.99 apiece. But you can use any QR code reader. There are a bunch of free ones, some on Android phones as well.

There are now over a million local businesses which have claimed their Google local listing, up from a few hundred thousand last summer. If these QR code stickers become popular in the U.S., it could encourage more small businesses to claim their listings and give Google cleaner data.

In the near future, Google Maps on mobile phones will also start including businesses as points of interest.  Google calls these “smart maps” internally.  As the businesses are added, they are clickable, and their Places page pops up.

Google will be adding these businesses incrementally. “They are selected based on their PlaceRank,” says John Hanke, VP of Google Earth, Maps, and Local. PlaceRank is like PageRank for places It tries to figure out how prominent a place is based on factors such as “references on the Web, reviews, photos,” says Hanke, “how many people know about it, how long its been around.”

Maybe they should put the PlaceRank on the sticker. A high PlaceRank could become a badge of honor, like a high Zagat’s score.

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Google Brings Local Business Coupons to U.S. Mobile Users

Google has announced today that, just in time for holiday shopping, they are enabling local retailers to display coupons for in-store use on mobile devices of Google-searching users.

Any business using Google Local Business Center can upload mobile coupon offers, and any user searching on Google.com using a mobile device can find the coupons on the businesses’ Place Pages – a feature that also debuted relatively recently. Altogether, the direction the company is taking seems better for users and for local businesses, as well.

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Printable coupons have long been available on Google Maps, but – let’s face it – more and more consumers have abandoned the desktop/printer paradigm for a more mobile/digital approach to search, on-the-go directions, and local business research.

Product manager Alex Gawley wrote on the Google Mobile blog, “With more of you going mobile to search for this information, it makes sense for coupons to go mobile too… We hope you find these mobile coupons useful and that they help you save money, trees (fewer printed coupons), and your hands (from paper cuts) when you’re on the go.”

Place Pages for the desktop have also been revamped to ensure that mobile and printed coupons will share a common look and feel, regardless of the device, the OS, or the browser in which they originated.

It will be interesting to hear and read post-holiday metrics and success (or “opportunity for improvement”) stories about these new mobile coupons. While we certainly hope the setup will allow users to quickly and conveniently engage with the world around them – and we likewise hope local retailers can reach out to customers wherever they are – we wonder how many quickly the coupons will take off and how much users will be inclined to use them.

Would you redeem a mobile coupon you found through Google search, and under what circumstances or conditions? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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Coming to Twitter: Create Sharable Lists of Users

Twitter just announced a major new feature soon to launch: the ability to create sharable lists of users around topics of interest. This will tackle several problems with one feature: the ability to discover diverse high-quality users quickly and easily and the undue power Twitter HQ has had as the only curator of lists on the site so far.

Curation of dynamic topical expert sources is an act of poetry. Just like Twitter has caught on faster than RSS, Twitter Lists will probably catch on a lot faster than OPML has. If you’ve seen the new service TweepML then you’ve got the idea. This is going to be a very big deal.

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“For example,” Nick Kallen writes on the company blog, “you could create a list of the funniest Twitter accounts of all time, athletes, local businesses, friends, or any compilation that makes sense.”

Twitter says that the lists won’t just live on the site, either; there will also be a Lists API available to outside developers. That could mean that clients like Tweetdeck, Tweetie and Seesmic will no longer have any excuse to keep your group lists locked-in.

There is some question whether having Twitter control this technology, instead of an outside, standards-based body like TweepML is trying to be, is going to be a good thing. We’ll have to see how they implement the feature and the API.

The possibilities here are endless, hopefully we won’t have to wait too long for this feature to go live.

Speaking of TweepML, you can follow all the writers of ReadWriteWeb via this link.

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