Technology

I was part of a very interesting conversation the other day about location sharing sites. The conversation centered around why using these sites is different for men than women, in particular because of the security & privacy concerns that women have.

Will We See a Gowalla Gangsta or a Foursquare Fiend?

Maura Thomas was questioning whether giving her location out constantly was safe. Someone else voiced the concern that sooner or later Foursquare or Gowalla would run into the same issue Craigslist did with the Craigslist killer. Of course the website PleaseRobMe entered the conversation, just to round off the fear theme that was the center of the conversation. I admit, at first I was slightly dismissive of these claims and concerns, mostly because I believe we have become obsessed with threats, to our children, women, homes and the nation. After a couple of days of contemplating the conversation I decided to reach out to a few women that I know are users of these tools and get their opinions on the concerns, how real they are to them and what precautions they take as women.

The three women who helped me so greatly were Jessica Smith, Sarah Vela & Michelle Lemire. I’m extremely grateful to each of them for taking the time to share their thoughts with me.

An overwhelming sentiment shared by all three was that while security is always an issue, it should not be a paralyzing one. Not taking part in something that is available to everyone, e.g. Social Location sharing is not the answer. In fact all agreed that sharing your location can actually enhance your security, as Jessica Smith responded “It’s not like it’s only opt-in for the bad guys”.

The gameplay, especially that offered by Foursquare was actually important to some, “I may be a wee-bit competitive by nature, so “fighting” for mayorships and badges is fun.” Michelle said. Why shouldn’t women join in the games?

Again all three women thought that the site pleaserobme.com raised some valid general concerns, and hopefully made people take a second look at their privacy settings but didn’t increase their individual fear of using the sites as they felt it was extremely unlikely burglars would be checking Foursquare to find out if someone wasn’t home. Much more likely that they would cruise neighbourhoods looking for empty houses. As Sarah pointed out “most attacks on women are carried out by someone close to the woman”.

Safety Tips

Some obvious places were raised as places not to check in, these included children’s schools, home, friends homes and anywhere you wouldn’t want your boss/significant other to know about. The interesting thing about these tips is that they apply equally to men and women. In fact the precautions that these women all suggested are just generally good advice for anyone, man or woman.

Three things they all agreed on were:

• Ensuring your privacy settings don’t reveal information that you don’t want to share, e.g. email, phone number
• Knowing your network before connecting with people
• Realize that you don’t have to connect these tools to your other networks, e.g. you don’t have to send all your checkins to Twitter or Facebook

What precautions do you take when using Location Social sharing sites?

One of the reasons that sites like Foursquare, Gowalla & MyTown have become so popular beyond just the ability to share your location is the game play aspect. Not only are you asked to share, but you are positively rewarded for doing so, in fact the more often you share the more you are rewarded.

The upside for the businesses whose locations are shared is that they get free word of mouth promotions everytime someone checks in. Now comes the same functionality from two sites for products on the web. GetGlue, from Adaptive Blue & Hollrr, from well Hollrr.

Both have adopted the same concept. Encourage you to share products you like with your “friends”. Let’s look at each in turn.

GetGlue

Glue wins a lot of points for its ease of use, they have a firefox plugin that creates a glue toolbar which appear whenever I am on a site that has products displayed. This toolbar is almost like a personal shopper. Not only does it give me the ability to share the product by simply clicking “Like” but it shows me who else in the Glue community has liked this product, it shows me similar products and if I want, allows me to see other suggestions.  I like this feature a lot. If I am shopping online it allows me to see what others that I know think of this product, this is even better than the embedded ratings & reviews that sites have on them.

They reward sharing with changes in status, encouraging users to strive for “Guru” status. Achieving this opens up another dimension to the service – special offers. Guru’s are eligible to win free stuff from Glue sponsors. DVD’s, Books and other offers on a regular basis. So there is a tangible reward for all this sharing. Overall I’d say Adaptive Blue have done a great job of combining Social Sharing with ratings & reviews, with game play.

Hollrr

Hollr is a less developed platform, no browser plugin, which forces me to return to the site to conduct product “Hollrrs”. Hollrr’s are rewarded with badges, in a Foursquare style reward system. Hollrr has a more cutesy, Web 2.0 feel to the site than Glue but no tangible rewards. I like the game play but there are features of the site that need some work. For example it couldn’t find my email contact friends or Twitter connections who were using the site, even though I know a couple of them are. A small bug, but huge impact. If I am being asked to share socially, the first group I want to do that with is those with whom I already have a connection.

