The company Euclid Elements uses a bunch of wi-fi receiver devices plugged into the wall inside the retail store which in turn hangs out and listen for wi-fi pings from customer phones looking to make a connection. No connection ever takes place, but data about “signal strength, ping frequency, and proximity to other sensors” are all captured from customers’ wi-fi enabled devices.

All the pinging can cover a wide area reaching out and around the retail store itself and the company expects that a typical store may have between 40-70% of customers walking around with wi-fi enabled devices.

So what is there for a retailer to learn for this data? Well plenty according to the company. First and foremost is better insights into customer loyalty, ie what percent of my customers are repeats versus new customers… which may be particularly interesting to look at after running that big Groupon deal last week. Other information like how long customers hang out in the store or how many people are being pulled in off the street because of a killer window display are other potential applications. Or maybe on the last Thursday of each month there is a ton of foot traffic outside your store ½ hour after closing hour… so you may want to stay open late those nights.

While the company says that for the forseeable future there is no intention of tying anything back to the level of individual customers, or sharing data between retailers, the potential uses for capturing store presence data and tying that back to the larger marketing ecosystem seems like it may present an irresistible opportunity.

Simply being able to target mobile or web ads to folks who have been in certain stores or types of stores with follow up marketing would be a great place to start. Then why not try to improve on the whole loyalty card mechanism, by remembering customers who are regular loyal customers and giving them special offers while they’re still shopping, rather than waiting for that small percentage of them to scan a card at the check-out register.

With Research group BIA/Kelsey showing that a whopping 97% of shoppers research online before buying online, representing a $1 trillion market next year…  and 90% of those using search, connecting those two to advertise to customers in store based on their previous online search seems like a no brainer. If I was searching for Magnavox HDTVs online and walked into a Best Buy the next day you’d have to expect that Magnavox would pay a pretty penny to reach me at that critical moment… Magnetic needs to get all over that!

Another possibility is to throw a few more beacons around and try to help the retailer figure out some navigation path data within the store… do people loiter in house wares when you really want them in your shoes department, or are they stuck in the check out line for way too long?? All data that retailers would find interesting but aren’t yet knowable via the current Euclid Elements system.

It will be interesting to see where Euclid Elements goes with their offering, while its certainly super innovative… at $200 per month or $1,600 per year I am not sure if there is enough value there yet for the typical retailer who probably expects a more clear path between the analytics and how he can make money from the analytics.

And considering that half of small businesses don’t even have a website, being touted as the the Google Analytics of Retail won’t be an automatic foot in the door.

 Up until now, access to such data required reaching out and working directly with Verizon to obtain and use the information, on a case by case basis, something that didn’t happen much. The newly released APIs will change all of that, allowing developers more streamlined access and allowing added value service providers like Loc Aid and Location Labs to finally offer a complete coverage offering, allowing unified location based services across all tier one carriers in the U.S.

Why are folks like Loc Aid and Location Labs so excited about this development?  Well, the logic is that anyone who has always wanted to develop a location based services and deploy it to everyone in the country, has up until now been hamstrung by how to include the 90 million Verizon Wireless users into the mix.  It wasn’t an easy task.  But now this barrier is gone, or at least greatly lowered, and in theory at least so should all the excuses to not build a service… so let the flood of new services commence.

Ubiquitous availability is one part of the equation but so is price and availability of the type of location data that developers want and it’s still unclear how much of a barrier those present.

Verizon is offering location in two forms via its newfangled APIs, coarse location via cell ID good for a mile or two accuracy depending on where you are, and more granular location via GPS or WiFi, all available as a single fix or as a tracking session.  I’ve heard that in the past, that the cost to dip into this data generally ran from fractions of a cent for a coarse location and more like four cents for the more accurate stuff, or a few dollar CPMs up to $40 respectively per thousand if you’re a media person and this is how you view such things… not cheap stuff for a lot of applications.  However the verbiage around the Verizon NavBuilder Inside sitetalks about how “it’s the fastest way to add location based services to your apps for free”.  At the same time I’ve also heard folks like Loc Aid positioned as re -SELLERS of this data, so it’s still a bit unclear to to me if this is going to be free or if it’s something for sale.  Any help from a more tuned in  source here?

