Ok if you have not heard of location based services like Foursquare, Facebook Places or Gowalla then this may come as a shock to you. You can use you cel phone to ‘Check in’ to a particular retailer’s store, or other publicly accessible place. How this is supposed to work is that because most intelligent phones have GPS (Global Positioning Satellite) communications modules built in.
Relying on GPS is all well and good but GPS it not very reliable considering that is has an accuracy window of approximately 30 meters. Um that’s just shy of 100 feet for you metrically challenged individuals. I know you are probably thinking that this is not a huge issue especially if you live in a rural area. However in a congest city line New York this can be a huge discrepancy.
Consider this scenario, the person’s phone that first registered the location you are checking into reported it approximately 100 ft north of your current physical location. Your phone is reporting your location approximately 100 ft to the south of your physical location which could place you at the Starbucks across the street from the one you are currently paying too much for that latte in. At this point you may have to sift through numerous listings for the particular shop that you are actually in. Of course this is only a small reflection of the problem with social location solutions.
Let’s expand this just a step further shall we? Assuming that you are not the only person to experience this phenomenon let us assume for the sake of reality that the individual who first entered the site you are checking into did not bother to include all of the street information or even the correct name of the store as printed on the receipt. At this point you aren’t really certain that you are able to locate the store. Your next option is to add the location as a new venue which is great because this will expedite your climb on the mayoral ladder.
The problem here is that the purveyor of said establishment has not real incentive nor any interest in clarifying this situation. Honestly with such a flawed system why bother, which is bad news because at least the vendor should want to validate their location. The question is how to do this without too much effort. I mean if there are already several incorrect entries how can a retailer ensure that theirs is the once checked into?
My solution to the problem involves some old technology put to a new use. The simplest answer is QR codes. Most intelligent cel phones also have the ability to read QR codes via their camera. Don’t believe me take your cel phone out and launch the bar code reader app. If your phone does not have one then check you device manufactures application store for it. I know that Andoird, Blackberry and iPhones all have a free application. Once your reader is loaded scan the following image.
If your phone advises you that you are about to open a browser just remember if you click ok it will surf to the address contained in the code. Depending upon you phone service provider there may be some bandwidth charges so only do this if you normally surf the web from your phone. Assuming that you do surf via your phone it should take you to LinkedIn.com. Ok that’s a simple QR code let’s examine one that is a little more complicated. Do the same again for the next code.
In the above example the code will open up a window to your twitter account and prepare a tweet for you to send out to your followers. If you normally use a twitter app like twicca from your cel phone then please fire that tweet off.
By this point you are beginning to understand the power of the QR code and how a business could take control of their location presence by placing one of these on their front door or even next to the register. Think about it, all that marketing fluff from the companies who push the location based services solutions could actually be realized just by adding a tiny bit of accountability.
What needs to happen is that we need to standardize the location tag for businesses to use a QR code. A simple vCard style code may suffice but I suspect that we would need some augmentation of this. Store/franchise identifier and other specific retailer information. I imagine that a business might wish to include some sort of offer attached to the code as well. Why not reward customers who are actually using your services? Take a look at this vCard and you’ll see that I am getting at.
Honestly you need to be in the store in order to check in. In addition the code ensures that you are checking into the store on this side of the street. I believe that the with right mix of technology location based solutions could become a true marketing tool. Unfortunately the current crop of utilities miss the mark almost entirely. That’s not to say that they don’t promise the world I just don’t feel that they come anywhere close to delivering it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mikel King has been a leader in the Information Technology Services field for over 20 years. He is currently the CEO of Olivent Technologies, a professional creative services partnership in NY. Additionally he is currently serving as the Secretary of the BSD Certification group as well as a Senior Editor for the BSD News Network.
