I have been playing with FourSquare for about four weeks now as many of my friends have probably seen the check-ins on Facebook and Twitter. I have even gone to the extent to checking out the API behind the scenes and it looks very clean and easy. The basis of the API is REST (REpresentational State Transfer). So integrating other commerce based products, tools, and sites should be a snap.
Not many people in my area are using FourSquare but on a positive note there seem to be more and more people using it even in the past month. I am already a mayor in two places; not sure what that buys me but it felt good.
I used FourSquare to check into a store called Justified; my wife and I were shopping for a birthday present. There were signs all over the store for 40% off. When I checked into FourSquare I received a coupon code “500″ and received an additional 40% off! I was thinking, there is no way its 40% off then another 40% off, but that is exactly how it rang up at the register after presenting the coupon from my iPhone. We saved tons of money that day. So much in fact, we got the girl double the amount of gifts because we felt bad it was so inexpensive – she really made out…
Now, on to my point. I really like the concept of check-ins using an application like this. It allows me to use the application to find many kinds of places and see what those places have for specials. For instance, I might be at a Best Buy with a Staples next door, I see on FourSquare that Staples has a coupon or a special by seeing the special indicator in the “Stores nearby”. This immediately lets me know what stores in my physical area have specials and which stores do not. In my mind, this is a huge benefit over stores with specific applications on my iPhone. Stores with their own applications make me go into their application, check-in, and look for specials – once again, very different than seeing a list of stores with specials. So it makes me ask, why go through the trouble of having a native iPhone(mobile) application when services like “check-in” and “coupons” are available on products like GoWalla, FourSquare, Facebook, etc? With HTML 5 you could get a lot accomplished on these devices without having a special native application for your store. Leave check-ins to applications that offer a community, badges, rewards, and a social aspect to the check-in action.
Getting the Pulse of the social world
Fri, Jun 14th 2013 6:00a Bob Balfe If you haven’t seen the “Pulse” area on Klout you might want to check it out. You can see the most influential people by many different categories ranging from Late Night hosts to Universities. [read] Keywords:
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Congratulations to my son Nathan, best Fathers day gift ever!
Thu, Jun 13th 2013 10:22p Bob Balfe I don’t normally write much personal stuff on my blog but I was so proud of my son Nathan last night I have to put this on my blog so I will always have this here.
Last night my son had his “moving up ceremony” from fifth grade to sixth. This is a pretty big deal because three elementary schools merge to one school – about 240 kids total. What I did not know was what I was about to hear when the awards ceremony started. At all of these events I record as much as I can dur [read] Keywords: facebook
Product delivery date: An online shopping experience
Thu, Jun 13th 2013 7:50a Bob Balfe I have been in the process of remodeling my kitchen. I am not going to mention any companies here but you can imagine two very large home improvement stores in the United States and those are the two I will be talking about. Oh yes, and I also checked Amazon.
This particular order was for a new faucet you see in the post. It is the Delta 9192T, it is very cool and can be turned off and on by touching the metal casing.
The two stores in question did not have this model “in stock” s [read] Keywords: connections
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Using XPath API to figure out my stats post is now translated in Spanish!
Tue, Jun 11th 2013 8:00a Bob Balfe A bit back I was asked if one of my blog posts could be translated on a support page for a hosting company’s site. The post was originally put on this blog on 12/19/2012 and is titled “Using the XPath API to figure out my stats“. Here is a snippet of the translated post and link to the site:
Uno de los problemas principales que tengo con WordPress básico es que si bien hace un buen trabajo proporcionando tus estadísticas alrededor de las vistas (el número de vistas que obt [read] Keywords:
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Introducing my new Commerce channel on Youtube
Fri, Jun 7th 2013 7:30a Bob Balfe I have a collection of videos on my YouTube channel and most of my recent ones are about commerce and more specifically WebSphere Commerce. The commerce related videos are similar to what we would show to a customer in a meeting or at a conference but in a smaller scope and generalized.
Since YouTube decided to make my channel pretty ugly and harder to find things I attempted to arrange my videos in sections by content type – I hope this helps. If you are looking specifically for commerce [read] Keywords: ibm
development
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Sorting a HashMap in Java: SortedMap to the rescue!
Thu, Jun 6th 2013 8:50p Bob Balfe I recently had to populate a list and make sure there were no duplicates so I immediately thought of a hash map. While this worked great, I also needed the output to be sorted alphabetically. This is where SortedMap comes into play.
While I could have done this a few ways, I found this method very simple and straightforward. The hash map provides the unique values while the SortedMap provides the auto sorting I needed. I only had about 1000 records to sort so I didn’t have to worry about p [read] Keywords: java
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The WordPress subscription feature is awesome!
Wed, Jun 5th 2013 7:30a Bob Balfe In case you do not use the Jetpack plugin for your WordPress site you might want to consider it. The plugin is packed with some professional features. One of those really cool features is the Subscriptions feature. Not only is it easy to subscribe on a WordPress site – see my home page on the upper right for an example, the administration of the subscriptions is basically seamless.
Many visitors land on your site once, never to return. Convert more visitors into regular readers by making i [read] Keywords: administration
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Want to learn Dojo? Then check out this site today!
Wed, Jun 5th 2013 7:10a Bob Balfe Dojo is considered the most robust JavaScript framework for business applications. If you want to really sink your teeth in then you might want to check out what Sitepen has to offer. The site hosts a blog, support, and workshops to get your team up and running with Dojo very quickly. You can even schedule a free 30 minute call to talk about your project.
Sitepen - Development, support, and training from the makers of Dojo. [read] Keywords: applications
development
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javascript
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Using Dynamic Drive’s Image Zoomer in WebSphere Commerce
Tue, Jun 4th 2013 11:40a Bob Balfe This blog post shows how you can use the Image Zoomer plugin by Dynamic Drive:John Davenport Scheuer for jQuery to provide image zoom capability in WebSphere Commerce. While many companies use their own package for image zoom like Adobe, a Dojo widget, or any other JavaScript framework, I wanted to show how easy it is to use this plugin on your WebSphere Commerce site. One, because most of WebSphere Commerce uses Dojo and two, I wanted to show how easy it is to do something like this with the MV [read] Keywords: ajax
css
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