At the end of the day, these APIs certainly do solve some key problems of building location oriented applications for Verizon customers. The vast majority of phones, ie feature phones, will still be limited to the more coarse location accuracy of Cell ID, which will certainly still be a limiting factor for introducing many location oriented services.  But on the other hand, higher end smartphones on Verizon will be able to take advantage of always on, higher accuracy (Wi fi or GPS) positioning for extended sessions which for example could pave the way for hands free social check-in services that, after an initial approval, could register presence or check you in automatically.  If the user doesn’t need to regularly push a button to ‘check-in’ anymore will the whole concept of check-ins just slowly fade away and a mobile record of presence at place of sale take its place?

It was also interesting to note that location fixes are defined as Fast, Normal and Accurate…  a “Fast” fix is achieved in under 2 seconds, a “Normal” one up to 10 seconds and an accurate one, well 60 seconds or more.  Since location can apparently happen more behind the scenes, depending on how its implemented,  the user may in many instances be blissfully unaware of how long its taking to get this information for their use, but such lag times times could also pose to be a hurdle for services accustomed to working in times in microseconds… like say ad targeting and serving.

So while it seems that we have indeed taken a major step toward ubiquitous availability of of location here in the U.S. there is still a lot TBD here particularly around speed, accuracy and costs of this data, so while it may be there, everywhere… is it the kind that’s needed and at a cost thats affordable to developers of new services?

• first of all if you don’t already read The Next Web and their coverage of location, you really should…  they did a lot of posts on Facebook Places, full of great insights. I thought the one titled “Why I deleted foursquare for good” was particularly good.  That and pretty much all of Greg Sterling’s Screenwerks blog are great sources of info
• I also saw the re tweet ‘news’ that FourSquare had its busiest day ever in terms of new user signups for Foursquare yesterday. I think this just further supports the thought from my post yesterday that when starting a new company AND a new category simultaneously, that the threat of customers never having heard of you is as big, if not a bigger threat than competitors. Facebook users hear buzz on new location features… go to figure out what its all about… see lots of talk about FourSquare… decide to go check that out too.
• after having played with Facebook Places a little bit yesterday, I am even more convinced that it will be huge. It may take a while for it to truly go mainstream, and I am sure there will be some tweaks along the way, but it’s quite easy to envision Facebook users happily posting where they are en mass in a few months the same way that so many people on Facebook currently use it to say post photos.
• within moments of getting it running yesterday I saw a place update from old high school friends I haven’t spoken with in decades… nothing close to being techy types. One in particular updated that he was “working” at Location XYZ, one click and a zoom later I could see that he was “working” at a cancer center in XYZ city in Alabama… two great pieces of information that I would have never known about this guy otherwise. Now I am not in that area of the country very often nor do I know anyone that has cancer, but its valuable information to have about my friend and who knows when it may come in handy.

I have noticed that my attitude toward when to check in with Facebook is a bit more thought out. When I first started on Foursquare, I found myself checking in a lot more… bagel shop, checkin, gym, check in, playground with kids, check in. The gaming part and brief thrill of mayorship and badges made it fun for a bit. But now with both, I am finding that I only check in when I am somewhere new or noteworthy (relatively speaking of course… no plans to crash the White House State Dinner anytime soon) or if I think others I know may be around.

Now that I know I am pushing check ins out to over 200 people, the vast majority of whom I know and like, well I don’t want to subject them to the fact that I am at the gym or the bagel shop, I really can’t imagine anyone cares. But for some reason I did it with Foursquare for a while. It’s not just about the number of people who I’d spam, but also with Foursquare it felt like it was more about a connection with the place… while with Facebook, it’s more about a connection with my social network.

Perhaps that’s still an angle here to be explored for someone in this space… I won’t check in at my gym or at the bagel shop on Facebook, but I’d still be willing to check in there if there was something that made it worth my effort, it doesn’t need to necessarily be free stuff or discounts but I am not sure a virtual mayorship is going to do it for most.

Causeworld
First a quick word on CauseWorld.  As far as I can tell it pretty much works like this… you load up the app on your mobile phone, check in at retailers and scan bar codes on products and earn karma points. You can then donate those points to one of the available charitable causes, and of course post your ‘achievement’ to your social network… a seemingly prerequisite these days.

It seems that at some point the number of karma points each charity has received dictates what share of the corporate donations pool they will receive.   The whole thing feels a wee bit disingenuous, consumers who check in aren’t donating anything, rather they’re casting a vote for where some big corporation donates their money. 

There is a big quote on their site from Michael Arrington at TechCrunch saying that the service encourages big corporations to give more… it’s a bit unclear why or how that is, but presumably if big corporations feel like they’re getting consumer interaction with their products, and consumer behavior data in return, it’s conceivable that it’s a better ROI on your charitable contribution than just slipping the Red Cross a check under the table and entering the appropriate amount on your tax filing each year. 

