Author Archives: John Robert Reed

Dis-Cord: Mobile Transactions and the Death of Cash

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Here’s a thought: walk into a bar, order, and pay with your phone. Why not? Japan as an entire nation has been doing it widely for at least the last five years. I know it sounds crazy but it’s time the wild wild West looked beyond what the mobile giants are pedaling today and ask themselves, “Why haven’t we done this yet?”

We’ve already seen a number of mobile payment technologies break onto the scene since the start of 2010, including a few raised right here in Austin, and they are doing more than just introducing new portals to give our money away; they are actually ballooning a market that has the potential to disrupt how we view, value, and spend our hard earned dinero.

Get In The Game

The technologies exists to transition transactions from the ugly, cumbersome processes that we’ve all been accustom to for approximately the last 60 years – I am talking about scribbling by signature on a piece of paper with a bunch of meaningless numbers, or carrying around book of receipts/cash in my back pocket.

Of these technologies, there are number of interesting players in the game but Square is probably the most notable of the group currently leading the pack. Square allows merchants anywhere there is internet access to accept payments from credit cards via any mobile device that has a headphone input jack.

Square is extremely interesting to me because of the potential it has to significantly widen the transaction playing field and practically double the revenues of any delicious cash-only trailer on South Congress simply by facilitating credit card transactions.

Square provides a necessary technology for independent businesspersons to see more dollar signs while lessening the stress on consumers by providing a stellar alternative to the always-disappointing “cash only” sign, all while sexifying the exchange in the process. I’ll ask it again: “Why hasn’t this happened yet?”

Market potential seems to be growing hand-in-hand with the proliferation of the apple’s products (i.e. the iPad and iPhone), and rumor on the street has is that apple themselves may be starting to smell the pie they are cooking up and want a piece of it.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Square’s tech should and will be included in every small biz startup kit from here on out. However, the more interesting question to me is not whether businesses are going to use it, but how this technology will influence how we as consumers spend?

To buy or not to buy?

In an effort to predict general US spending behavior, as well as an Austinite’s spending behavior, I think it best we look to Japan as a sister culture example that is ten years ahead of us.

I make this assumption because Austinites have the disposable income and interest in technology to mimic Japan’s mobile adoption behavior. “Austin residents are the No. 1 spenders in the U.S., averaging $67,076 in overall household expenses over 2009.” And, as is in Japan, Austinites are technology cookie monsters in search of the next fun gizmo to ogle over until someone at SXSW tells us what the next shiny object could be. Long story short, our culture is composed of financially enabled, technologically savvy cool hunters.

Japanese residents use their phones for everything, including payments, and they shop a ridiculous amount via their mobile devices. According to a number of reports put out by Wireless Watch Japan, an English news source for Japan’s mobile industry, Japan’s mobile payment/shopping industry has encountered little resistance with user adoption. To shed some light, here are some of the more interesting stats I found:

· Revenues from mobile shopping and auctions started to outgrow mobile content revenues as early as 2005. The dominant players in this category are Yahoo! Shopping and Auctions and Rakuten, an online shopping site Aggregator which generates 25% of its total sales via mobile.
· 32% of Japanese mobile users use their mobile to make purchases online.
· 21.5% participate in auctions.
· 14.8% of mobile shoppers do so 5-9 times a year, and almost 1/6 once a month or more.
· The average amount spent on mobile purchases by shoppers exceeds US$300.

As our lives get busier and align more with web-savvy devices, we will start to mimic the behavior seen above, purchasing more: possibly a new Mac Book via your new iPad, bidding on ebay via your blackberry, or merely purchasing the right to read the content that until this point has been offered free for your reading pleasure!

Currently, we are faced with an infrastructure-level problem: If we don’t have cash, we don’t get a cupcake from the trailer. The introduction of mobile transaction software/devices, mobile digital cash, payment 2.0, or whatever we will eventually call it, will inherently remove this infrastructure level barrier leading to the deeper philosophical question, “It’s possible, but do I need this cupcake?”

