Gowalla for BlackBerry Now Available in Beta

Posted
by
Kyle McInnes
on June 6, 2010, at 1:09 PM
in News
. Tags: , , , , .
Comments: 6 responses
6 Comments

Gowalla is another location-based service that lets you check-in to businesses and collect rewards for essentially promoting the venue to your friends. This type of location-based viral promotion is definitely the forefront of location advertising. The viral factor helps spread awareness about the venue, and companies can offer tailored incentives to drive more business.

The problem with Foursquare, which I’m curious about with Gowalla, is that the user experience is totally defined by what city you live in. In Ottawa, the experience is very lackluster and there is only 1 business that takes advantage of the service (the Mercury Lounge). There are no food deals and for someone who doesn’t drink or go out, this means there are no deals available in the City. Considering Foursquare aren’t adding many badges, their is now almost no value proposition for Ottawa users on Foursquare. Will Gowalla have a similar downside? We’ll review the two services and compare their value proposition for a user.

Download Gowalla for BlackBerry and let us know what it’s like using it in your city.

Permalink

Post Comment

  • Anonymous

    Gowalla and Foursquare use location in different ways. Foursquare rewards the person that checks in to a location the most (the “mayor”) while Gowalla uses virtual goods not limiting the number of times that good can be collected.

    They are both running some great location-based promotions. Gowalla recently ran a New Jersey Nets ticket giveaway initiated by Gary Vaynerchuk over at Vaynermedia (check out my interview with Sam Taggart on this here: http://untether.tv/ellb/?p=997) and Foursquare is doing a “$ off a latte” when you become the mayor of a Starbucks location.

    One last plug — I’ll be interviewing Gowalla for UNTETHER.tv on Tuesday and will have the interview up by the end of the week. If you have any questions, leave them as comments here.

  • Nurse Berry

    i put it on my storm 2 but it would not allow me to log in.. would not even let me type into box to log in :(

  • Ryan

    disable compatibility mode (options / applications). Was able to signup & login.

  • charles

    The biggest problem(s) I have encountered is the lack of the feature to add a spot/place, and when I launch the app, it keep telling me there's an updated version available, when in fact, it's the same version that is already installed.

  • http://www.blackberrycool.com/ Kyle McInnes

    I have found this as well. The beta kept asking me to update when there was no update. Also, it was unable to determine my location correctly. Kept saying I was in Kansas when I'm in Ontario, Canada.

  • http://www.blackberrycool.com/ Kyle McInnes

    You can also sign up on the web from your device. Very mobile-friendly site.