The big winners seem to be CauseWorld itself and donors. According to an article in CIO magazineCause World takes 20% for its services, and big corporations get more for their donation buck. Meanwhile presumably that 20% cut from Causeworld comes out of the charity’s pockets. For big charities this may not be the best, but the service could potentially be a big plus for lesser known charities that now benefit from the power of consumers promoting their interests in certain causes, maybe a great way to get noticed if your charitable cause flies a bit under the radar… and 80% of a donation is better than 0% any day.  The consumer meanwhile is basically trading off the time and energy to do the work and giving out information about their behavior in return for the right to steer big corporate giving and the ability to easily promote charities of personal interest and also to promote their own personal ‘achievement’.  

If nothing else, it’s an interesting combination of value creation for the various folks in this industry and demonstrates the value that different people (corporations and consumers) place on giving and receiving digitally captured information related to real world behaviors.  Consumers seem pretty happy to give it away, with little more than a little social creds and feel good in return… and corporations, well are happy to get the consumer interaction (and information), even if it means that 20% less of their money actually makes it into the hands of charitable causes.

ShopKick
Ok, so now that you get the idea behind Causeworld, Shopkickisn’t all that different… consumer still both walk into stores and scan items and get credit (called kickbucks) for  doing so, but the reasons why and the technology is a little different.

First, the motivation for downloading and turning on the app when you enter a store, and for scanning items etc is to earn points and to receive special offers. Special offers are things like 10% off anything in the store, or maybe a special item on sale.  Consumers can also earn points along the way for doing things like entering a store or navigating to a particular section of the store… points are later convertible into various things like Facebook Credits or gift cards, or with enough points you can just outright buy an item like the Twilight DVD… with 4,400 kickbucks.

And while you can still sit in your house and check into places in your neighborhood and scan items in your fridge, you only get a few measly points for doing so.  However the real intent here is that you’re in store and the unique ShopKick technology really tries to reward that.  Participating stores install little speakers around the store that transmit an inaudible signal that is recognized when the Shopkick app is running on an iPhone or android device… physical proximity to those speakers, and the ability for the device to hear the signal is what determines when the big points are awarded.

The whole business premise here seems to be around allowing retailers to better understand who is in their stores, before they buy something, and to help retailers service and reward these customers… and also to get consumers to pick up and interact with product all while providing a better shopping experience for consumers.  Since the speaker technology ensures that a consumer is actually present, there is the added benefit of knowing that real foot traffic occurred within the store. So if Best Buy wants to get more people into say the camera section they could run a promotion in the app upon entering the store that pushes customers to that section, and then measure the results… theoretically something ShopKick could get paid for helping make happen on a “cost per” basis. 

The general concepts here are good ones in theory:  measuring presence at point of sale, get consumers to pick up and interact with real products at point of sales, offering specials based on preferences and when you enter the store, not at check out, and rewarding frequent shopper.  And it seems to be getting enough traction that Best Buy is experimenting with the technology with plans to roll it out in 187 stores in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Jose, Chicago and  New York City, as of today.

But in reality from what I’ve seen so far, some of the theory isn’t really making its way into reality.  I used the application a couple of times today to check in at Macy’s and at an American Eagle Outfitter and here is the good and the bad:

The Good
- The little speaker technology that gives you points WHEN YOU ENTER worked flawlessly at both stores here in Manhattan along 34th street… earning me 110 points for the two check ins. Woo Hoo indeed! I took 100 of the points and converted them into 4 Facebook credits and I hope one day to figure out what those do.

The Not So Good 
- I fake checked in at a few more places (including a place that closed a few months ago) and got three more points, and tried scanning some products around the house but as I may have mentioned I hate scanning products and after trying for 3-4 minutes and finally getting a pack of Swiffer wipes to register I got an error message saying it was the wrong product. Beats me why, they were definitely Swiffers… maybe they secretly knew I was really in my laundry room instead of at the Duane Reade across the street… and that was just a nice way to deny me my kickbucks.

- The key goal of ShopKick is supposed to be to make my shopping experience better, but I am not sure it really did that. Checking into Macy’s ShopKick showed me a handful of ‘offers’… and two looked vaguely of interest… a pair of Nike Monarch shoes for $49.99 and some Ralph Lauren Polo shirts for $19.99 (the cheapo ones). The problem was that they didn’t have the shoes in stock, and there was nothing special about the price of either… in fact the shirts happened to be on sale for $14.99 anyway, so I felt like I was better off just looking around the store for big red “sale” signs.  The app wasn’t helpful at all in helping me find the featured item in the massive department store either.

