Image license: Estimote©

What’s A Beacon?

Beacons are inconspicuous and inexpensive devices that can be placed nearly anywhere. They transmit information via low-energy Bluetooth signals directly to compatible smartphones at custom ranges of four inches to two hundred feet. The industries that stand to win most from this technology include retail, events and transportation.

While there are a plethora of beacon companies entering the market, Apple has given the industry a boost by baking beacon technology into its latest operating system. As a result, there are 200 million+ iPhones, iPads and iPods in the marketplace poised and ready to pair with beacon apps and services.

Let’s use a Minnesota Twins baseball game as a potential use-case (they just installed dozens of beacons in their stadium). As you near the entrance, your iPhone might automatically pull your tickets up and offer a deal: Check in and be entered to win FREE season tickets! Continuing past the concession stand, your phone could send you a push notification, alerting you that hot dogs are half off after the sixth inning when you show them your targeted code (this message would only show up, if you were within thirty feet of the concessions). After the game, you’re back at your bus stop and perhaps a beacon  lets you know that the next bus is running late and will be there in six minutes. This is just one of many possible future scenarios.

What’s The Opportunity? 

For event planners, retailers, mass transit, educational institutions, hospitals and many others, beacons offer the simplest way to intelligently target highly specific audiences, in highly specific locations via mobile communication.

Photo credit: Business Insider

Consider the graph above: A full 30% of consumers use their phone to look up product reviews while shopping and nearly 50% call a friend or family member for advice. Armed with this knowledge, how could retailers use beacons to deliver timely content that might alleviate the need to call or look up information?

To conclude, consider the following. Beacons are nimble: Marketers can easily use this technology to offer tailored messages to highly specific consumer segments. Beacons are unobtrusive: Users need only download the accompanying apps to let brands know that they’re willing to interact. It’s then up to the marketers to make those interactions worthwhile. And finally, beacons will offer rich real-time data: This will make optimizing local targeting efforts in real time easier than ever.

As we noted in our 2014 Tech Predictions, this year will bear witness to a significant rise in applications that rely on beacons. Look for innovations in retail, healthcare and home appliances. Keep an eye on Apple’s iBeacon, Estimote, Gimbal beacon, Swirl networks and PayPal’s beacon.

Spyder Trap team members have been busy the last month taking part in various mobile conferences across North America.  With numerous app projects, mobile websites, responsive web design projects and mobile search campaigns, it was great to take a few days here and there to share our passion, experience and thirst for more knowledge on mobile.

Mobile Conferences Recap

Here is a quick recap of the mobile marketing conferences we took part in the last month.

SCREENS – Toronto, Canada

Web Development Manager Travis Neiderhiser attended SCREENS 2012, a 2-day conference focused on mobile and tablet app development and responsive web design.  Travis came back with a ton to share with his development team on HTML5, app analytics, responsive web design and more.  He cited Wes Bros as his favorite speaker and session of the conference covering mobile operating system advancements.

Travis had a great time learning and networking with other mobile developers and shared that Crown and Dragon is the beer and wing hotspot in Toronto.

Breaking Development – Dallas, TX

Creative Director  Jeff Wagner was Texas bound in September to take part in the Breaking Development conference on mobile web design and mobile development. Jeff really valued the conversation and collaboration format of the event as speakers and attendees mixed opinions and ideas frequently.

Sessions covered mobile content, load time, mobile experience and testing.  Want to know the answer of web first or mobile first for design process?  Ask Jeff!  Jeff cited Lyza Danger Gardner as his favorite speaker with her session addressing “Supporting more, sucking less.”

Jeff claims that he didn’t hit up the social scene at all in his Dallas adventure, but he did share that the Gaylord Texan Hotel was “the bomb.”

SMX East: Local University Advanced – New York, NY

The SMX conference series brings in global online and mobile marketing experts for a 3-day conference in New York City.  I had the privilege of being part of the Local University Advanced Workshop at SMX East covering mobile search marketing.

My presentation outlined the massive growth in mobile and local search and what a mobile marketer needs to understand about mobile search rankings and strategies.  I’ll cut to the chase for you on this blog post, but local search and paid search are huge winners right now for mobile marketing.  With 50% of Google’s mobile searches having local intent and 70% of local search users taking action within an hour, the “mobile search funnel” is huge.

I could hijack the rest of the post with all of the great things in New York I took in during my 3 days there, but one highlight was the “Local Search Last Supper” at rooftop bar Birreria (pictured above).

Let’s Talk Mobile

If you’d like to hear more on our recent travels, conferences, connections and speaking opportunities in mobile, please give us a shout!

-Additional photo credits to Avalaunch Media

Apple’s iOS5 just released and a few of us have already downloaded it. Initial reactions are, of course, that it is a great upgrade and includes some amazing new features that will surely be of importance to us and our clients.