The introduction of these technologies goes way beyond cupcakes though, and will undoubtedly effect spending behaviors, businesses, and financial institutions.

Looking to the future

In the next few years we will begin to see Americans purchasing more and more from their iPads, iPods, and phones. I have not doubt about it.

To break it down, I see the paradigm shifts below happening in the next 10 years as a result of mass adoption of mobile transactions:

Cash use and physical currency will decline

This is bound to happen especially as more players like, PingPing, Paypal (using Bump’s tech), and Austin’s own TabbedOut enter the game with their eyes on the rapidly expanding gold rush opportunity.

(Even Starbucks has a mobile payment app… we should all be worried, very worried. Our nation is about to be cracked out and in debt thanks to Starbucks.)

Although all different now, with no clear victor in the pack, these technologies all share one common attribute: they come through when cash fails. Cash is limited, troubling to access on-demand, and ultimately unnecessary unless you are purchasing something shady.

Credit cards will likely remain the primary payment option (as perpetuated by technologies like Square) as we’ve already been trained and accustomed to this primary payment process for the last 60 years.

Quickly following credit cards as the current preferred method payment is cash, but the main differentiator between cash and credit cards is that credit cards are not yet immediately threatened by mobile payment technologies — cash definitely is.

All of the companies listed above will likely substitute cash in small transactions to start, but will grow in popularity because they are fundamentally easier and more similar to the credit card-like behavioral tendencies to which we are accustomed.

Cash is also threatened by businesses that may reinforce mobile payment methods because of the added business value they offer. This could be a number of things: graphically representing transactions, gathering data about your customers, branding transactions, or by providing a better system for personal finance by allowing users to electronically tracking each transaction in with e-receipts waiting for them in their inbox.

Point being: cash is limited, and phones are everywhere. Businesses and consumers will put one and one together eventually.

NFC enabled phones will increase micro payments

Not long ago, Richard McManus wrote this article on ReadWriteWeb explaining the tech and potential of Near Field Communication technology in mobile phones.

Pay Pay with bump is an example of NFC hard at work. The days of “I’ll have to pay you back” just won’t cut it in the future, not when the act of returning owed money can be accomplished by simply bumping phones together (assuming you have the money in your account).

This technology could allow for payments of all sizes, but practically speaking, it directly targets cash because that is the preferred method of smaller transactions. No one wants a check made out for $4.50 – it would cost you that much in gas just to cash it.

NFC is a valuable technology, especially within the context of mobile payments. While Apple or Android products haven’t yet adopted it, I wouldn’t be surprised to see this technology wrapped into new products as the competitive landscape for mobile payment methods matures.

Smarter Recommendations: spending data will open all kinds of doors

Transactional data will dramatically improve search. When transactions go mobile and through a device, data is being generated and potentially captured. While some don’t want this data to go public, there are valuable uses for it that have real world value.

In a recent interview with John Battelle, he explains how services can communicate with each other to use such data to better serve your goals:

Say I use the New York Transit application to navigate my way through New York for 3 or 4 days… all of the questions and back-and-forth that I use that app for, which is essentially a structured search session—right? Now, match that against a set of data which is the transit map. I say, “I need to go over here. I want to go over there. I prefer this route over that route,”—that becomes a dataset that should inform other searches that I’m making on things that seemingly are unrelated but may not be. That should be available as metadata for future searches. And figuring how to inform that is as important as parsing the line or the spoken phrase that I’m making in the moment.

Now, if I take that spoken phrase and go and search for “Chicago rental car” four months after interacting with that New York Transit map application, how can we take the metadata from that interaction with New York and inform the appropriate response in Chicago. Perhaps the best suggestions would be, “Hey, you know what? You don’t need to rent a car. You can use the Chicago Transit. Here’s an app for it. You can get from the airport to everywhere you want to go without having to rent a car. Plus, you’ll save $150 which we know is a goal of yours because you’ve been interacting with the Mint application and it said that a goal of yours is that you want to save $200 a month and here’s a way that you do that”?

