Location based social networks like, Foursquare and Gowalla are currently enjoying great deal of attention particularly among mobile users. Foursquare has 2 million users all over the world, gaining 15,000 members per day and has crossed 1 million mark faster than Twitter. Gowalla is also about to surpass 100,000 users by Jan’10 gaining popularity very rapidly particularly in smaller cities where it has a better network base than Foursquare. The primary goal of these apps is to encourage users to share their location to the rest of the world by offering them accolades.  Both these apps allow users to checkin to a spot and can track their friends nearby. Both of them reward a person who checks in to a place for the first time by either making him the ‘mayor’ (Foursquare) of the spot or providing him ‘passport stamps’ (Gowalla) for the spot. A user can also earn other valuables like ‘badges’ (Foursquare) or ‘items’ (Gowalla) by checking in at various places. Gowalla users can even stamp their passports by creating ‘trips’ (tours).  Foursquare users can decide to comment about a spot (say a restaurant) by adding a ‘tip’.

Such rewarding techniques encourage folks to visit spots more and more and checkin. We at Context, can help Marketers take advantage of these checkins. We can use this location data as a parameter to promote their products e.g. they may opt to send offers or promotions to people visiting a spot frequently or for the first time or fulfilling certain predefined checkin criteria, as a part of their campaign strategy. To get this data, Foursquare and Gowalla have exposed methods through REST based FREE API Service which can be accessed with user authentication via OAuth .

Another application with growing popularity in location space is Google Latitude. Unlike FS or Gowalla, it is not a social networking site rather a tool for tracking user location and allowing it to be shared with others, it can also track friends nearby. The primary requirement of using Latitude is to have a Google account. One can even add Google Latitude to his igoogle page in his mobile or laptop browser.

Statistics reveal that Google Latitude has 3 million active users by May’10, gaining 30% per month. It has recently published a REST based FREE API service as an enhancement to latitude badge API to expose information about user’s current location or location history to be accessed via user authentication through OAuth. The prerequisite for an application to use Google latitude API is that it must be registered with Google. Though Google Latitude shows friends info of a user, the API is still lacking any method to retrieve friend’s data. We at Context can help Marketers make use of this location data returned by Latitude API to leverage digital distribution of incentives to customers based on their location, a small example can be, suppose when a customer comes close to a consumer store, digital offers can be send to his mobile to attract him to the store.

An entirely different kind of application launched very recently in location space and has captured enormous attention is SimpleGeo. SimpleGeo provides an extremely scalable, cloud-based platform for storing,  managing and securing location data of an application, and a REST based API interface for querying this data. Here records are stored in layers. A record in a layer can contain any arbitrary structure of location data. A layer can be owned by an account representing an application. SimpleGeo query can return a single record, multiple records, record history, nearby records to a point within a given time duration, latitude-longitude polygonal boundaries within which a point/polygon lies, reverse geocode to find address of a point and so on. One fantastic feature of SimpleGeo is that it can provide density of population of a place at a given hour or day. It has collaborated with Skyhook SpotRank for getting this data.

Context opens up the possibility for applications to warehouse their location data with SimpleGeo and use them to distribute incentives to their mobile customers or provide them various useful information based on their location. An application can even choose to utilize the location data-store (layer) of various other third party data providers sharing their data at SimpleGeo “Marketplace” such as “Weather data”, “Business Listing Data” or “Recreation Information Database” etc. Applications can even leverage their own non-user specific location data-store for sharing/selling at SimpleGeo “Marketplace”. A Free Account (Beta account) in SimpleGeo presently allows 20,000 API calls per day and 100,000 total records stored at no charge.