Overall, I’d say that Hollrr needs work, cute badges are easily trumped by real life rewards. Make it easier for the user by providing a browser plugin so I don’t have to keep coming back to your site.

Both these services would do well to explore the Mobile avenue and create apps that allow integration with cameras in Smart phones. I’d like to be out in a real life store and “Like” or “Hollrr” a product from there, now that is real social sharing.

Have you used either of these services? Which do you prefer?

The Austin Chapter of the American Marketing Association, an organization for which I volunteer, recently ran into trouble with Facebook.  The trouble began when the chapter tried to set up a couple of event announcements for events being organized in Austin for  marketers to attend.

Firstly, Facebook would not allow the word “free”, even though there is no charge to attend the event. Eventually the word complimentary was found to be acceptable. Secondly, having created two events. The page admin received the following stern warning from Facebook that the chapter:

“significantly slow down or stop this behavior. Further misuse of site features may result in a temporary block or your account being permanently disabled.”

This is surprising for two reasons, firstly, the chapter is a non-profit, it provides information to marketers who are both members and non-members, it’s fans all understand that when they become fans of the page. Secondly, the chapter only posts one or two events a month. This hardly strikes me as misuse of site features!

I checked the Terms of Service to see why Facebook would think we have fallen foul of their rules. Surprisingly there is nothing in either the General terms or the special provisions applicable to pages about the number of events you can promote in a given timeframe.

So what is really going on with Facebook? Are they trying to bite the hand that feeds it? After all if Marketers stop running ads on Facebook where will their revenue come from?

Facebook either needs to make its terms of service clearer or they need to make their messaging clearer when they rap organizations on the knuckles for “misuse of site features”.

Have you or your organization run into issues with Facebook and their terms of service?

This week I found an addition to my Gmail, Google Buzz. Like so many others of you I was surprised at the way this was rolled out. No invites, no “elite” group of users first, just open your email and there it was.

Open Rollout – Not the Google Way

A definite departure from the way Google has rolled out previous applications, including Gmail. What to make of that? Was Google not so sure that they could create a buzz about Buzz?

Having played around with Google Wave and been left with the impression that while it might be useful for groups of collaborators, as an individual it left me feeling like I had taken a trip back in time 15 years or so to the days when I was one of only a handful of people I knew that had email. I could see that this might be useful, but no one I knew used it and so for the most part it was irrelevant.

Turn Down The Volume

Google Buzz seems to be much the same type of thing. For the first time I would have to say that Google is a day late and a dollar short. Google Buzz is little more than an echo chamber, in a world that has enough noise already. Rather than bringing something new and exciting to the table, they have invented a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist, namely, how to stay in touch with people I email using Gmail. The people I email using Gmail I am already connected to, on Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, Foursquare, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube and of course via email. Why do I need another tool?

When I look at Buzz what I see is cross-posting from Twitter & Facebook, along with “Hey, how does this work?” posts. So what is the point?  That is a classic software development conundrum. Google has given me a tool, but I have no idea how or why I should use it. So I will just leave it be and not use it.

A New Tool For The Miner

If you are going to build a social tool, then at least look at what already exists, and look at the problems that occur with them. The primary problem for anyone actively involved in Social Networking is Noise. A tool that enables me to reduce the noise, focus on what I am interested in across all sites and still enables me to catch those odd alluring snippets that might otherwise be missing from my attention stream is what I need.

Tweetdeck is the nearest tool that I use that comes anywhere near that, and that barely does the job. I currently have more than 20 columns in Tweetdeck that I scroll across every day looking for the good stuff. I am an information miner, what I need is a laser, not dynamite and definitely not a 16oz claw hammer which is what Google Buzz is. Old tech, old approach.  Google I expect more from you.  Back to the drawing board you go.

Have you found a use for Google Buzz?

In January’s edition of Scientific American MIND, David DiSalvo wrote an article entitled “Are Social Networks Messing With Your Head?”

He raises some interesting points about Social Networking sites, how they are used and how they can often fall short of a users expectations. What I found very interesting was his and others observations that these sites can actually increase stress and lower feelings of self-worth. Something that many of us who use them on a regular basis might find counter-intuitive.