Tying all that together, that’s the Holy Grail because then it starts to understand you. If you only parse just the query, even if you get the natural language right and the intent right, you’re missing the whole person.

Spending behavior can paint a more accurate picture of who you are and can thus allow services to better understand our needs and make better recommendations.

While scary, spending behavior is one of the biggest missing pieces of the puzzle that helps machines identify what we need, what we don’t [cupcakes], what we value, and what alternatives may better suit our long-term objectives.

Dis-Cord: Tech Tips for N00bs to Survive SXSW

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There’s a little piece of chaos at SXSW for everyone; and every year, some folks navigate the flood of people and sensory overload a bit better than others – the difference between a SXSW veteran and noobie is noticeable at first glance. In an effort to reduce apparent nerd-ism, I’ve put together some helpful tips and found some neat tools for first-timers at SXSW.

Tool #1: SXSW N00bies, start here.

Take time to dig the SXSW website — I often start here with clients. There’s a ton of valuable prepackaged content on the SXSW website. First-timers have a tendency to get overwhelmed at first glance and avoid spending the necessary time exploring the website fully.

To be honest, the SXSW website runs very deep, and requires some quality time to find all the gems that you might not even know you’re looking for. But SXSW is all about serendipity, so allow yourself room to be surprised, even in your initial planning.

Here’s the SXSW first-timers guide and general 101 – start here and take an hour or so for a deeper dive. http://www.sxsw.com/first_time

http://www.sxsw.com/home/news/sxsw_101_posts

True expectation: there’s entirely way too much for any one person to do at SXSW — exploring the website helps you see a better lay of the land and make better decisions.

Solid solution: plan to attend everything that sounds interesting and make the game-time decision when it comes down to it – you can’t choose wrong; it’s all good.

Tip #2: Use apps that are optimized for SXSW

It’s all about location this year.

It seems that every year at SXSW, the biggest problems are trying to figure out where to go next, and what the hell everyone else is doing and why. When I’m glued to phone at SXSW this year, these are the apps I’m going to be using to solve these problems:

SXSW (official app) – The official SXSW app called, my.SXSW, is a valuable tool for those who live the structured life. My.SXSW has some nice sorting and filtering functions that literally can show any and all of official SXSW activities.

If you have the time (and desire), log-in to my.SXSW.com, create an account, and add interesting films, shows, and panels to your schedule. This process forces you to explore the ungodly amount of content that SXSW has prepared over the past year.

The app also has a great map function. For those who have never walked the fine city of Austin, Texas, SXSW is practically a city-wide event – sometimes it’s helpful to actually gauge what’s actually “walking distance.”

Foursquare – Foursquare is a veteran of SXSW from last year. This service/app incentives you to “check-in” and awards you “badges” for personal exploration. Each check-in alerts all of your friends on Foursquare of your location (by venue). The virtual currency talk is an interesting one for another day, but the real value at SXSW is knowing where all your friends are without having to text, email, or call. Plus, they have some cool promotions running this year, like this one in conjunction with Spin.

Superglued – Superglued is real-time coordination/information app developed specifically for the live music experience. It delivers gig-specific tweets, meaning by location and band, to your phone and streams everything being talked about at the show you’re attending without the hassle of hash-tags.

This app also has a complete list of the showlistings (both official and unofficial) and can alert you when hot shows are trending. These features are especially helpful when you’re standing still and not really sure what you’re supposed to be doing. Superglued is also integrated with Foursquare’s API.

Sit.by.us – Sit.by.us takes the idea of a “check-in” to the next level. When you check-in to Sity.by.us, your friends are alerted of your exact seat or area within specific panels at SXSW. This seems like the thing that Scoble is definitely going to pick up on.

