facebook application development

Location-based social service Loopt is launching a new mobile rewards game called Loopt Star. Loopt Star will let users check in to different locales to not only compete with friends (a la Foursquare and Gowalla), but to also earn rewards from retailers and organizations. Loopt Star is basically a virtual loyalty card with a built-in social game.

Using the free iPhone app (other platforms are being evaluated, but Loopt Star will be for the iPhone only at first), users can check in at participating organizations and earn rewards, points or discounts, based on a set of factors designated by the establishments. That means that rewards and reward amounts can be altered depending on time of day, day of the week and how frequently the person has checked in in the past.

While other location-based services like Foursquare have offered discounts and loyalty rewards to users based on where they check in and how often, the focus hasn’t been specifically on earning and offering rewards. With Loopt Star, that’s the focus.

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What Is Loopt Star

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Loopt Star does borrow a lot of its social game elements from Foursquare — there are badges, leaderboards and the ability to become the “Boss” of a location — however, it also differs significantly from the other location-based services already available.

• Loopt Star is based entirely on Facebook Connect. Instead of having to build or import your social graph, Loopt Star simply uses Facebook. We think this is pretty brilliant because it lets users get started immediately. Users can then share their current location in real time with their Facebook friends and alert them about special Loopt Star offers via newsfeed.
• Brands can customize campaigns based on location, the number of visits, how many people are in a group, time of day or day of the week.
• Wi-Fi location technology is used to limit cheating.
• Users can view “Nearby Rewards” in the app and also get updates of rewards for places they have been before or that their friends share with them.

Loopt has already signed more than 20 sponsors and will launch with several large companies including The Gap, Universal Records, Burger King, Starbucks and Stanford University. New brands will be rolled out each week in the application.

What rewards users get depends on the brand. For instance, if you visit The Gap twice, you’ll earn a 25% discount. Meanwhile, Burger King customers in New York City who want to “have it [their] way” three times will get a free coffee or soda alongside a qualifying sandwich.

Universal Music will be giving away MP3s to users who check in at certain bars and Starbucks will offer special badges and discounts for the most frequent customers, much like it does with Foursquare and Brightkite.

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Simplicity = Smart

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What we like best about Loopt Star is that it’s extremely simple. The app plugs into your Facebook social graph and then makes it easy to share location info and check in to places to earn points and rewards.

In a recent editorial post about why location hasn’t gone mainstream, Leah Betancourt argued that its value to advertisers was questionable. Loopt Star isn’t designed to be its own social network; Facebook and Twitter and other services can do that better. Instead, it can be a location guide and a virtual loyalty card. The coupons and the simplicity offer the user value, while the ability to set parameters around offers and to better target existing users offers businesses and advertisers value.

When I spoke with Loopt CEO and Founder Sam Altman about the new product, he stressed that even if Facebook does get into location on its own terms, that doesn’t cannibalize what Loopt Star is doing. On the contrary, it makes the overall service even more valuable as Facebook better integrates with location. If everything is coming in from the same stream and everything is based on the same social graph, Loopt Star can offer its sponsors and users a certain experience while still tying into the core Facebook ecosystem.

We think that’s extremely shrewd. We also think that giving advertisers and business owners more options and granular control over their campaigns will lead to more creative and expansive uses. We’ve been waiting for a location-based service to eschew the pretense of being a social network and instead embrace the advertising opportunities

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A Competitive Space

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Loopt was at the forefront of the location-based space, but despite having a diverse suite of mobile apps and support for lots of platforms, the service has taken a backseat as social gaming services Gowalla and Foursquare have moved to center stage.

With Loopt Star, Loopt is getting into the social gaming space but with a very clear purpose. From the offset, Loopt Star wants to offer value to users and offer value to advertisers. The value for advertisers is crucial because the companies that will end up leading this space are those that are most able to sell a cost-per-visit strategy to business owners and retailers.

To be sure, Foursquare and Gowalla have crazy momentum right now, with Foursquare reporting nearly 1 million checkins a day. However, this is a space that has yet to truly explode and there are still plenty of opportunities for other companies and services to get a shot at claiming some of this virtual (and physical) space.