I Hate The Social Media A List

There are plenty of rant posts out there, that boil down to this basic statement. Someone somewhere doesn’t like a prominent Social Media/Social Networking “A Lister”. Whether its Robert Scoble, Chris Brogan or some other person. It often struck me that many of these rants were the result of jealousy. I know Chris Brogan in particular had a rough patch late last year with attacks on him. These were always a surprise to me, as having met Chris several times in person, he is one of the nicest guys you could meet and definitely not a “Its’ all about me, celebrity”. Reading DiSalvo points to a potential reason for all this angst, the people making them are lonely.

DiSalvo quotes a study by John Cacioppo of the University of Chicago in which two groups of subjects were shown images while undergoing an MRI. One group typed themselves as Lonely, the other non-lonely. The group whose brains showed a higher response to pleasant images of people and situations were those who were non-lonely. Those whose brains showed a higher response to unpleasant images of people and situations were the lonely ones.  DiSalvo states that “Lonely people have a heightend sense of social threats. Snubs, insults, alienation & gossip all elicit higher levels of stress in the lonely”.

I Want More “Friends”

Those joining sites like Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn to “connect” to more people may in fact be doing themselves more harm than good. SoHo workers & Stay At Home Mom’s in particular often make statements like “Twitter is my window to the world”, ” I love the support I get from my Facebook friends”. However, in reality, seeing other build larger networks, and having more conversations with those people who are perceived as being “influential” may actually heighten feelings of loneliness.

Laura Freberg of the California Polytechnic State University defines loneliness as “the deficit between what you want & what you have” and goes on to say “Social Networks can make this worse”.

The key here is that those who use Social Networking tools to support their existing friendship circles do better than those who center their friendships on these sites. It seems that meeting in real life is always going to win over just meeting online. Which is why Tweetups, Social Media conferences, and social sharing tools like Foursquare are becoming increasingly popular. Don’t just tell me what you are doing, come do it with me.

The last installment of the Foursquare series takes a look at B2B and how Geo-Location services like Foursquare, Gowalla & even Twitter can be used by them.

Successful use of Social Media by the B2B space is a bit of a holy grail amongst marketers. Some have even gone so far as to dismiss the technology as it currently stands because they see no real method of seeing returns on their investment.  If services like Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn are a hard sell, how much harder is it to sell a service like Foursquare which seems to reside firmly in the B2C space and be little more than a game?

I was talking this idea through the other day with a friend who read my first post in this series and she extrapolated a very interesting concept for me. I was proposing the use of the technology by B2B service organizations, such as HVAC, copy machine repair etc. Her extrapolation of my idea was to incorporate the heat maps that I showed in the first post into a CRM/Lead Generation environment.  I can definitely see this being used, especially by small B2B outfits.

Imagine being a service based organization that has some type of field force, whether they are making deliveries, making maintenance calls etc. By using heat maps you can see the frequency of visits in a particular area, and by field force member. The heat map would show you where your calls were and where they were not. This would immediately give you valuable information for targeting either customer service issues (too many maintenance calls) or sales opportunities (no deliveries). While I am sure that there is enterprise level shipping, tracking or delivery scheduling software out there, I am equally sure it is beyond the budget of a small B2B businesses trying to compete with bigger organizations. I posted the link to wheredoyougo yesterday, here is another service, checkoutcheckins (produced by Danny Pier) doing a very similar thing with heat maps – still in Alpha.

Location, Location, Location

Of course the key here is still a physical presence. What of companies that do not have a physical product, for example a Marketing Communications Agency?  How do they leverage geo-location services to advance their marketing, especially in the B2B space?  The quick answer is they don’t, not directly. After all the key to geo-location social networking is exactly that, location. However, in much the same way as companies are now starting to feature select staff member twitter streams on their websites, I could definitely see some companies showing select staff member check-ins on their websites. Why? If for no other reason than to show that the company has more than a passing knowledge of how to leverage the technology. More than this, it can provide subliminal messaging showing your potential customers who you are already working with. Of course, it has to be managed correctly, and there is the question of just how much transparency you want with your organization.

Other concepts that have been proposed all revolve around having a location, even if its a temporary one such as at a trade show or conference. This is still a good idea, though temporary locations really do go against the spirit of geo-location social networking, insofar as the idea is that you can repeat the experience of others. If your “friends” are checking in at a conference that you aren’t at, then you have no way of repeating their experience.