Gowalla – Much like Fourquare above, Gowalla is a fun, location-based game that alerts friends of your presence when you check-in. Gowalla is throwing a fun SXSW party and is distributing virtual VIP badges around the city that can be discovered via the app. They are also extending their virtual items to redeemable, real-world counterparts.

Bump – Networking mavens: perk your ears up! This app is a new comer this year and is actually a finalist in the SXSW Accelerator, SXSW’s start-up innovation competition. The Bump app trades contact info and/or attachments from iphone to iphone simply by lightly bumping the two phones together.

Most assuredly, if you do SXSW right, your pockets will be overflowing with business cards by the end of the conference. Bump simplifies the input process by auto-magically dumping a cohort’s info directly into your virtual Rolodex, and it’s pretty fun to do, too.

Siri – Also a SXSW newcomer and finalist in the SXSW Accelerator, Siri is a virtual personal assistant. Much like a real assistant, you can literally ask Siri to do things like, “Siri, get me a cab. I’m way too drunk” or “Siri, remind me to call my mother tomorrow and let her know how fun SXSW is.”

Siri’s smarts can help you locate a restaurant; find movies for downtime, and can try to answer knowledge-based questions. Siri goes beyond voice search and actually takes action on your behalf; meaning, actually booking a cab vs. finding you the number – pretty cool stuff.

There’s a plethora of tools/apps that are applicable for SXSW; these are the ones that I’ll be playing with the most this year. For more SXSW suggested tools, look here.

Tip #3: Trust in your friends when your phone dies

Conference goers, testify – you might as well count on your phone dying once (I know I keep my charger on me and have an battery-powered emergency charger just in case).
With crap-tactular AT&T going down every 10 minutes, your beloved iPhone constantly searches for signal which eats tons of battery. If/when your phone dies, or even before then, look to social media for information when you can’t talk.

Facebook – “friends” tend to share real(er) details about their actual SXSW plans via FB. There are also some fantastic groups and fan pages that track and regularly update SXSW-related info targeted for attendees that intend to experience SXSW badgeless.

Here are the best SXSW pages I’ve found, thus far:

SXSW – This is the official SXSW Facebook page. This fan page hosts the official updates of SXSW and also doubles as a forum for folks looking to meet up and/or discover new aspects festival.

Unofficial SXSW 2010 Events & Parties – This guide updates regularly, features performers, and is geared towards the music audience. For those who look to get the most of the day parties, subscribe to the email list to receive a spreadsheet with all RSVPs. Proceed at your own risk – I’m building my own.

SXSW Badgeless – a Facebook fan page dedicated to the badgeless activities to participate in during the Film, Interactive, and Music festivals.

SXSW Baby! – Activity-based fan page that highlights SXSW’s activities as well as focusing on the logistical side of the festivals — i.e, food, lodging, navigating, etc.

Other Great Websites:

Do512 provides a complete guide to SXSW’s official/unofficial parties in addition to all the other fun stuff happening in Austin at the same time. Pretty much a daily unique in my book.

Plancast is another great tool. Plancast allows users to plan out their SXSW experience and share that plan with friends who are interested in checking out the itinerary. They recently announced one of the more complete SXSW guides I’ve seen recently and I’d highly recommend checking it out here:

Mashable’s Austin Realtime is an online directory that recently launched. It’s a place to connect with other social media fans. You can tag your interests, connect it with Foursquare, Twiiter, Gowalla, Youtube, etc. to share your social networking sites.

Twitter – a great way to digest a quick overview of SXSW chatter.

Tweeples (un)intentionally “leak” A LOT of sensitive information via twitter during the course of SXSW. Following the right people, i.e., the party organizers, the event organizers, influentials, bands, bloggers, etc., can help you beat everyone to the secret shows and hot parties before they close their doors due to capacity.

Don’t just use hashtags, discover them. Everyone is going to use #SXSW, #SXSWi, etc. but you never know what new conversations you can find with some quick searching.

[See my list of favorite ATX twitter peps below.]

Tip #4: SXSW Parties? RSVP! RSVP! RSVP!

