For everyone that didn’t already figure us out from Stephen’s guest post and the buzz about Loca + Foursquare, the cat’s now officially outta the bag… and what a sleek looking kitty it is!

LocaModa’s Digital Out of Home App Store has launched, and is currently offering a host of new place-based social media applications (along with some old favorites, of course).

Third-party developers are encouraged to contact us if you’d like to get involved!

We’ll be showing off some of our newest apps at the Digital Signage Expo in Vegas next week… so stop by Booth 1924 and introduce yourself. Stephen will also be speaking at Sessions 28 and 40, as well as a couple Lunch and Learn Panels, and the app store is sure to be a hot topic!

Full Release here.

I’m turning the blog over today to LocaModa’s CEO Stephen Randall for a special guest post on our integration with one of our favorite new services, Foursquare.

Recently, The Boston Globe reported on the latest location-based service to turn the heads of media mavens:

“Foursquare, the mobile phone software and accompanying website turn your daily peregrinations into a competition: every time you venture somewhere (your neighborhood Dunkin’ Donuts, or the Boston Garden), you use the Foursquare app or mobile Web site to “check in,” getting credit for being there. The person who has checked in the most at a particular location becomes the mayor — at least until someone else shows up more often and steals the title.” (“The 21st century’s version of ‘Killroy was here,’” The Boston Globe, Scott Kirsner, 28. January 2010).

Unless disabled by the user, Foursquare check-ins automatically send a message to the user’s “social graph” (the number of friends people have on social networks), and if the user so chooses, updates his Twitter feed as well. The average number of friends, followers or fans on social network sites such as Twitter is 126 (source: The Guardian, 29. June 2009). Facebook’s social graph is 130 (source: Facebook).

The user experience is fun and engaging, and it’s obvious why some enterprising venues have started to reward customers who use these apps to announce their presence to their friends. The merits of displaying location-based services for locations should be apparent – they are a user-generated marketing tool for the venue. It is therefore ironic that location-based services are not designed for place-based screens at all, but for web and mobile screens.

The Globe article went on to mention a local battle for mayorship of Toscanini’s, a well known café not far from MIT in Cambridge, MA. LocaModa’s HQ is five minutes away from Toscanini’s (Tosci’s to locals). As long-time fans of Tosci’s and friends of its larger-than-life owner, Gus, we use the café as a lab to test new place-based social media applications. In November ’09, we started testing Foursquare on Tosci’s LCD screen, the first time Foursquare was used as a real time interactive DOOH application.

The LocaModa Foursquare app (shown above) dynamically displays a picture of the mayor, the number of check-ins and user tips about the café. The screen also displays real time Twitter messages tagged “Toscanini” and “Tosci.”

I have previously written about ensuring place-based screens have a range of miles not feet (i.e. that they connect venues across channels to brand websites and social network fan pages etc). Location-based services are an excellent example of cross channel engagement and are therefore likely to be a mainstay of many place-based networks.

You can also download a pdf version of this post.

A few weeks ago, I attended a talk at the Berkman Center that centered around the concept of online “platforms” and the politics of the loosely-defined layers tangled up in the term.

From a theoretical vantage point, the need for a firmer definition comes at a favorable intersection. The mainstream players cited in the talk (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr) have all undergone endless UI iterations and carry robust and vocal user bases, indicating that basic functionality is well understood across audiences; yet, from a partner integration standpoint, the services remain malleable enough that brands and networks can still help to define their access points and relational methodology.

The critical point here is that this juncture isn’t only ripe in the academic sphere. Clearly the industry can (and should) benefit as well, and it should be noted that this ‘industry’ encompasses not only digital signage networks, but an entire host of satellite segments (see diagram above).

It’s evident that it’s prime time for defining not only what a platform can and should be in a New Media sense, but also for proving its potential in the term’s most basic faculty: as an interactive stage for people, causes, and ideas.

A better defined platform becomes the industry’s foundation for new sets of fresh, ready to run, interactive, real-time apps that will help shape further integration across DOOH.

(And it should come as no surprise that we have more up our sleeve in this regard…)

Okay, so that title was a little much, but those X-Games promos sure do like their power adjectives… And we’re excited to display our place-based social media platform at the Winter X-Games!

I wish I had on-site photos to share, but I’ll have to settle for some bar pics of our real-time Twitter/Flickr screens for XGames that we rolled out with Zoom Media & Marketing. The screens captured tweets and photos from correspondents at the games, and streamed them live onto screens in bars nationwide…

Let’s just hope the screens didn’t showcase too many images of Shaun White’s unfortunate beat-up face…

I typically do a weekly scan of new deployments in digital signage across LocaModa’s most relevant channels – quick serve restaurants, bars, entertainment venues, public spaces. Most are fairly standard POS solutions, digital menu boards, and streaming news content. Since we’re focused on elevating such installments to include interactivity (and ultimately branch them into a cross-channel effort), I often have a hard time evaluating the signage at face value and not immediately jumping to next steps.

A headline on the Digital Signage Expo site this morning caught my eye not because of a unique use of digital signage, but for the cool factor of the venue itself: The Cereal Bowl Restaurants Roll Out Digital Signage.

A QSR devoted entirely to customized cereal creations? So smart.

Add in fro-yo options to hop aboard the Pinkberry craze? All the smarter.

Their new digital signage installation makes me salivate thinking about the options for interactivity on those screens! To start, patrons could send in texts with their favorite cereal “recipes” and email in mobile photos of their creations once they’ve been built. How about incorporating a social poll where users submit their carby masterpieces and other patrons vote and comment? Add in customized Cereal Bowl Twitter and Flickr hashtags… and now we’re getting somewhere.

For such a fun venue, I’d love to see the ante upped with their DS solution…