Changing The Game

B2B Marketing through geo-location social networking is a much harder proposition. If I were the marketing manager for a company such as Avery Dennison, how would I use Foursquare or services like it to market my message to potential customers? Having access to an individuals’ check-ins doesn’t help me much.

Because I lack the other information about that person, are they authorized to make purchases on behalf of the company etc.? Just because I see that they have checked-in at Office Max doesn’t mean they are buying labels for their company or at all. So no point in pushing them discount coupons. So what do I get from a geo-location service that helps me get my message through all the noise that potential & existing customers are already experiencing? I reverse the concept. Instead of trying to use the service to simply promote my products, why not use my products to promote the service. For example, market to restaurants, bars, coffee shops etc. that are using Foursquare, labels that they can give away to “Mayors”?

Overall, I think that there is a long way to go for geo-location services. We will need to see a greater convergence of both current software technologies and new adaptations of hardware technologies. I certainly see a role for RFID technology in geo-location social networking, having a product check-in for you as you buy it will certainly expand the B2c potential of these services. Quite where B2B will go with Social Media in general, and geo-location in particular, remains to be seen. But there are some very smart people out there figuring it out and you can be sure that, given the right incentive, we will see some innovative campaigns using these tools.

Share your predictions for these services with everyone in the comments below.

Read Part One of this series.

Read Part Two of this series.

Following on from yesterday’s post about Foursquare for users, today I’m going to look at Foursquare for business, in particular the Business to Consumer market (we’ll look at Business to Business tomorrow). During this series I’m making several predictions, mine are based on research, they are generated by getting involved in the development community and talking to people who are actually building these applications. When I see smart people like Mike Langford of Tweetworks diving into the Foursquare API it’s a clear indication that some good apps are just around the corner.

One reason businesses get involved in any new technology is the rate of adoption by the broader community, e.g. their potential customers.  The chart below shows the increasing rate of check-ins in 2009, an increase of approx 900% over the year.

(thanks to John Wiseman for the graph)

In considering the B2C market, I’m going to segment it into large brands & local businesses. While the core of this series of posts focuses on Foursquare, it really covers all geo-location services and their potential uses.

There are two major elements for businesses to consider when getting involved with any Social Media service. Firstly, what can they achieve by using or encouraging use of the application? The other is what can they derive from the application if anything?

Large Brands

Large brands are usually associated with large budgets. What this means is that they can, if they so choose, spend more to acquire a customer than smaller businesses. However, the mindset of doing that is changing. Social Media has made it possible to lower that cost. Geo-Location when used as a part of the Social Media movement can be leveraged quite cheaply.  There are some very obvious quick wins, which large brands can and do use when using Social Media. Promotions, discounts and activity based rewards are all a part of their arsenal.  All of these can have a geo-location element. Gowalla, another of the popular location sharing services uses these to promote its own service. They hide rewards at locations and provide clues to their existing users. This type of “Treasure Hunt” is a common use of marketing in geo-location and is inspired by geo-caching as a game.

The advantage of this type of marketing is that the brand does not need to have their own physical location, they are leveraging other locations, usually notable ones – The Golden Gate Bridge, Grand Central Station, Sydney Opera House etc. This means that brands like Coca-Cola or Hanes can compete with brands like Disney, Marriott etc that have well known physical locations.

The real win for brands is not however in the simple B2C competition, but in leveraging the fact that geo-location services like Foursquare and Gowalla are social. The real win is in the B2C2C space. This might be a reward not only for you but for getting your friends to take action as well. E.g. if you check-in at X location you will receive Y reward, however, if you get 10 of your “friends” to check-in at that location you will get YY reward.

An Open API Leads to Greater Adoption

The fact that, certainly for Foursquare, it is possible to extract this type of data via their API means that brands can promote rewards far more easily through networks.  Foursquare in particular, having opened its API, is making it possible to construct applications that have far reaching potential. Because Foursquare allows its users to auto-post their check-ins to Facebook & Twitter, any application that utilizes the Foursquare API also gets this benefit. In effect they piggyback on the permissions already granted by a Foursquare user.  So a brand could set up a location based competition application and have users take part and promote their activity to their entire network, without the brand ever having to gain direct access to that network. This is a very powerful application of, and extension to, tools like Foursquare that we will see more of in the coming months.