What to expect? Nothing. What to get out of it (other than the free beer)? Everything.
There are film parties, music parties, interactive parties, happy hours, day shows, night shows, secret shows, unofficial shows, official shows, afterparties, etc. – point being, there’s plenty to do. The true challenge of SXSW is making sure you have an idea of what’s going on, and are prepared enough to get into the shows you want to attend.

Going back to my original point above, plan to attend everything that sounds interesting and make the game-time decision when it comes down to it – you can’t choose wrong; it’s all good. Here’s how you plan:

Do512’s SXSW-related Calendar

Austin Showlist

SXSW 2010: Austinist’s List of Day Shows, Afterparties, and more

How to find parties in the SXSW website – click on the conference that you want to attend (either Music, Film, or Interactive), select the “Parties and Lounges” sub-tab on the right of the tool bar, scroll to the bottom of page and select the day you are looking to party. From there, each party should have the respective click-through links to RSVP.

Once you identify everything you want to see, you can either add it to your my.SXSW calendar or create calendar invites for yourself and your friends – share the wealth, everyone needs help – it’s SXSW.

Great people follow for SXSW Rumors:

Music Twitter Handles:

@covertcuriosity

@happn_in_austin

@do512

@C3Austin

@Andylanger

@paramountAustin

@socialTNT

@mohawkaustin

@waterloorecords

@rare_caitlin

@pushermania

@superglued

@endofanear

@coolinaustin

@austinsound

@AustinChronicle

@atxhipsters

http://twitter.com/abusedgrymatter/sxsw

Film/Interactive Twitter Handles:

@sxsw

@joshdilworth

@BryanPerson

@austinist

@Rebfef

@Scottland

@PN_ATX

@dtotheryver

@johnrobertreed

@whurley

@rwwmike

@austinstartup

@joshuabaer

@omarg

@bjheinley

@laniar

@prhacker

@bmenell

@chelseabot

Some good blogs to look to for SXSW-related info:

http://republicofaustin.com/sxsw-party-rsvps/

http://do512.com/

http://ultra8201.blogspot.com/

http://austinist.com/

http://www.sonicitchmusic.com/

http://sideonetrackone.com/

http://ticktickbang.tumblr.com/

http://covertcuriosity.blogspot.com/

Parting thoughts:

Drink water. Don’t forget to eat. Wear comfortable shoes. Bring earplugs. Don’t drink and drive.

Have fun at South By Southwest this year! I’ll be running around like a mad man but would be happy to chat at any of the parties above!

[Disclaimer: The SXSW Accelerator, Superglued and Siri are all current or former clients of John Robert's]

Dis-Cord: Paying Our Data Forward

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One of my favorite ReadWriteWeb authors, Dana Oshiro, recently asked in a post, “The larger industry-wide questions remains – will this year’s [2010] branded iPhone app be a recommendation app?” While I pondered this question, I began asking myself, yes I do but… aren’t we almost already there? Allow me to explain…

The palm-sized devices that we all carry have a strangely unique ability to sway protectionists to be more transparent, isolationists to interact in real-time, and can seduce the technologically impaired/fearful to experience the advantages of a modern life. There’s no doubt in my mind that the behavior that follows these little devices will also be absorbed by them and spat back out in the form of recommendations.

To me, it all makes sense: it’s rather time consuming to hunt down the cool in Austin and always be spot-on. To compensate for this lack of time, we’ll often access Web sites on-the-go and utilize them as short cuts to aide us in the recommendation process. Although these short cuts are extremely helpful, we often need to know more than just what to do today or this week; we need to know what to do right now.

So to over-simplify a complex space, there are two general buckets that satisfy this need for real-time recommendation: aggregators (which are computer algorithms, like Pandora) and platforms that can be used for social recommendation (which are human powered more-or-less, like Twitter).