- The experience at American Eagle Outfitters was a little bit better, when I walked in a sales associated immediately told me that all jeans were on sale and he was backed up by about three dozen signs around the shop all saying the same thing… and voila there on the first screen of ShopKick appeared to be a similar deal… which ambiguously enough said ‘Every Single Jean on Sale”.  But flipping through the other offers, ShopKick did me one better by offering me 15% off any purchase, so that may have been a better deal than just any Joe would have received off the street, I guess it depends on what I was buying.

The Bad
- It seems that in order to get your kickbucks points for being in the store, you need to fire up the application before you enter and leave it on as you pass through the main entrances (see TechCrunch “do not avert your eyes from the phone” zombies video to get the idea) so your phone can ‘hear’ the ‘shopkick signal’. I tested this in Macy’s by heading on upstairs away from the entrance and firing up the app and it didn’t work… I didn’t get my check in points.  Huge problem there… maybe easily fixable with a lot more hardware but currently not a good experience.   At Macy’s specifically they also missed some secondary entrances to the building, but that’s more of a minor glitch in the grand scheme of things.

-  In Shopkick points land it takes 4,400 kickbucks to get a $17 Twilight DVD. So from what I saw I’d have to do about 4,400 fake check ins, 176 product scans or walk into a Best Buy 58 times ( for 58 different days since it seems to not let you get points 2x in one day).  Also the number of products you can scan for points varies by store but the ones I saw ranged from 2 to 9 products, so assuming you can scan five products per store on average you’d need to go to stores 35 times (either different stores or different days to the same store) and scan five items to get enough for the DVD.

So the offers on Shopkick so far don’t seem all that special, and the points system doesn’t create a whole lot of motivation except maybe for those people who really shop a lot and really like to play mobile games to win stuff while they’re doing it… but frankly I think those are often different types of people, or at least limited.  From my own experience I certainly wouldn’t use it for the gameplay elements that it offers like becoming fans of places or earning badges, or even to accrue kickbucks.  I may potentially fire it up while in the store to see if there is a special offer for something I am looking for…  but to think that there is some massively new improvement on the phenomenon of checking-in here seem to be more hype than reality from what I can tell.  And thinking of all the specialized hardware that would need to be installed in the tens of millions of retailers across the U.S. kinda makes you wonder if all those fake checkins are really such a bad thing afterall.

Another up and comer in this area, with a new twist, that is beginning to get some press is a company called Hot Potato.  Here is where they fit in:

What they do: They create an online social network around the dimensions of “here” and “happening now”.  Facebook has people at its center of gravity and Yelp has places (mostly businesses) as theirs. Folks like Foursquare and Gowalla have seen the value of connecting the two with gameplay around the places where people go. 

Hot Potato is similar, but with a focus not as much on the places themselves as on the live events happening either directly in a real nearby place or one 1,000 miles away. Think of it as a mobile or virtual social layer on top of eventful or meetup.com where folks check in to events to socialize.

How it works:  As with Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare and Gowalla, having your friends involved is a key component of the service.  So the first step is to invite all your friends with handy friend imports from Facebook, Twitter and Gmail supported. Once your friends are connected you can kind out what events they’re attending or create your own events and invite others to join you.  Like with Foursquare, people check in to an event in progress and can share comments and pictures with other attendees… events can be open to anyone or made private for only a select group to participate.

I can see this type of tool being particularly good for a business conference where everyone is there to network and share information and to socialize. I tried to set an event up for the Where2.0 conference happening in San Jose this week…  seems that no one found it and a new one was created instead… although even that one had just 16 folks check in and only on posting that I could see.

The Hot Potato service is just getting off the ground, and seems to be in its very early stages at this point, with many kinks to be worked out. The website seems to be down a lot, and I left a question with customer service five days ago about how to set up an event, and have yet to hear back.

For attending real world events at physical places it will be interesting to see if Hot Potato can find enough ways to differentiate itself with features targeting the needs of live event goers maybe around tickets and what to do afterwards. Currently there is not a lot more you can do with Hot Potato than what someone might find checking in somewhere like at Madison Square Garden for an event or at ‘Snowpocalypse’ on Foursquare… with their more loose interpretation of ‘place’.