Local Business

The most commonly considered method for local businesses to use location based services is loyalty programs. This is a quick, easy and free/low cost method of using these services. Simply ensuring that your business location(s) are entered in the tool correctly and waiting for people to check-in is great way to achieve a small amount of free promotion. By actually telling people that they will be rewarded for checking in it is possible to increase this dramatically.

In fact, Foursquare actively encourages this on their website by providing a form for businesses to fill out when they offer specials at their location(s). While this is great, it isn’t the only way local businesses can utilize these tools.  Just offering a discount or a freebie will only work so often and for so long. Again, as for large brands, the real killer is not in just communicating with your customers but having them communicate with others and spreading the word. Services such as Yelp have gone a long way in doing this, but they lack the instant nature of geo-location services like Foursquare.

Unlike large brands, local businesses do not usually have the funds to invest in the creation of applications to leverage the networks of users, so they have to do it in a more analog fashion. Referal business is at the core of most successful small businesses, by encouraging referral activity via the use of social tools, small businesses are able to leverage the large networks that users build without cost. For example if I owned a dog washing service I might offer a free dog wash to the “Mayor” of my location, however, if a user brought in 3 other “friends” I might want to offer something more. Using the physical location to show these offers, combined with online announcements, encourages people to take part in these activities.

In the B2C space we are likely to see a lot more integration of applications. As more applications open their API to each other it will be easier for businesses to have their advocates share their message to a broader networks. So what would a future business to consumer app look like in the near future?

You have a local business that sells a major brand product, you want the local customers, the brand wants the loyalty of your customers. As a supplier they provide you with an incentive for your customers, some kind of promo, but instead of a coupon that has to be redeemed, it is validated via geo-location social networking. Having installed the brand’s application, when the customer makes a “reward” purchase, that reward is promoted to all of their network as well. “Matt just earned X, you can too”.

What features do you think Foursquare should have to get businesses to use it?

I’ve been using the mobile location service Foursquare for sometime now. Originally via the mobile web and more recently as part of the Beta test group for the Blackberry – sorry but I can’t reveal anything about that at this point. What I want to cover in this post is the more basic question of  ” Why the heck should I bother with another app?” Over the next two days I’m going to try cover this from two angles, that of the user and that of the business looking to leverage another Social Media platform.

From a user perspective Foursquare appears, on the surface, to be nothing more than a game. Check-in more times than your friends and claim the title of “Mayor” of a location. So what? In much the same way that new Twitter users are stumped by the question “What are you doing?”, new Foursquare users find the act of checking in at a location somewhat pointless. As a friend of mine says, other than enabling stalkers what exactly are you getting out of it?

It’s true that the current actual value of Foursquare to the average user is minimal, if you stay mostly in your home town, you might find you are checking in at the same location as friends, possibly you might get a recommendation for an alternative to the location you are at, but that’s it. If you travel then you are likely to get more from it in terms of recommendations for places to visit, things to do and the potential of meeting other users – the core of Social Media.

However, just as Twitter as a service has spawned numerous add-on services and applications (see OneForty for the definitive list), so Foursquare is doing the same thing by opening up their API.  The heat map of my checkins below was created by WhereDoYouGo.

Ok so it’s a pretty picture but, again, so what? Imagine being able to layer your friends check-ins over the top and see it all graphically. You would, at a glance, literally be able to see the “hotspots” of your location. Much more useful, now add to that augmented reality applications like Layar – put the two together and you have a real-time city guide written by you and people you know.

Imagine being out for an evening, hold your cell phone camera up to a bar front and instantly see layered over the image reviews by people you know, see who you know who is in the bar without going in and what the special offers are for users of the application. Sounds like science fiction but all of the tech to achieve this already exists and is rapidly converging on a phone near you very soon.

Ready to sign up? Go on try it, and send me a friend request at the same time.

Avatar premiered this weekend. A multi-million dollar blockbuster and much vaunted as a game changer in the movie going experience.  James Cameron has spent a considerable amount of time and money building the technology he needed to bring to life the story in his head.

I went with high hopes of the movie and saw it in its 3D version (my full review here). What I came away with was a sense that the movie was more about the technology than it was about the story.