Though Twitter is the most hyped, it’s not the only social recommendation tool out there; in fact, there’s lots of them! For example, Rec.fm is a charitable recommendation tool, and Superglued recommends concerts near you. Blippy’s “tool” is a bit more controversial, and Gowalla and Four Square’s apps allow location-based recommendations, while Twitter’s lists and hashtags, such #nowplaying, offer follwers insight into what and who’s popular at the moment.

In short, though some tools are more directly tied to actually “recommending”, ultimately any time you share an experience it can be transformed and interpreted as a form of recommendation. Slashdot, Digg, Hackernews, in their simplest form, are just recommendation engines and a means to an end – identify, interact, share, and in turn, recommend.

James Cameron’s new film, Avatar, is a visible example of mainstream recommendation by participation. There was a ton of buzz resulting from re-tweets (partly due to the astronomically large 18,000 follower-ship); Facebook was blowing up with status updates along the lines of “I just saw Avatar!” Avatar’s popularity/revenue was dramatically improved by the hype resulting from the never-ending activity of sharing, updating and retweeting. This stream of never-ending recommendation and reinforcement, combined with other marketing efforts, ignited the momentum behind film and truly made it a blockbuster.

In light of that, 2009 was most definitely a year full of recommendations in many forms. The answer to Dana’s question above is yes – I fully agree there’s ton of potential for vertical segmentation and I believe we’ll see lots more of the kind of stuff she mentions:

“…there’s opportunity to extend these recommendation-based applications to special-interest and location-based communities. Imagine investment communities trading and reviewing stock and news apps, or Oprah Winfrey’s community recommending shopping and reading apps, or New Yorkers sharing transportation and amenity apps.”

We’ll see all of these; companies can simply transition their products from the web to mobile apps and POOF – we’re there! In my mind, the next set of questions I think we’ll inevitably be asking is, what makes one recommendation app better than another and where is it getting its information to make us a better recommendation?

The apps Dana will be talking about six months from now will be the recommendation apps that have successfully captured the wealth of recommendations we have been unknowingly contributing to the Web since its conception; it will be the apps that have crunched these recs down to the raw data and re-wrapped it in the prettiest app UI that best pays us our own data forward.

These apps will be artificially intelligent, they’ll have to be aware of real-time trends, and most of all, they should be able to react to all environmental factors while delivering recommendations based off of a specific individual’s unique preferences.

Full Disclosure: Rec.fm and Superglued are clients of John Robert Reed’s.

Crowdsource Your Photos With FocalPop

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Just before the turn of the New Year, an Austin up-and-comer, FocalPop, announced the launch of their site focalpop.com – a new online marketplace where photo seekers can solicit the shots they want, and photographers answer by offering up their best interpretation.

The company serves to unite photographers and photo buyers on their admittingly easy to navigate site. The business model is even rather simple – image seekers create a request describing the photo they need, photographers then upload shots that meet that request, and then the seeker selects the winning photo and pays them accordingly. Simple supply and demand.

Right out of beta, the site had over 2,000 visitors from 63 countries and helped fulfill user’s requests for photos like “Lonely Guitar,” “Greasy Plate of Food,” and “Happy Dog.”

The photo industry has seen rapid change over the past few years and this is yet another fresh approach to crowdsourcing and reverse-auctioning the photo commissioning process.

Photographers interested in using the site can receive “a minimum of 70% commissions on photo sales.” Although, the site seems very enterprise oriented, any photographer with any style could potentially drop their name in the hat.

Brian Romanko and Becky Parker conceived FocalPop during their MBA program at the McCombs School of Business.

For more information check out focalpop.com or follow them on Twitter.

Dis-cord: Tweet Your Turf

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It’s ok if you are not yet convinced by all this “location, location, location” hype; there have been convincing arguments made against the integration of location-aware software. Just don’t be disappointed when the entire world becomes virtually geo-tagged and your company is left off the grid.

Location-aware software in mobile devices can be beneficial to both businesses and consumers. I’m sure we won’t have to wait long see a variety of newly unveiled use-cases and a steady uptake of mainstream integration throughout 2010.

