Check-In Mania / People, Places, Things
Though this post tempts me to expound on many different tangents, all related to technology, I am going to have to restrain myself. This entry is dedicated solely to the craze of the “Check-In”.
As a caveat, in general I am a fan of the check-in, even if it is a craze.
Places: The most popular of the three, checking in to real world places via a virtual/mobile portal has taken the nation by storm. Services like Foursquare, Gowalla, and Facebook have forged ahead as early movers (though it could be argued that Facebook did not move early) helping bring the location aware technology into the forefront. To me, these services bring the most value to the users by placing location-aware contextual information onto the smartphone screens; coupons, loyalty rewards, product or service information, historical data, tips, etc. All the other bells and whistles (gaming, badges, socially sharing your location, etc.) I could take or leave.
People: This is one of the newer concepts out there. Actually, in a twitter conversation with Michael Yavonditte the founder/CEO of Hashable (www.hashable.com), he perfectly described his new company as the inventors of people check-ins. This is profoundly game-changing because as we interact in the real world with real people, a site like Hashable will track and trace those interactions in the virtual world. As Pascal-Emmanual Gobry stated, it’s “LinkedIn-meets-Twitter…a personal CRM tool”. It seems that Hashable will take off as the premier service for people check-ins, especially with the recent use by the Dell brothers and Benioff.
Things: ThingD is a company out of New York, NY and founded in 2009 that aims to create a database around all of the things in the world. Per General Catalyst’s website, …”the early stage company will connect people to things, and people to things to other people.” ThingD is living out this mission through their startup The Fancy (www.thefancy.com). Currently, users can save and tag images of anything on the internet AND use their iPhone app to take pictures, tag the real world things in those photos, and post it to their Fancy profile. Now, to label this company the first mover of check-ins for things is sort of a stretch because that is not how The Fancy describes itself. Instead of “checking-in” to things, their goal is to virtually tag and database every thing. But to me, that is just definitional. If I check-in at a bank on Foursquare, I virtually declare that I am there and then spread that across my various social mediums notifying my network that I am at the bank, in reality and virtually. Same thing with The Fancy; I take a photo of an object, tag it, add it to fancy (a la the “check-in”), and then blast it to all my social network saying, “Hey! Friends and followers, I just tagged (checked-in to) this real-world object - check it out!”
So, that’s it; my take on the way three amazing start-ups are tackling the great divide between virtual and physical worlds. As the services in each category improve, we will begin to see the seamless melding between the two, and one unique world will emerge. The question is, what clear value proposition does this pose to the masses? Could this massive undertaking leave us with an inability to separate the two worlds should it prove to not benefit us? Or will enmeshing our real lives into the “cloud” actually augment our planet, leaving us net-positive?
