As Stephen mentioned in his Vegas recap, we were absolutely blown away by the overwhelming response to our integration with Foursquare. The TechCrunch article had over 4700 clicks in one day from bit.ly alone, not to mention 70 comments (many of them rather impassioned)! The Mashable article garnered 2500+ clicks from bit.ly in the first few hours as well… I thought we were going to see Tweetdeck burst from all of the RTs!

So what does this mean for the still emerging DOOH industry?
Was this installation DOOH’s coming out party to the mainstream tech crowd? (Hey, what better place for a par-tay than Vegas, right?)

If so, does this mean the DOOH Tipping Point is happening at the intersection of Place Based Social Media (such as LocaModa) and Location Based Services (such as Foursquare and Gowalla)?

We’re interested in hearing from the thought leaders of the industry… speak up!

The night before I left Las Vegas I walked out in the desert to look at the moon. There was a jeweled city on the horizon, spires rising in the night, but the jewels were diadems of electric and the spires were the neon of signs ten stories high. ~Norman Mailer

And with that, I’m turning the blog over to CEO Stephen Randall today for his take on this past week in Loca-Land. Take it away, Stephen…

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Following DSE 2010 in Vegas, the LocaModa train keeps rolling along…

We used DSE as a platform to launch the industry’s first app store – dedicated to solving the problem of helping networks find revenue generating media that engages audiences, attracts advertisers and adds value to venues.

I’m happy to say that our message and proposition was received loud and clear! It’s great to see so many companies coming over to our booth and telling us that we had the exact solution they were looking for. I was also delighted to see so many inquiries coming from major networks outside the US.

We also announced our relationship and integration with Foursquare.

The Foursquare announcement was timed to coincide with our launch on another Clear Channel screen – this one happens to be the largest on the strip, outside Miracle Mile Shops. This was great timing with the DSE show less than one mile away, and various events occurring at the Paris, next to the screen. This story keeps on getting bigger for good reason. Applications like Foursquare will become the on-ramp for loyalty programs in venues and are perfect for DOOH screens. Not surprising then that both Techcrunch and Mashable covered it yesterday afternoon. You should have seen our web stats spike!

Back to DSE, where we also announced that UCView has integrated LocaModa Apps directly into their software offering (they have hundreds of licensees collectively reaching thousands of locations).

The show itself was a great success with hundreds of leads from networks globally representing tens of thousands of venues. Our booth was always well attended and our applications were also on display at UCView, Eventful and CoolSign booths, as well as being used by the event organizers as a communications tool, showing tweets, hashtags and text messages from attendees.

LocaModa’s position as thought leaders was further strengthened when it was announced that we had won two gold awards for our work – a Gold Apex award in the Hospitality category and a Gold Content award in the Interactive category. Both awards were for applications that ran on Zoom Media and Marketing’s network – which was also great news for our partners.

Luckily we managed to fly back to Boston missing the massive Nor’ Easter that dumped 18 inches of snow along the east coast and delayed flights up to New York. We made it back with no delays. Our team was great – Jake, Tim and Gabi were first timers at DSE and now know what it’s like to stand and talk to customers until you don’t have a voice. Jayne, Bill, Steve and I, are long time supporters of DSE so we already knew what to expect – but even we were very surprised by how the event went. Thanks Chris and team over at DSE.

More Vegas photos available on Gabi’s Flickr.

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…