Foursquare, Loyalty Cards And Market Baskets
There's a fantastic interview on O'Reilly Radar today with Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare. Of course, the topic of revenue models came up, and one of Crowley's ideas was to create "scrappy promotions" for local businesses--check in five times at the same coffee shop and get a free cup, for instance. The "loyalty scheme" is a pretty promising angle for location-based apps like Foursquare and Gowalla (and exciting, hyperlocal variants like North Carolina's own TriOut.) Certainly they provide the "scrappy" promotional angle that Crowley speaks of, but they also provide local businesses with a loyalty scheme that makes sense and doesn't requires consumers to carry around a rolodex full of punch/stamp cards or other pocket detritus.