Nike+ Meets Gowalla in Vail Resorts App for Skiers and Snowboarders
I’m kicking myself right now. I used to work in the snow sports industry running OnTheSnow.com and I’ve always thought that a system that allowed a person to track their vertical in a social way would be an amazing experience. However, I was never able to get past how to make it easy to check in. Trying to use your phone with gloves on is an absolute nightmare. I’m glad to see that someone figured out a solution to this problem by using the RF tags already present in the ski passes and tied it together with the new app EpicMix.
In addition to tracking a person’s snow exploits it looks like the app was designed with great care in order to make it a really engaging experience that should drive loyalty beyond the mountain slopes. The app official launches November 5 at Keystone.
See the full article at Mashable
Forrester: Why Most Marketers Should Forgo Foursquare… uh?
Forrester finds that only 4% of U.S. online adults have ever used location-based mobile apps such as Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt. Only 1% update these services more than once per week. What’s more, 84% of respondents said they are not familiar with such apps, leaving the vast majority of Americans online still in the dark about location-based apps, which have had the marketing world obsessing over them in recent months.
While I don’t necessarily agree with the entire premise of the article I did find the number of people who frequently check in to be less than I would have thought. This is clearly an area that will continue to experience explosive growth for sometime but it remains to be seen whether any of the above services will emerge the clear cut winner. I suspect that we haven’t seen the killer app that will own this space.