According to Apple, iOS5 has over 200 new features. Some that we are especially excited about include:

Notifications

• Swipe from the top of any screen to view notifications in one place with Notification Center
• New notifications appear briefly at the top of the screen
• View notifications from lock screen
• Slide the notification app icon to the right on the lock screen to go directly to the app

iMessage

• Send and receive unlimited text, photo, and video messages with other iOS 5 users
• Track messages with delivery and read receipts
• Group messaging and secure encryption
• Works over cellular network and Wi-Fi*

Newsstand

• Automatically organizes magazine and newspaper subscriptions on Home Screen
• Displays the cover of the latest issue
• Background downloads of new issues

Reminders for managing to do lists

• Syncs with iCloud, iCal and Outlook
• Location-based reminders when you leave or arrive at a location for iPhone 4S and iPhone 4

Built-in support for Twitter

• Sign-in once in Settings and tweet directly from Camera, Photos, Maps, Safari and YouTube
• Add location to any tweet
• View twitter profile pictures and usernames in Contacts

Camera improvements for devices with cameras

• Double click the home button when device is asleep to bring up a camera shortcut on iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS and iPod touch (4th generation)
• Volume Up button to take a picture
• Optional grid lines to line up shots
• Pinch to zoom in the preview screen
• Swipe to camera roll from preview screen
• Tap and hold to lock focus and exposure, iPad 2 and iPod touch (4th generation) only support exposure lock

Photo improvements for devices with cameras

• Crop and rotate
• Red eye removal
• One tap enhance
• Organize photos into albums

Mail improvements

• Format text using bold, italic, or underlined fonts

Indentation control

• Drag to rearrange names in address fields
• Flag messages
• Mass mark messages as flagged, read or unread
• Customize mail alert sounds
• S/MIME

Calendar improvements

• Year view on iPad and new Week view for iPhone and iPod touch
• Tap to create an event
• View and add event attachments

Game Center improvements

• Use personal photos for your Game Center account
• Compare your overall achievement scores with your friends
• Find new Game Center friends with friend recommendations and friends of friends
• Discover new games with custom game recommendations

AirPlay Mirroring for iPad 2 and iPhone 4S

Multitasking Gestures for iPad

• Use four or five fingers to pinch to the Home Screen
• Swipe up to reveal the multitasking bar
• Swipe left or right to switch between apps

On-device setup, activation and configuration with Setup Assistant

Software updates available over the air without tethering

iCloud support

• iTunes in the Cloud
• Photo Stream
• Documents in the Cloud
• Apps and Books automatic download and purchase history

Backup

• Contacts, Calendar, and Mail
• Find My iPhone

Redesigned Music app for iPad

Hourly weather forecast

Real-time stock quotes

Wireless sync to iTunes

Keyboard improvements

• Split keyboard for iPad
• Improved autocorrection accuracy
• Improved Chinese and Japanese input
• New Emoji keyboard
• Personal dictionary for autocorrection
• Optionally create keyboard short cuts for frequently used words

Accessibility improvements

• Option to light LED flash on incoming calls and alerts for iPhone 4S and iPhone 4
• Custom vibration patterns for incoming calls on iPhone
• New interface for using iOS with mobility-impairment input devices
• Option to speak a selection of text
• Custom element labeling for VoiceOver

Exchange ActiveSync improvements

• Wirelessly sync tasks
• Mark messages as flagged, read or unread
• Improved offline support
• Save a new contact from a GAL service

More than 1,500 new developer APIs

Bug fixes

Products compatible with this software update

• iPhone 4S
• iPhone 4
• iPhone 3GS
• iPad 2
• iPad
• iPod touch (4th generation)
• iPod touch (3rd generation)

If you have downloaded iOS5 already, we would love to hear your reactions.  What is your favorite new feature so far?

The Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association’s annual fall conference is the Midwest’s largest marketing and technology event.  It’s a two day bender of incredible speakers covering vast search, social, content, design and mobile topics.  With our staff having both presented and attended past Summits we knew an iPhone app would be a great benefit for the 1,000 attendees.

The 2011 event features keynotes from analytics expert Avinash Kaushik of Google and Wired Magazine Editor-In-Chief Chris Anderson.

Over 30 Sessions, 1 App To Help

MIMA Summit is a jam packed two days and having all of the workshop and session information at your fingertips is needed to navigate the event to make the most of your time.  Our iPhone app covered the basics of delivering the schedule by time or by topic with complete details on each.

Speaker bios and Twitter handles are just a tap away to deliver background info and easy tweeting (#MIMAsummit hastag included).

While we had a number of great ideas for additional features in the app, having just 8 days to design and develop the app wouldn’t allow for them all.  We focused on a simple “My Mima” feature that allows users to customize and build their own session schedule.  Proactively you can outline what you will attend ahead of time or you can use it to mark what sessions you hit between the two days.

