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CouchCachet Let’s You Fake Your Way to Foursquare Hipness

February 28, 2013 by Leave a Comment

CouchCachetBeing a hip urban social media superstar can be exhausting. You’re out every night, enjoying fabulous meals in fabulous restaurants, sipping on designer cocktails crafted by mixologists with ironic mustaches, and then dancing the night away to the latest bluegrass death metal band that all the indie blogs are raving about. Or, at least that’s how I remember it used to be.

Thanks to CouchCachet, now anyone can have that life, and let everyone else know about it through social media. First connect the app to your Foursquare profile, and on Friday night once you’ve ‘checked-in’ to a private residence (probably your own), CouchCachet will send you an itinerary of your awesome evening, and your night of fake-adventure is ready to begin.

CouchCachet will even find Instagram photos from “real” chic folk, post them on your behalf, then confirm your virtual shenanigans to Twitter. The app avoids awkward situations by avoiding a to a location where your other social media friends are at.

CouchCachet came about at a Foursquare Hackathon held earlier this year at locations around the world to create useful, clever and fun apps that utilize the Foursquare API. The NYC team of Brian Fountain, Justin Isaf, Harlie Levine, and Christopher Kennedy leveraged the Mashery API to create the app.

So, the next time you see me check-in on Foursquare at an impossibly-hip warehouse party, don’t be a hater. I just might be home curled up on the couch with the cats, drinking hot cocoa and re-watching Downton Abbey.

Filed Under: Mobile, Social Media Tagged With: , , , ,

Monopolize Your City One Check-in at a Time with the Metropoli App

October 9, 2011 by Leave a Comment


MetropoliThe creative minds behind the Foursquaropoly mobile game concept have re-branded as Metropoli (for obvious trademark issues), but the concept is exactly the same.

Once the concept is released players will be able to download the iPhone or Android version of the app, connect it to their Foursquare account. If a player is the first person to check into a ‘location’ they can buy it with the available money in their Metropoli account. All other players who check-in to that location must pay the owner rent, and the player’s earnings increase as long as they keep paying the bills on their property.

The group has turned to Kickstarter to fund Metropoli and they are looking for $12,000 by October 26. With the help of 46 backers they’ve raised nearly $1800 so far (Oct 9).

The game is obviously built for urban areas like New York, London, Amsterdam and Toronto that have the required concentration of hip mobile users with both the time and attention to dedicate to social game play within their daily tasks of commuting, work and nights out on the town. As I found out in August when I tried to check in to a restaurant in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia – mobile check-ins are not top-of-mind for most people outside of the major cities.

Filed Under: Digital Culture, Gaming, Mobile Tagged With: , , , ,

Macy’s Uses QR Codes to Promote Backstage Pass to Spring Style Tips

March 21, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Macy's QR CodesThe adoption of 2D barcodes over the past year has been steadily increasing. What was once considered an oddity (at least in North America) when we first used one back in 2008 is now being used by more small businesses and mainstream retailers each and every month. We are commonly seeing the 2D barcodes on everything from business cards, sales receipts, product signage and transit ads.

Recently Macy’s introduced QR Codes as part of their Backstage Pass campaign. Shoppers can scan the code or use SMS to access the 30-second videos featuring style tips and fashion advice from Macy’s team of spokespeople including Bobbi Brown, Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs and Tommy Hilfiger.

Martine Reardron, Macy’s executive VP of Marketing said:

“Macy’s new Backstage Pass is an exciting evolution that brings our stable of fashion experts and designers directly to the customer while they’re shopping in our store, through their hand-held mobile devices. By providing fun and informative video features via an easy-to-use, direct-to-consumer platform, we are connecting and engaging our customer in a personal way that enhances and adds a new element to their shopping experience.”

To help explain how to use the QR codes Macy’s created a demonstration video “How to Use Macy’s Backstage Pass” (above), making it available to customers who text “learn” to MACYS (62297) or on the Find Your Magic sitelet, Facebook page or YouTube Channel. Macy’s sales associates will wear Backstage Pass lanyards with instructions on how to use the QR codes. Customers can download a free QR code reader application by texting “reader” to MACYS (62297).

Macy’s and Mobile Technologies

This is not the first time that Macy’s has embraced emerging mobile technologies. It first used 2D codes in magazine ads in 2010 was is of the first national retailers to use Shopkick, a mobile application and platform that allows users to earn points for checking in at stores to receive special offers.

QR Codes a Passing Fad?

QR Codes are not simply a passing fad as seen in the answers to my question posted on Quora. As GPS and image recognition technologies advance and customers become more comfortable with the check-in, I think we will look back at QR codes as merely the critical first step in connecting real world locations to online content including loyalty programs, deals and value-added content.

Filed Under: Mobile, Technology Tagged With: , , , , ,

Checking In On Foursquare

February 22, 2011 by Leave a Comment

FoursquareFoursquare is coming up on its second birthday March 11. I’m not sure what that equals out to in human years but in social networking platform years it means its high-time for this location-based company to grow up and make something useful out of itself. And while I’m at it, “hey, you kids stop ‘checking-in’ on my lawn”. Or, are we expecting too much from Foursquare, after all, have their social-media siblings YouTube, Facebook or Twitter truly figured it out yet?

Foursquare may actually be on the verge of ‘growing-up’, the big question is “What does it want to be?” In a recent interview with CNBC, CEO and co-founder Dennis Crowley shared that the company has 6.5 million users (an increase from 100,000 a year ago) and 2 million check-ins each day, He said that they would be expanding  into 5 languages including Japanese, French, German, Italian and Spanish. Those numbers are nothing to sneeze at, but with any metrics the big question is how many of those people are active users.

Foursquare: a platform for experimentation

If nothing else, Foursquare has become a platform for brands and their agencies to learn, explore and experiment with the concept of location-based marketing. Foursquare’s check-in leaderboards, mayorships and badges seem like gimmicks now more than ever. Marketers are looking for more mature and sustainable methods to attract customers through their doors and to maintain those relationships through loyalty programs which they can control. Foursquare will be challenged to find that ‘special something’ that provides a true value that its users can’t live without.

Will Foursquare check-ins ever become part of people’s behaviour as they move through their daily lives, or will businesses and their customers evolve to emerging technologies such as Near-Field Communications and Geofencing to provide location-based services such as autocheck-ins and mobile offers. I am checking-in to locations much more sporadically now.

Only 4% of online adults use location-based services

In a widely distributed report released in Nov, 2010 the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life project found that only 4% of online adults use location-based services and only 1% use these services to share their location with friends. The survey was completed before the release of Facebook Places so it will be interesting to see an update of these numbers later this year.

However, despite those low numbers there is no turning back now. Location will definitely be part of the mobile marketing mix moving forward. How will we be using location in 5 years?

Filed Under: Advertising & Marketing, Social Media Tagged With: , ,