Why? For starters, on the data back-end, location-aware software adds a valuable third dimension to an already abundant cache of user-generated data sources. Location cognition in software will accelerate Apple’s original idea of “there’s an app for that” to an entirely different level.

Something as simple as a location stamp does little good; but when that same location stamp is compared to, and mashed up with, the ba-gillion different kinds of time-stamped UGC currently available, the value added creates a whole new untapped reservoir for researchers and businesses to dive into.

Businesses would be poorly advised to ignore this as just another “trend.” The potential data at their fingertips could ultimately prove to be an invaluable arsenal of previously-hidden tools in their marketing research.

Think about it: getting everyone to use to their phone in this manner would undoubtedly produce the ideal intersection of mobile advertising and user-recommendations, all combined with the addictive nature of social media.

If businesses choose to inquire, they could determine an unbiased view of what, where, and why people care about their product or service – and that sure beats the customer surveys that noone takes unless they’re totally pissed off. Why ask and annoy your patrons when you could geo-crowd-source all the information you could ever ask for?

Better data = better advertising = better sales.

In a perfect world, you could let the natural competition and recommendations spawned from your patrons drive sales. However, we don’t live in a perfect world and sadly, the above equation is far too optimistic and over-simplified, and we’re not there yet.

Currently, the world we live in is an opt-in society, and none of the magic data I allude to above will be available unless marketers and businesses uphold their end of the bargain, and offer the necessary incentives required to be rewarded with the data they desire.

Queue up the other side of the record: consumer-facing incentives on the front-end are a must. Location-aware software should be the next step toward uniting users’ virtual assets and communities with real-world value.

There has already been several use-cases speculated around the potential of this feature. Interested in knowing when, where, and exactly why there is a traffic jam on a highway? Or maybe why is there a crowd at a particular venue during South By Southwest?

I speculate the maturation I seek in real-world value for consumers will manifest in the form of these three categories: entertainment, physical goods, and real-time news redefined.

Local startup, Gowalla, has pretty much nailed the entertainment vertical. Their app combines physical exploration with the entertainment value of treasure hunting. Users are incentivized to check-in to reveal hidden rewards that may be stashed by other users in a particular location. Great idea. Rock on.

Similar to Gowalla, but with better market traction, is Foursquare. When users check-in to Foursquare at a specific location, they earn points that unlock a hierarchy of badges that convey their status.

If they keep playing their cards right, Foursquare will have a commanding lead in the market share because businesses have already begun to adopt it as the location-based platform to incorporate the philosophy I mentioned above – using their rewards/badges system as a scalable tool to deliver real-world goods. A scalable example that is already on the horizon is location-specific discounts or coupons offered (sponsored) by specific companies. And that’s just the start.

With the adoption of location-aware apps and Google announcing QR codes and Place Ranks, I expect to see a whole new convergence in the way mobile users interact with businesses, whether they’re ready interact back or not.

Lastly, when I say “real-time news redefined,” I am simply adding on to the existing definition. Currently, real-time news is delivered in streams, like Twitter (which Bing, Google, and Yahoo have all been forced to adopt into their searches).

News in “real-time 2.0,” so-to-speak, will most certainly have to include location. A “breaking” story, such as a crime, could truly be reported at the very moment and exact location where it occurred.

On a much larger scale, geo-aware software allows us to watch trends as they evolve and spread across the nation. The next election, for example, will undoubtedly produce a cacophony of data.

Any number of uses for more accurate, location-specific news will emerge over the next year, but ultimately this technology facilitates real-world value in the form of direct and agile responses to events as they occur.

For the time being, geo-specific tweets and games are currently novelty items, but as uptake increases, expect to see a massive land rush of virtual assets and real places, the substantial adoption of incentive-based programs, and a wealth of data dumped onto the table for anyone’s taking. Get in now.

Dis-Cord: Is App Frenzy Already Killing AR?

