My 2011 SXSW Interactive submission is Location-based Services: Numbers vs. Hype

Location-based services like Foursquare, Gowalla, and Facebook Places offer the ability to reach consumers when and where they are interacting with businesses. Amid a mix of approaches from the platforms, privacy concerns, and questions of actual value arises the question: Who and where are people actually using these services? Building off last year’s well-received SXSW talk “Beyond Wordclouds: Analyzing Trends with Social Media APIs”, which showed how more people were tweeting coffee shop Foursquare check-ins from Austin than New York during the conference by a 2:1 margin, this session will take a comprehensive look at the data around the activities on these platforms to gauge how widely adopted they are and just who is the “consumer” they can reach.

All the Fahrenheit submissions can be found here.

Voting ends 11:59 CDT on Friday, September 2!