Mobile Behavior: an Omnicom Group Company

Locamoda just integrated Foursquare into their Wiffiti product, which publishes in real-time multimedia from Flickr, Twitter and texted-in messages. The new screen has been live at Toscanini’s in Cambridge for awhile and, thanks to Jayne at Locamoda, we set it up on the ceiling at Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai's birthday last week:

In addition to tweets about the party, the screen dynamically displayed the picture of the mayor, the number of check-ins, and tips about the venue.

Stephen Randall, founder of Locamoda, sees a much larger potential for Foursquare and other location-based services to live on DOOH (Digital Out of Home) screens. In a post entitled "Why Web-Based Services Are Important for Place-Based Screens, he says:

The user experience is fun and engaging, and it’s obvious why some enterprising venues have started to reward customers who use these apps to announce their presence to their friends. The merits of displaying location-based services for locations should be apparent – they are a user-generated marketing tool for the venue. It is therefore ironic that location-based services are not designed for place-based screens at all, but for web and mobile screens.

Randall goes on to say that "place-based screens have a range of miles not feet (i.e. that they connect venues across channels to brand websites and social network fan pages etc)." Indeed, if you could click over to a local restaurant's website to see their "digital blackboard" with daily specials--the same thing restaurant patrons see on a DOOH screen--that would be pretty valuable. And if you are sitting in a restaurant, it would be interesting to see tips and comments posted online by people who'd been there. The point is that on-screen content need not stay within the confines of a venue's walls, an application, a website, a social network, etc. It can spread across these screens and create new opportunities for interactions, with the added bonus of saving time. Most everything could be automated or just updated in one place. "Location-based services are an excellent example of cross channel engagement and are therefore likely to be a mainstay of many place-based networks," says Randall. It will be interesting to see if location-based services tailor their products to these screens, not just the ones in our pockets.