By using Facebook as the basis for the Loopt Star social graph, we think that Loopt is on the right track to building a service that users will actively use. Now it will just be up to the company to secure the sponsorships and partnerships to ensure that the rewards are valuable.

What do you think of the idea behind Loopt Star? Let us know!

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For more mobile coverage, follow Mashable Mobile on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook

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Reviews: Brightkite, Facebook, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twitter

Tags: facebook, foursquare, geolocation, iphone apps, loopt, loopt star, social gaming

When Google upgraded their Local Business Center to Google Places, it launched the opening salvo in what we expect to be a long war for local advertising dollars.

With local advertising revenues expected to reach $144.9 billion in 2014 according to BIA/Kelsey — and more and more dollars are shifting away from traditional media toward digital media buys — the new war for local ad spend will be a battle between the Internet titans and social networks.

Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Foursquare, Yelp and even Apple are all attempting to carve out their own niche offering for local advertising dollars. Who will succeed remains to be seen, but this is a fight you won’t want to miss.

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The War of the Worlds

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The challengers fighting for local advertising budgets can be separated into three categories: Search, consumer review sites and social networks. The mobile component to each sector is also quite significant, especially given that the mobile web is taking over the world, and that mobile search is still a nascent space — one that appears to be more app-driven than search-engine driven.

Each category also has its own distinct advantage and key players, but what Google has managed to do with Google Places is straddle all three sectors with an extremely valuable proposition for local businesses that includes free stuff, cheap advertising rates and the promise of exposure.

Google also has a very strong mobile presence, but their adherence to the standard search model for discovery could make them susceptible to competitors vying for local ad dollars.

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Search

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In the local search space we can include the obvious players: Google and Microsoft, the latter of which will grab more share once the Yahoo search deal is implemented. Both behemoths are fast-adding features to their search services to better facilitate local search queries. Bing even has Foursquare data in maps.

For businesses, the advantages of being highlighted in local search results over competitors is significant. Sure it’s 100% paid media, but it’s also exposure at one of the primary touch points for service and restaurant queries on the web.

Google clearly recognizes the value of a targeted ad. With Google Places they also re-introduced a simpler, faster, cheaper way for their local business customers to advertise (formerly called enhanced listings). Business can pay a $25 per month flat fee to use Tags to make their listings more prominent on Google.com and Google Maps. Included in Tags are Posts, which are like status updates for Place Pages and will appear as part of the search listing.

Tags show up as yellow markers that users can scroll over to view promoted features or coupons. While Tags are ads, they’re essentially Google’s take on Promoted Tweets, and make listings stand out from the crowd. If done right, they could be useful for both businesses and consumers.

When thinking about local search, don’t forget about Twitter. The social network also happens to double as a search engine, and they’re aggressively moving in the local direction with tweet geotagging that can identify points of interest. This extra layer of data will enable Twitter users to search locally, and see a real-time stream of nearby tweets.

Couple these new Twitter features with Promoted Tweets — Twitter’s definition of search advertising — and you have a situation ripe for local businesses. The key here is whether or not Twitter can prove why users should share their location and why local businesses should care.

In thinking about search, remember that mobile will factor into the future in a big way. Steve Jobs believes that most mobile search happens via applications, which means that Apple — which now owns alternative mobile search application Siri — could play an important role in the mobile local advertising battle.

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Consumer Review Sites

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For the purpose of this post, consumer review sites like Yelp and City Search are being distinguished from other social networks because their primary focus is on user-generated place reviews.

The advertising opportunities on these sites are certainly geared towards the businesses that consumers are reviewing. That could create a conflict of interest for some networks, and in the case of Yelp, many small businesses felt that they were being bullied to pay to advertise in order to remove negative reviews. Yelp has maintained that this was absolutely not the case, and was a misunderstanding of their review filtering process.

As such, they’ve made changes in recent weeks to lessen the confusion, but now that Google Places offers a handful of business-friendly features, we could easily see local businesses jump ship with their advertising budgets.