The service is currently heavily used for ‘virtual events’ around social television watching, like March Madness or the latest episode of ABC’s Lost… making what for many is likely not a very social activity of sitting in front of the tv at home, a bit more virtually social at least. Although it feels like the live and in person events need a different set of capabilities than the virtual event attendance like watching a tv episode, so I suspect that at some point soon, Hot Potato may need to split and decide which market they’re after and how to really differentiate themselves.

Its an interesting enough twist however to continue to keep an eye on.

Navteq positions the new service simply as a “showcase” for their products and services, which makes a lot of sense, specifically highlighting that it will contain the most fresh data available. As they layer on new and interesting data and capabilities into the database, a directly accessable web front end seems like a great sales tool to be able to actually demonstrate some of these things in action immediately.

For example… lets say Navteq Direct Access just sold in McDonalds and corporate bigwigs want to be able to SEE the result of the deal now? Great have em go on over to navteq.com and search for “McDonalds” to see what they got. The inability to ‘look’ at a database as well as the lagtime in how long it takes some of their clients to pick up and distribute the new data must have been a challenge.

But on the flip side, this tool appears to now have pretty much taken over as the purpose of the main navteq.com website, with the previous content shuffled off to corporate.navteq.com. That and the fact that they did of course buy into a consumer map portal with Map24 has to make you wonder.

I also found it interesting that they seem quite interested in asking for feedback on and presumably improving the features and capabilities of the online map application. And much of the veribiage like “Let Navteq find it for you.” could be perceived as consumer oriented.

My guess is that they’re trying to delicately put their big toe in the water… or maybe their whole foot at this point, since Map24 could have been considered the big toe… to start to play in the consumer map portal market. But today in the here and now there is more money to be made from selling data to other map portals versus running your own as the uber map portal.
But potentially Navteq sees the day when this will no longer be the case and is preparing for that day?

After hearing the wonders of NearbyNow on last weeks Placecast Location Based Advertsing Teleconference, I figured I’d give it another spin. For those not familiar with NearbyNow they promise the ability to find the products you’re looking for in a retail store near you, from their website:

NearbyNow was founded to simplify shopping for today’s consumers who browse online but buy in stores. By allowing shoppers to find products, brands, or sales locally, and to scan the inventory at any given shopping center, we provide a convenient shopping experience for the consumer and an effective marketing tool for merchants looking to motivate local customers.

The last time I used NearbyNow was a year ago, when I found myself time afer time back at an e-commerce web site rather than a real nearby store for the items I was looking for, so I wasn’t overly optimistic that things had improved but I gave it a try anyway…

I started with the bike helmet for my son… on Friday he took a nasty spill on his scooter on the way home from a special dad’s trip to ickdonalds and he got a bad scrape on his face… luckily he was wearing his beat-up old frog helmet which generally did its job. However, I got nasty looks from the moms in the park all weekend, so I’ve decided that he simply can’t have a big ol’ scrape on his face AND a helmet with the outer plastic shell missing and the strap jury rigged together, or I may just have one of the moms call CPS on me.

So I went into NearbyNow in search of a cool kid bike/scooter helmet. I did find a virtual picture and price on a helmet that fit the bill, but when I went to check on its availability at first I was told that the store wasn’t open right now and that the store would open at 9a… the problem is that it was already 11:25a local NYC time… so it seems that NearbyNow isn’t adjusting store hours for the location of the user relative to the store, only relative to California… wait I thought NYC was the center of the universe, evidently in tech land the Bay Area would be the center.

The second problem is that the store in question has been closed for probably close to a year now, maybe two… but thankfully I received an email from NearbyNow apologizing for not being able to validate the items availability because the store is “extremely busy” (busy being closed for a year that is)! So just for fun, I decided to call the closed store with the number that NearbyNow had provide and got what I believed to be a pre recorded message in Spanish, without anything that I could tell having to do with sporting goods.

Next stop Amazon, I picked up a cool Ben 10 helmet that will be here on Thursday, I think I can convince him to stay off the scooter until then.

Next I tried NearbyNow for a laptop battery… with equally dissapointing results. Evidently there is nowhere in Manhattan to walk into a store and buy at laptop battery over the counter, instead I was diverted to a variety on online e-tailers. It is possible I suppose that this is entirely accurate… I’ve seen a lot of odd specialty stores these days including a napping store (MetroNaps), peanut butter and jelly shop and shave shop, but have never seen a laptop battery store, so maybe that one was legit.