What Can Social Marketers Learn?

What Social Marketers can learn from this experience is that, no matter how slick your presentation, no matter what technology you deploy, if your content doesn’t meet the need or expectation of your audience the gloss will wear off fast.

Tools & Tricks Are Only Part of The Solution

Investing heavily in a great looking Facebook page, or an amazing set of Social Media monitoring tools will serve no purpose if you have no content or content strategy to back it up.

Commiting to Social Media and to providing your readers/viewers/listeners with quality content is much more likely to generate a lasting impact than having only a flashy interface.  That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth making those investments too, but be prepared for that fact that the real investment comes in the form of content, not tools.

Content Is Still King

Content has always been King, no matter the medium. Whether in print, on the Radio or Television or more recently Online, the method of delivering the message is never as important as the message itself. A slickly put together Social marketing campaign will have a much shorter shelf life than content that draws in the audience, makes them feel involved and ultimately encourages them to talk about it.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the one iPhone application that I believe to be something that is not only useful but that has the ability to jump from being just an iPhone curiosity to the wider world and have a real impact.

The application is Bump from Bumptechnologies. David Lieb, CEO of BumpTechnologies kindly took part in an email interview with me here is what we talked about:

What sparked the idea for Bump? – Was it a back of the napkin in a coffee shop deal or a group effort in a lab somewhere?
It was really a personal frustration.  As a first-year MBA student at University of Chicago, I found myself meeting a lot of my new classmates and manually entering their contact information into my phone.  Frankly, I just got sick of that.  One day during Accounting class, the idea for Bump just hit me, and we got started building it right away.

How did you go about taking it from an idea to an actual application – had you built applications for mobile platforms before?
No, never.  Very early on I brought on two co-founders.  One of them was a former colleague of mine from my days as an engineer at Texas Instruments.  Andy bought a Mac the day after I first contacted him about Bump, and we just started going.  Apple made it very easy for us to get started on the iPhone platform, even though none of us had any mobile development experience.

How did the partnership with Apple come about, did they approach you or vice versa?
At the end of April, Bump happened to be the billionth app downloaded on the Apple iTunes App Store.  (Apple had a big countdown to see who would download the billionth app).  Well, as it turns out, a 13-year-old in Connecticut downloaded Bump as the billionth app.  Apple called us that morning to congratulate us (and warn us to be ready for lots of downloads!), and that was the beginning of a great relationship.

How much do you think you will be able to accelerate / meet your plans now that you have the backing of Sequoia?
Our main goal is to bring Bump to as many people as possible and try to make interactions using mobile devices simpler and more intuitive.  Having partners with the experience of Sequoia and our other investors is a huge asset, and their financial backing allows us to move more quickly.

In my post I talked about Bump becoming a much more pervasive technology than it is currently being used for, without giving away your plans, how close to reality do you think the post was?
As our mobile phones have gotten smarter and smarter over the years, we’ve come to depend on them for an increasingly large part of our lives — think about what you use your phone to do today versus five years ago.  But there is a big gap that has emerged: there is no easy and universal way to connect two phones that are right next to each other.  Our phones are great for interacting with people at a distance, but what about interacting with someone right next to you?  That’s the problem we are trying to solve.

One criticism of Bump is that the other person has to have the same technology, what are the other drawbacks of interacting with people in real life via mobile platforms?
That’s true — both people have to have the Bump app on their device.  The nice thing, though, is that 1) Bump is free, 2) you can find and download Bump directly from your phone in less time (~30 seconds total) than it would take to type the person’s contact information into your phone, and 3) millions of people already have installed Bump on their phones.

One of the main drawbacks of interacting with others via mobile right now is that the interactions are very limited.  There are so many ways that we interact with others at home from our computers that are really more suited to in-the-moment, in-person interactions — connecting on social networks is one example.  Instead of remembering to search for a new friend on Facebook when I get home at night, I can use Bump to connect right when I meet them.

What is the one piece of technology other than a mobile phone that you can’t live without? Or wish already existed?

Hmmm….there are so many that I can’t live without.  One that I wish existed would be faster and more energy efficient transportation.  We’re still flying in the same airplanes that were built before I was even born.  Even with video conferencing, the internet, etc, nothing beats sitting in the same room with your family or a business partner.

Do you use bump? What is the one application you think will make a difference in the coming year?