Lastly we added a Feedback button to allow users to send an email to MIMA to let them know what they loved from the event or want to see next year.

Big Fun, Big Thanks

Pulling this app off at warp speed was a great challenge and very rewarding.  Spyder Trap’s Perry Govier, Ben Olsem, Erin Moore and Becca Tollefson put in a lot of extra time to make it all work.

Thanks are due to the MIMA Board as they gave us a great opportunity letting us take this on.  We hope that Summit attendees are pleased with the MIMA 2011 app, we’ll be there using it as well.

+ Download the MIMA 2011 app

A shining light in development right now is mobile.  Mobile development is just plain sexy.  You’ve got apps, tiny programs communicating with API’s and each other, solving a new wave of problems and quickly becoming an integral part of people’s mobile lives.

Problem being, mobile app development is a significantly different way of thinking than web development.  Suddenly you have to worry about RAM, getters, setters, and threads (oh my).  Not to mention that Objective C and Java aren’t the sort of thing you can familiarize yourself with over a long weekend like Ruby or Python.

The thought of both being betrayed by the painful adoption rate of new web browsers and the exciting things going on the other side of a steep learning curve is enough to drive a web developer to binge on pizza bites and a Star Wars marathon.

Mobile Development Has Options, Good Ones

Never fear ye weary web developer, there is another way.  Fun thing about mobile devices, for the most part, they all use pretty modern webkit based browsers.  What’s more, all of them have UI elements that are little more than instances of Webkit that can parse and display HTML5 and CSS3 right in an app.

By simply loading these web views, you can create advanced HTML5 and Javascript based apps and deploy to iOS, Android, Blackberry and Windows Mobile with far less reworking than working with a given platform’s language of choice.

To top it off, tools like PhoneGap and Sencha provide Javascript based hooks in to system functionality like the camera, accelerometer, and even access to the file system.

Yes, you can simultaneously use all the exciting new features of HTML5 and CSS3 and develop exciting mobile apps for multiple platforms all at once.

I’ve seen the future for web developers, and it is mobile (at least until IE can figure out auto updates).  While not a very shocking statement, it’s a very exciting one.

Social Media Leaps Ahead With iOS 5

And now, Apple has announced iOS 5 will be out to the public this fall. I couldn’t be more excited! If social media wasn’t already deeply engrained in your every move, iOS 5 is about to make socializing bigger, better, and easier than ever. Faster, too. With iOS 5, your Apple product (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad) integrates your Twitter account information into multiple applications, enabling you to tweet whatever you’d like, from whichever app you’re engaged with (Photo, Safari, Google, Maps).

Remember all those pesty push notifications, interrupting your work and play?

With iOS 5, the pop-ups will be replaced. Instead, notifications will appear subtly in your top banner. Also, with the new Notifications Center you can view all of your notifications in list form.

Notes will now be Reminders, integrated with iCal and Outlook, providing location-based reminders. That means when you’re at the grocery store, the list you wrote yesterday in Reminders will notify you to remember the milk & eggs.

Notifications just got polite, smart, and worth reading - all of the time. From the locked screen, the notifications you care about will now show in list form, providing access to one at a time or all at once. With a slide to the right, you can select to view a single notification and open that app directly from the locked screen.

That same locked screen can open up Photo for you, too. Access your iPhone’s camera directly from the locked screen. Take a photo, edit the image, and post it to Twitter without leaving the Photo app. Easy.

Consider the current route used to share photos with friends:

• Tap 1: open your camera app on your phone
• Tap 2: snap a photo
• Tap 3: save the photo
• Tap 4: select where to send the photo
• Tap 5: get ‘outta’ that app, you want to post this photo on Twitter!
• Tap 6: open your Twitter app
• Tap 7: create message
• Tap 8: select to upload photo
• Tap 9: choose photo
• Tap 10: upload photo
• Tap 11: thumbs hurt. Relax.

Now, consider the iOS 5 route:

• Click 1: take photo from your iPhone’s locked screen
• Click 2: edit photo
• Click 3: share photo
• Click 4: send to Twitter

More integration means fewer clicks. Fewer clicks mean more time. More time means more sharing. My smart phone just got smarter, and could probably even get me a few more friends.

What are you excited about with iOS 5?

Foursquare To Help You Explore & Engage More

The new features for Foursquare users lead me to believe that Dennis Crowley and the team really took along look at how to benefit their new to moderate users and get them to engage more.

1. Explore – Added to the main navigation of the app is an Explore tab.  This new feature offers an easy way to search and see what’s close to you and get more specific with what you are looking for.  Results will also put you on to what places your friends may have checked-in at and also what other users have to say about it.  This feature is both useful and will help Foursquare get more users to check-in more.