On this feature front, the addition of service areas is quite significant. So too are the QR code window decals and free business photo shoots. Plus, if Google opts to take Google Maps inside businesses, there will be even more incentive for companies to own their Google Place Page.

In a previous post, I made a case for how the new consumer review is all about you, and that location, premium content and relationships are critical to the relevancy of the consumer review.

In this sense, Foursquare certainly factors into the consumer review equation. Their tips and content partnerships mean that their location-aware mobile social network is perfectly poised to deliver up tightly packaged consumer reviews that are place- and time-relevant. This means that smart local businesses will allocate more of their budgets to checkin rewards and mayor specials.

Lest we forget, there’s a Foursquare-esque component of Google’s Place Pages. All Place Pages include consumer reviews with both text and star ratings. These reviews are also easily accessible via Google Buzz for Mobile and Google Maps.

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Social Networks

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The primary social networks embroiled in the local advertising war include Twitter, Foursquare, Google and soon Facebook.

Google’s social networking endeavors have left plenty to be desired. Google Buzz launched to an excited tech audience but enthusiasm has since faded away. There’s also Google Latitude — an always-on location-sharing service that started as a Loopt clone — which now has 3 million active users. It’s the intersection of Buzz and Latitude on mobile devices that will help Google nail down local advertising dollars.

Between Buzz for Mobile’s checkin model and Latitude, Google has a lot of information that they can both display for consumer/business use as well as use behind the scenes. Since Buzz checkins are associated with Place Pages and Place Pages have dashboards, Google has the opportunity to compete with Foursquare’s business dashboards. They also have the data to create accurate behavioral analysis around location, based on the implicit location-sharing of Latitude users. Take that and the Google name, and you have something quite compelling.

Unfortunately for Google, Facebook is most certainly moving into the same space. Given their size and trendiness, we can assume that Facebook will be a strong competitor and a viable contender for local advertising dollars. The leaked McDonalds-Facebook location partnership tells us that diners will be able to check-in at restaurants with activity and food items being posted back to Facebook. How exactly this will work or function we don’t know, but what is certain is that once Facebook knows where their 400 million members are, they can target advertising by location.

Twitter is really trying to ramp up relevancy of geo-located tweets, but they’ve never quite been able to do what Foursquare has done — demonstrate the significance of location-sharing. As discussed above, there could be a perfect storm brewing for the day when geo-aware tweets are tied to places and Promoted Tweets are available to all potential advertisers.

Once that happens, we predict that advertisers will be able to target their Promoted Tweets by location and not just keywords (as it stands now). Should they go down this path, this could be their real secret sauce, especially given what we’ve already seen from Virgin America in the Promoted Tweets department.

In the social networking space, don’t count out David — a.k.a. Foursquare — amongst these internet Goliaths. Foursquare has pioneered the location-sharing movement by making checkins valuable, if not cool. The company is hotter than ever, and its partnerships — especially with the likes of Starbucks — continually ensure that it has something the competition doesn’t. Its user base is growing astronomically, and now that the users are there, businesses are clamoring to catch up.

Foursquare has also been nimble in finding ways to cater to local businesses. Early on, it allowed business owners to offer specials to mayors and those that check in. More recently, it introduced a simple way for businesses to sign-up and gain access to the business dashboard with checkin analysis. Its offering not only parallels what Google is doing with Place Pages, but bests it.

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For more social media coverage, follow Mashable Social Media on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook

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More social media resources from Mashable:

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- Facebook vs. Google: The Billion Dollar Battle to Be Your Default Social Profile
- Why Hasn’t Location Reached the Mainstream Yet?
- How Facebook Can Become a Money Making Machine
- 8 Tips for a Successful Social Media Cause Campaign
- 5 Ways Government Works Better With Social Media

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, bubaone

[Img credits: jef safi, Thomas Hawk and courtesy of iStockphoto, yuri4u80.]

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Reviews: Bing, Facebook, Foursquare, Google, Google Buzz, Google Maps, Internet, Siri, Twitter, Yelp, iStockphoto

Tags: facebook, foursquare, geolocation, Google, local businesses, MARKETING, place pages, twitter