Finally I seemed to have a little more luck getting a case for my iphone. There was a thin looking one from Case Mate called Barely There and two Radio Shacks a couple of blocks away allegedly carried it. After receiving another ‘sorry they’re not open yet’ and the “sorry we can’t check availability because the store is very busy” notice from NearbyNow I was beginning to wonder if the guy from NearbyNow whos jobs is to call the store on your behalf had found a MetroNaps store he liked and decided not to check out.

Rather that waiting for him to wake up from his nap and let me know if the item was in stock I ventured out to Radio Shack #1 to see what they had. En route I passed a number of other stores including a Staples and two or three mom and pop phone stores that likely had cases, but was determined to make it to Radio Shack. Well it turns out that Radio Shack #1 didn’t exist, in its place was a GameStop. But fortunately the second Radio Shack was a mere two blocks away buried in the second floor of a mall… and voila as advertised they had both the blue and orange Case Mate Barely There cases for sale at the price I had seen on NearbyNow. In fact it was helpful that I knew what I was looking for because for some reason the store had the Case Mate products on the other side of the store at boot level, not displayed with the other two dozen or so phone accessory items and I had to ask the sales clerk if they had any other cases before being directed to what I was looking for. In case you were wondering the store was completely empty, except for the two store clerks staring into the mall out of boredome, so that “store is very busy” message from NearbyNow is still a mystery.

Overall NearbyNow wasn’t a great experience, but it did come in handy and after some work I did find what I was looking for with one of my three items. I played around with a few other searches, for example for ‘paper’ within office products catgeory and was directed to Toys R Us and Sears 2-3 miles away, when there is a Staples directly across the street. So it seems that they have a limited number of retailers participating which makes it pretty hit and miss.

Google Search results for “Twitter”: 299 Million results
Google Search results for “Pizza”: 144 million results

I do find Twitter pretty valuable, I’ve identified a bunch of people, mostly business people around the LBS field, that I generally either know, or would like to know and follow them to benefit from the stuff they discover and post tweets about. It’s great for getting a feel for what’s going on when I can’t be somewhere I’d like, for example at this years CTIA in Vegas. I fully
expect to be able to follow any of the major announcements as they happen at CTIA via Twitter, while having my butt fully planted here in NYC.

Also, you can read a hell of a lot into those little tweets, like “yeah I totally was thinking the same thing as that guy” or “those guys from company X are indeed all douchebags.” or “so thats what the developer of that hot new LBS app is really doing with his leisure time at 3am”.

So I of course was quite interested in seeing what the location aware proposition could add to something like Twitter.

I recently came across Twinkle, by Tapulous, which was touting the benefits of their location awareness twitter application for iPhone, I figured I’d give it a whirl. I use Tweetie as my core twitter application and it to also has a location aware feature, but since Twinkle really markets “leveraging the power of Geolocation” I thought it would be worth checking out.

First and foremost, Twinkle seems to be shooting for more of a combination of social networking and Twitter app all in one, so the idea is not only to allow folks to broadcast out their 140 characters of update/anecdote/wisdom and to geolocate the location of the user, but to expand on the idea by allowing you to add folks as friends and to initiate chats with those nearby… kinda
like Twitter meets Limbo or Loopt Mix.

I have tried the location feature out on both Twinkle and Tweetie and despite setting the same geographic radius I get a lot more tweets in my area from Tweetie then I do from Twinkle, which makes me think that Twinkle is only showing me Tweets from other Twinkle users, and not the full number of location aware Twitter users, which is a huge problem since I’d be missing out on 99% of the tweets happening around me.

Suprisingly neither of the two systems seems to allow me to combine the two features by seeing 1. only the tweets of those that I already follow and 2. when they’re within say a mile or two radius of me… now that may actually be useful if I for example saw that someone was sending updates about some cool stuff they were seeing at a digital media conference they were attending, and unbeknown to me that digital media conference was happening just on the other side of town. It’s possible that this does indeed exist but those that I follow on Twitter just aren’t enabling the location awareness aspect when they post their tweets.

I can see this being an interesting feature if you could get the geographic radius down to a tighter area like those in the same restaurant, or bar, or building or stadium where everyone is sharing a common experience. It would be a hell of a lot more relevant to me than just random people within a mile radius, which in NYC can cover a good half million people with next to nothing in common.

I also noticed a new service BeLocal coming out in the U.K. which has a different spin on the whole location aware Twittering. They have you follow @belocal on twitter and then send them your postal code via a direct message, where you will then be pushed out local daily tweets with news directly relevant to your location, presumably from area media outlets and businesses.

I suspect that there will be a lot more of these interesting, location aware tweeting capabilities in the months ahead, but we are certainly not there yet.