If you’re looking for new things that may be useful to your business, you’ve come to the right place. Here are four technology tidbits you may have missed in the ever-increasing flow of information that surrounds us.
Mayor McCheese? Who’s the mayor of your business? A strange question, unless you know about Foursquare, which is being billed as “the next Twitter.” Foursquare is a direct outgrowth of the love affair between people and their mobile phones. Members of Foursquare “check in” using their mobile phone when they visit a restaurant, coffee house, bar or other business. The person with the most check-ins becomes the “mayor” of that location. So, Foursquare is both a location-based social network (for you and your friends) as well as a game. It’s available as an “app” for iPhones, BlackBerry devices, Android-based phones and the Palm Pre. Other smartphone users can access Foursquare via its mobile-enabled website. You can also text your location to 50500.
Why should you care? Smart businesses can encourage people to check in from their location in various ways. Obviously, they can give the “mayor” special deals. At the Marsh Café in San Francisco, the mayor drinks for free. You can also offer deals to a person checking into your location for the first time or to someone who has checked in a specific number of times (just like the sandwich card I get at Giovanni’s in Sebastopol). Basically, you’re getting free word-of-mouth marketing among a group of people who like to go out to eat, drink and otherwise buy stuff.
Like nearly all social media services, Foursquare is free, except for the time it takes to participate in the network. If you’re a destination venue, it’s probably worth spending some time to set up a Foursquare account for yourself and play around with it. I can’t emphasize enough the need for businesses to actually use the technology their customers are using—and right now, that means a smartphone that can run apps.
Protean pills. I recently heard a breakfast talk from Dr. David Lawrence, former Chairman/CEO of Kaiser Health. He spoke quite intelligently about a number of topics, but the item that really caught my ear was Proteus Biomedical. Proteus, along with a few other companies, is in the business of creating “smart pills.”
It’s a pretty well-known fact in the medical community that many patients fail to take their medications either correctly or at all. The idea behind a smart pill (not to be confused with pills that make you smart) is that the pill, once activated by contact with the fluids in your stomach, sends back data via radio waves to an external “smart bandage” worn on your skin that records the information for later use. Having done its work, the microchip passes harmlessly through the digestive tract. The data can include information about the drug, the dosage and what time it was taken.
This innovation makes it possible to notify others when a patient fails to take medications on time, as well as to detect when conflicting medications are being taken. Of course, such pills are going to cost more, and they certainly have some potential privacy issues associated with them (although they do require the smart bandage collection device to function, so you can always elect not to wear one, I suppose). From bathroom scales that Twitter (www.withings.com) to real-time monitoring of your blood pressure, we’re entering a decade in which data about your personal health is going to become easy to collect and, hopefully, to act upon.
Chrome polish. Google Chrome is now in its fourth stable release, and I’d strongly recommend you download and try it if you’re not already using it. My primary reason is it’s fast. Although we all end up waiting from time to time for the network to deliver data, more and more of your experience depends on how fast your browser works. The new release is 42 percent faster than the previous, and 400 (!) percent faster than the first release (which was sufficiently fast to get me to drop Internet Explorer like a hot rock). I still keep a copy of Internet Explorer on my system, because a few sites don’t quite work as expected (particularly Microsoft.com, go figure). But if you use “applications” that run in your browser, you owe it to yourself to see what a really pleasant experience it can be.
Some Firefox users have held off of switching to Chrome because of the lack of plug-ins, which are helpful little applications that, as the name implies, plug seamlessly into Firefox and add functionality. Perhaps the best-known Firefox plug-in is AdBlock, which blocks ads from appearing on Web pages (both speeding up the display of a page, as well as reducing annoying distractions). The good news is that Chrome now has plug-ins (called “extensions”) and AdBlock is one of them.
Trends for 2010. There are three technology trends you need to watch as your business navigates 2010. First, social networking will continue to grow in importance, so if your business isn’t on Facebook and Twitter yet, take another look (see my October 2009 column for details).
Hand-in-hand with social networks are smartphones, which put computers with Web access into everyone’s pocket. Mobile marketing of your business is going to be a new way to attract and respond to customers. It’s worth spending some time online actually researching what businesses like yours are doing in the mobile space. Here’s a question to ponder: How can you make it easier, faster and cheaper for your customers to buy your products and services with their phone? A simple example: letting people who frequent your deli text their orders to you in advance (it’s convenient for you, too, as you don’t have to answer the phone).
Finally, consider how “the cloud” (on-demand services provided via the Internet) can streamline and enhance your business. These services range from simple (outsourcing your email) to radical (replacing your servers with cloud-based resources). At the very least, consider using a cloud-based backup service like Mozy or Carbonite for your company data.
Got a question? An idea for a column? Something to get off your chest? Drop me a line at mduffy@northbaybiz.com.
