by Ben Allen

• Added February 24, 2010

There are so many companies popping up these days, looking to dig out a niche for themselves in the mobile location aware space. Here is a samplers platter of a few that I think may be the more interesting ones to keep an eye on, what they do and why they’re potentially interesting. This is by no means a recommendation, and they all have competitors doing similar things also worth checking out, but it may just help to get your creative marketing  juices flowing:

Foursquare
What they do: It’s a mobile social networking application, particularly popular on the iPhone platform among tech types in the NYC and SF area.  Foursquare lets you check-in to the places you visit, and share your thoughts about those places with your friends.  Check in enough places and you can earn points, unlock badges and maybe be crowned mayor.  It’s a game plus a way to find and stay connected with your friend all rolled into one.

Why it’s interesting: Well for the folks that run those local brick and mortar operations, there is a goldmine of information in all those check ins and comments. Companies have already begun experimenting with their next generation loyalty programs around mayors and folks that check in a lot.  Foursquare has been a leader in the world of mobile “check ins”.  In the big, big picture mobile marketers could begin using check ins as a metric for measuring success of advertising and marketing efforts… kind of like a click through for the web. 

Localeze
What they do: Rich and comprehensive business listings management designed for the increasingly important world of local and mobile search and discovery.  Have a business with retail brick and mortar stores? You’ll want to be sure those stores are found as consumers increasingly turn to web and mobile search to find what stores they’re looking to visit and items they’re looking to buy.

Why it’s interesting: Many marketing folks behind brick and mortar stores often just ignore the web, either leaving that to their dedicated e-commerce teams (large companies) or having their uncle Larry put up a web page and then responding to occasional emails and generally forgetting about it.  As mobile location awareness gains more steam, more and more brick and mortar only companies will turn to digital marketing to pro actively and directly drive in-store foot traffic.

Sense Networks
What they do: They obtain large amounts of raw and aggregated anonymous location data from folks like wireless carriers, often in real-time, and then turn around and analyze it all in order to better understand human behavior. The resulting analysis can be fed into another corporate run system to help them perform more intelligently.

Why it’s interesting:  The potential uses of this type of aggregate information seems tremendous, anything from mobile behavioral targeting and ad serving to vehicle and foot traffic patterns which could drive store locations selection, or even proxy area or retail level economic activity. 

Milo.com
What they do: They’re squarely focused on the consumer behavior where consumers want to research potential products purchases online, but ultimately want to walk into a local store to buy locally… estimated to be a $1 trillion market by next year. So this means a local oriented product search web site, access to retailers inventory systems and a ton of SEO and product oriented web pages all tied together to go after this segment.

Why it’s interesting: Tying online consumer search results to actual hard goods via inventory systems is some of the first steps toward a mobile search system where the end result isn’t a page of HTML, but instead a thing that someone wants to get their hands on.  Nothing wrong with e-commerce, but some 95% of the commerce  happening in the world is still happening in the real world and the possibilities for beginning to blur the lines more and more by applying some of the digital marketing techniques to those offline sales is potentially quite intriguing and lucrative.