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We all know it’s true, so let’s put the rumors aside and settle this right now – Arnold Schwarzenegger invented augmented reality in 1984 and I’m pretty sure everyone thought it was pretty bad ass.

The point is, AR is not a new concept. It has been around for at least two decades now and has been implemented and widely used in a number of fields ranging from automotive repair and aerospace manufacturing.

Augmented Reality as a term, though, has quickly begun to usurp Twitter as the buzzword of the day solely because App Frenzy is the new hotness. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the conversation that erupted on Robert Scoble’s blog a few days ago because Ray Ozzie from Microsoft mentioned that “apps won’t be a differentiating factor on smart phones” – a little too defensive, don’t you think?

In case you missed it, news broke in late October that over 100,000 apps have been developed for the iPhone alone. I applaud Apple and fully recognize that this is a significant feat; at the same time, however, I am equally concerned about the App Frenzy’s effects with respect to AR and similar emerging technologies.

Why? Because the rapid expansion of app markets has created a need to categorize apps into buckets. For example: enterprise apps, game apps, social networking apps, location-aware apps, etc. You get my point.

I guess we can all thank Yelp for creating the first official AR bucket. After all, they did produce the first AR-ish app to hit the mainstream.

But as Austin’s own AR guru Whurley asks, “Is an application that lets you Twitter safely while you walk, by replacing the normal background screen with the camera’s view of what’s in front of you, really augmented reality? Or should the term “augmented reality” be reserved for applications that truly mix digital assets with the real world?”

The answer is undoubtedly the latter, yet it is unfortunately the former that has suddenly seeped in to begin defining the space of AR.

Most “augmented reality” apps available now should actually fall into a series of more refined buckets, possibly under the umbrella of AR, but decidedly tangential to its conceptualization: video integration apps, identity recognition apps, object recognition apps, etc.

Pranav Mistry and Sixth Sense technology is one of the only true AR players in the game that is peaking down the right rabbit hole – and he isn’t even using a smartphone. Take a look here if you have never seen this stuff in action.

While not all “augmented reality” apps in the app store are erroneously construed or mis-representative of AR, the current system is detrimentally set up to cause horizontal segmentation of apps, which shouldn’t be the case. We shouldn’t have to have an app to view restaurant reviews, AND an app to locate subway locations, AND an app to see who’s tweeting around us…we should have one AR utility that sucks all of these technologies into one “app.”

So what’s missing here? Enter the intelligent software agents. Augmented Reality doesn’t have to be confined to a phone. Augmented Reality doesn’t have to be confined to an app. Augmented Reality doesn’t even have to be geared for mainstream consumption. Some of the coolest AR advances, in fact, will come in the form of nanotechnologies and biomedical engineering.

The problem that keeps arising, however, is that with App Frenzy directing the discussion, Augmented Reality as a conceptual space is being overrun by products simply latching on to its ascendant buzz, but limiting the actual possibilities of what the technology can be. The danger here is that misconstruing the term to a consumer-oriented market will only dismantle future innovation, similar to the way “green” has quickly become an empty term that every product now claims, regardless of the “reality.”

Austin Tech Happy Hour Today

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Join us this Thursday, October 22nd for the Austin Tech Happy Hour at the Molotov Lounge from 6:00 p.m.- 8:00 p.m. For those that have not attended before, the Austin Tech Happy Hour is the perfect setting for the emerging technology community and thought leaders to mingle, relax and enjoy conversation outside of twitter.

Registration is closed at this point, but you can pay $10 cash at the door for a night of networking, friendly faces, and tech talk. Two free drink tickets will be included with each registration. If you have not done so already, take a look at the Facebook page for photos of previous events and become a fan for additional information on future ones.

This past Tech Happy hour was a great success. Many familiar faces among new ones graced the scene with news about new companies and respective technologies. Read the full write-up on it here.

This week’s Austin Tech Happy Hour is sponsored by Indeed.com, the #1 search engine for jobs and Calavista, a leader in state-of-the-art software development, tools, testing and consulting.