Just now, on stage at the Where 2.0 Conference in San Jose, California, Gowalla CEO Josh Williams just announced promotions with Chipolte, Twitteriffic, the New Jersey Nets and Adobe.
Right after his talk about how Gowalla came about from Williams’ previous work with an icon warehouse, we quickly sat down with Williams (he had a flight to catch back to Austin) to discuss the new promotions and how Gowalla is doing post-SXSW.
TNW Location: How are you guys doing since SXSW?
Williams: Awesome. The halo that came afterwards was really important. We’ve grown 50% in the three weeks since SXSW and have added 60,000 new passports. There is a new iPhone release likely coming next week (2.1), mostly polish. Also it will include activity feed filters and for friends and for locations.
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TNW Location: You just announced a number of partnerships/promotions on stage. Let’s talk about them individually.
Chipolte
Gowalla is giving away Gowalla stickers at Chipolte’s over 1,000 resturants. These stickers for now are just for users to collect in the Gowalla’s passport, but later could certainly be used for free food.
Williams: This was a fun one. I like burritos. Chipolte is a great brand and we feel an affinity to them. They have very enthusiastic people and we expect this partnership to expand in the future.
Twitteriffic
Gowalla is allowing users to trade in Twitteriffic Gowalla stickers in certain cases for actual “Ollie the Bluebird” (Twitteriffic’s icon).
Williams: We love the guys at IconFactory (the people behind Twitteriffic). They were actually responsible for a lot of the iconography for our app.
New Jersey Nets
Gowalla is working with the New Jersey Nets to give away 500 tickets to the last ever home game at the Meadowlands.
Williams: We’re really keen to do more on events. For something like a sporting event it becomes very interesting – in this case “hey, I went to the final game in the Meadowlands”. As we go forward we expect to see more sports teams interested in doing this.
Adobe
Gowalla users that find Adobe stickers will have a chance to win copies of Creative Suite 5. More on the Photoshop blog.
Williams: Unlike with the Nets tickets which are randomly scattered around sports bars, etc. With Adobe, they are going to be very deliberate in where they will put the stickers.
Gowalla iPad App
TNW Location: Finally, let’s talk quickly about the iPad.
Williams: There were some screenshots leaked of our iPad app yesterday. We’re watching this space, and are very curious about what happens. The first version of Gowalla for iPad is just going to be scratching the surface of what we hope it will be. But at the very least it’s pretty.
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