Category Archives: checkins

Local market upheaval

Local markets have been tough for high-tech companies. If you talk to investors or entrepreneurs, you typically hear a sad story of distribution issues, technology issues, costs etc. What you rarely hear are issues related to value proposition to local businesses. You don’t hear of whether a local business found a service indispensable or even valuable as if  a local businesses should be happy to provided any service at all.

These companies (e.g directory listing, web sie creation, coupon listing,  self-service location-based companies etc.) have mostly focused on targeting larger number of customers and getting a good conversion factor instead of the customer value proposition.

With the advent of social media these businesses are going to have a tough time staying relevant. Businesses will demand more and more measurable ROI. With location-based and mobile computing there are going to be more and more ways to deliver these services in a cost-effective ways.

This of course is great news for local business owners who will get a pick of services that deliver real ROI to them and finally we will new billion dollar companies developing by focussing on adding value to customers.

Google to hand out devices to local businesses

Recently Techcrunch had a piece on Google giving away 8M devices to local businesses to facilitate checkins, reviews and more…Now to be honest, I actually had a little insider info about his coming down the Google pike. Now that I have had the time to process all the info, following are my thoughts:

1. This device could be

  • A customer-facing  tablet kind of device running android with build-in integration of Google places for reviews and checkins
  • A device to verify your location (ala ShopKick) so that users running a Google app on their phone or other devices can easily receive notifications (key), do checkins, validate coupons and write reviews. Something like this would be pretty cool but might require some standards work to get it working across different devices
  • A device that not only enables user interaction but also allows businesses to run business apps like POS apps etc. on Google infrastructure

2. At the end of the day, this move by Google is about getting more data. Google is really worried about Facebook getting all the user/local data because of FB apps and they want to distribute these devices (they will be expensive to send and maintain) to get some of this data.

3. The important point here is what is in it for local businesses? I think they will be able to see much richer data on their own customers and Google will share the data they collect with each of the merchants.

4. The Apps delivered via such a device could be really powerful as these apps will enable Google to get their hands on the all important sales/market basket data. Businesses won’t mind as the traditional business apps are old and expensive to buy and maintain. If Google can deliver these apps cheaply and easily, it would be powerful.

All in all this looks like a huge gamble on part of Google (could be over several billion dollars worth), but might be justified given the size of the market we are talking about. Still though not having a social graph will likely handicap Google in making sense of this data because  most of the local business customers are driven by word-of-mouth.