As cool as FourSquare is, why stop there… Mr. Best Buy CMO, if you’re listening here is what I think would be a more comprehensive way to use mobile and location data in your business:

First and foremost be sure people can find your stores when they’re looking for them… call Universal Business Listing and Localezeto make sure your complete list of stores and as much information about those stores is correctly propogated out to all the players in the geoweb… oh year and be sure to claim all of your Local Business Listings on Google. 

Want to pull more customers into your physical stores from the web and mobile web? Check out folks like milo.com, where customers can search for items carried in your store on the web and then find the closest nearby store where they can walk in and purchase it then and there… or hire some clever local SEO experts and associated content to create massive amounts of web content around all of your most popular products and tie them back to the location of each of your stores… that way digital searches for “Garmin Nuvi Detroit” lead folks to your brick and mortar stores.  

Want to better understand the people that already come into your stores why not ask someone like Sense Networks if they can drill down around your stores to see how far folks that are coming to your store are traveling to get there, where they go before and after going to your store, or if there is a nearby roadway that could should be driving more traffic but is not… it may be time to buy a new billboard on that nearby superhighway.

Want to help your suppliers and store management better understand what is selling and why? Why not talk with the folks over at Awhere.com to take a deeper dive into the demographics, weather and a variety of other geographically specific factors occurring in the areas around each store that may be having an impact. Not selling many GPS dog trackers at store #2718?  Maybe its because pet ownership in a 50 mile radius of that store only indexes as 28 versus the national average.

Once you’ve got customers in your store why not provide better in store service and create a little mobile store portal to help customers do things like find their way around (Blue Umbrella Indoor Navigation), look up consumer reviews on the items you carry and do price comparisons on items for sale, look at what you have in inventory, and leave feedback for a manager, etc.

In fact, why not just sell virtual digital goods right there in the store through the phone while you’re at it. Why not give Apple a call and remind them about that nifty digital meets physical affiliate marketing patent they filed, and see if you can put it to use by marketing music through listening stations in the store where consumers can download directly to their iPhones while providing Best Buy with a nice high margin affiliate fee for driving the download.

I am sure there is more, but that should be enough to get the ball rolling in 2010.

I love Yelp and use it frequently, and to a degree I get the rationale on why its a potentially attractive acquisition, particularly for someone like Google that is looking so aggressively at targeting the local brick and mortar businesses, and their advertising budget. Yelp has many of the right relationships with local advertisers and at the same time has a nice content creation tool and user base who rabidly create tons of local oriented content… all a very nice fit with what Google does and where they’re looking to grow.

 But the deal between Microsoft and Localeze in my mind directly tries to fix something that is currently wrong when you search for local businesses. So many times I try to fire up a mobile browser in the hopes of searching for things around me, and so many times the experience is just so damn underwhelming. No sign of businesses that have existed for years and years, no understanding that I am a consumer looking to walk into a retailer and dont care if someone deep in the skyscraper in front of me runs a web LLC out of their apartment on the 25th floor.

I can still stand on the sidewalk peering into the window outside of Sohpie’s Cuban Cuisine staring at huge baskets filled with yummy empanadas and then turn and do a mobile search for the term ‘empanadas’ and end up being directed to go miles away to Empanada Joe’s, Empanada Mama’s, and Reuben’s Empanadas.

Currently the local search solutions are either far too simplistic in understanding the search query… ie search for ‘empanadas’ and get back a list of places with ‘empanada’ in their business names, or they return 372,000 page that match the place and the term ‘empanada’ which is an unwieldy mess to sort through if you’re just standing on the corner with 15 minutes of your lunch break left.

Localeze clearly has this problem in their sights and is looking to help connect mobile searchers with the closest place to fill their bellys with empanadas even if the place selling you those empandas is called Sophies.

For Google at least, there may be a day when all of those Yelpers will rave about the great empanadas at Sophies and the Google algorithm would put aside those 371k other pages, and put two and two together and match the Yelp content about empanadas at Sophies with the Sophie’s business listing and give me a great search result. But the problem for Google may be that it’s special sauce is built around links (and votes) between web pages not necessarily analyzing the content or intent of the words within pages… so whether or not Google can effectively and reliably make that connection, particularly without owning the content is still a big TBD.