I think it’s pretty obvious that Foursquare and businesses should go hand in hand. Sure, Foursquare was designed to be a game for friends to find friends and find new places to go, but if you’re going to a business… One of the challenges for businesses, especially small ones, has been letting people know about specials, deals, or even that they exist on Foursquare at all (I’d be surprised if there are any businesses not on Foursquare now). Charlottetown-based ScreenScape has announced a new Foursquare module for their ScreenScape video information platform that will help businesses advertise their Foursquare presence.
ScreenScape is a service where an Internet-managed flow of information is put up on a screen in a venue (office, store, etc). Until now the offerings were the basic news, weather, and other venue-specific information. ScreenScape highlights the ease of use of their system to help businesses offer more information to their customers. Here is a short video from ScreenScape on how their tech works:
This is where the Foursquare integration comes in. The challenge for many businesses, and regular folks, is how to keep adding new technology to their marketing mix. Honestly, business people, especially small businesses, have enough to do than to have to worry about Foursquare, Places, Yelp…the list goes on.
The <3 of EU tech
The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!
What ScreenScape did was to simple add a Foursquare module to their SaaS application letting people add any information they want customers to know. Maybe a “check in now for a special” or “If you’re the mayor, let us know to get your perk!”. Will this drive location-awareness products into businesses? I think it will. It should take only a few minutes for a ScreenScape business to get Foursquare set up for themselves. ScreenScape? I’ve seen similar (maybe ScreenScape itself) in a few places and it did catch my eye. Now if I didn’t know about Foursquare, it might peak my interest. If I do know about Foursquare and see there is a special for checking in (often I see them on Twitter, when I’m at home, which doesn’t help much), I’d be pretty likely to take advantage of it…and tell others.
Open question: If you are a store, would you subscribe to a service like ScreenScape?
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.