2. Specials – Users now see all nearby specials when locating a place to check-in.  The past format would only give you one nearby special once you had selected a place.  This makes specials a bigger and more visible piece to using Foursquare.  I do think their filtering needs work as I see many specials first that are much further away then ones right by me.

3. Engage – My favorite addition with 3.0 is on the screen following your check-in.  Foursquare has added more information on your check-in, more point options and a better view of where you rank with your friends.

You’ll know if you’re the first of your friends to check-in somewhere, if you’re close to your highest point total for a week or if you have cracked the top 10 of your friends point totals.  All of this data leads to provide users with more reasons to check-in.

Foursquare Marketing For Business

2010 saw a rush of small and large business move fast to understand location based marketing and put together offers on Foursquare.  The latest update looks to put more free marketing and promotion options into the hands of businesses with new special levels:

• Swarm Special: If a certain amount of people check-in at the same time, a retailer can offer a discount.
• Friends Special: If you and a X number of friends check-in a a certain store, you can all get a percentage off.
• Flash Special: First so many people to check-in get a deal on their purchase.
• Newbie Special: First check-in gets a special offer.
• Check-In Special: As long as you check-in you get a deal.

These new options go along with the existing options for loyalty specials and mayor specials.

Foursquare Stats

• Foursquare is the “mayor” of LBS apps with over 7 million users
• Foursquare check-ins now number over half a billion
• In 2010, SMB’s marketing on Foursquare grew from 900 to 250,000
• Minnesota was 3rd for percentage of gym check-ins in 2010 with 2.42% of all check-ins

Will All This Fuel Further Growth?

With any update, it can be as much about timing as features and Foursquare seems to have nailed both with 3.0’s arrival. The new features have added more ways to find places and more ways to engage users than just gaining mayor status.  Businesses now have more promotion options to encourage check-ins, loyalty and interaction.

While Facebook Places and Deals continue to lack adoption, Foursquare should make continued noise in 2011 with more users, more check-ins and more businesses finding success using LBS based promotions.

If they can get anywhere close to their 3,400% growth from 2010 in 2011, things might get interesting.

This year with the adoption of social media and mobile applications, charities are adding new ways to give and making it easier for people to donate.

I’m going to explain three organizations and the way they are changing online giving. The website Givemn.org, The Salvation Army, and a new Twitter application called Rainmaker.

Givemn.org
Givemn.org is a great example of an organization that uses tools to promote giving in different ways.

Givemn.org acts as a portal for non-profits to easily raise funds on their website through their online payment system, called Razoo.

They recently had the 2nd annual “Give to the Max Day” on November 16th and gave out prizes to individuals or organizations which gave the largest donations that day. They raised over 10 million dollars for Minnesota non-profits and used various social media tools during the day to promote the event, including: live streaming on sites like MinnPost.com, unique Twitter hashtags, blog mentions and Facebook promotions.

The Salvation Army
The Salvation Army also represents a new approach to online giving this year.

The Salvation Army has created a Red Kettle symbol that other organizations can host on their website. This allows for people to give to The Salvation Army through multiple websites, in addition to The Salvation Army’s own website. People will have more options for where, when and through what website they donate, while giving to the same cause. Additionally, this is a great opportunity for organizations to display their association with The Salvation Army. One unique feature of the Red Kettle iPhone application is that it allows users to track their donation progress.

Additionally, people have the option for the mobile “text-to-give” to 85944 to make a $10 donation to the Salvation Army. People will have more options for where, when, and through what medium they donate, while giving to the same cause.

Rainmaker
This application caught my attention this year.

The Rainmaker application allows users to donate money directly through Twitter. If you have a PayPal account, you can simply connect your PayPal account to your Twitter account and tweet to raise money for the charity or cause of your choice.

How it works.
Send out a tweet, with a minimum donation of a dollar, and then add the name of your cause or charity with a hashtag and @rainmakerapp. The Rainmaker application sends a Direct Message and Paypal is charged shortly thereafter.

Example tweet:
I’m donating $20 to #SecondHarvestHoliday @rainmakerapp

Giving to your charity of choice is now easier than ever. With all these new ways to give this year, how are you going to give back?

Due to confidentiality I can’t say much, but analytics, information sharing and a more streamlined process for business partnerships with Foursquare are on the horizon.

Looking forward to the future roll-out of new tools and business applications.

In our sixth edition of Web Wisdom Wednesdays, and the second episode of our two-part Foursquare series, we show you how to use Foursquare and how you can benefit from Foursquare.

How have you benefited from Foursquare? We’d love to hear your stories!

**Videos are posted every Wednesday to our Spyder Trap Online Marketing blog, our Facebook Fan Page, and our YouTube channel.**