Vegas, baby! Whrrl takes over Sin City with free prizes when you check in!

… and now your business can participate in Society Rewards, too!

If you’re anything like me, then you know getting off that plane in Las Vegas means you’re already taking a gamble. Between the world-class  hotels & resorts, entertainment, fine dining  and nightlife, you know it’s going to be an adventure. I always struggle with where to go and what to do because it’s simply overwhelming!

What if I said you could check in on Whrrl and not only find the hottest recommendations things to do in Vegas delivered right to your phone – but also that you could win *before* you hit the casino floor?

It’s true! Whrrl expanded its Society Rewards Program and partnered with the top hotels, resorts, restaurant, entertainment and nightlife in Vegas to offer you super cool, free stuff when you check in. It’s that simple. What will I win, you ask?

Cirque du Soleil: Free tickets to Mystère or tickets starting at $50 for six of their popular Las Vegas productions.

The Mirage Hotel and Casino: Complimentary Red Bull and vodka cocktails at the Race and Sports Book Bar or Onda Wine Lounge for 250 lucky winners.

Luxor: Complimentary appetizer with the purchase of an entrée at Tacos & Tequila (T&T), a flavorful Mexican restaurant.

PURE Management Group: Free drinks, meals and bottle service at their popular Vegas restaurants, bars and nightclubs.

N9NE Group: Free VIP tickets to ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ at Palms Pool on August 14, 2010.

Sierra Gold: Free cocktails including beer, wine and well drinks.

But that’s not all. Checking into each of these places will immediately grant you membership to their Society. Why does this matter? Because you’ll be able to view and swap recommendations about the hottest things to do in Vegas with other people that have similar interests to you.

For instance, if you recommend to other Cirque du Soleil Society members that Mystere is a show they should not miss, you’ll earn points for that rec. Additionally, you’ll earn points when someone both wants to do your rec, and then actually does it. The more points, the higher you level up in Societies. And the higher you level up in Societies, the better chance you have to WIN!

Does Society Rewards sound like the perfect program to reward your loyal customers? Now you can join the program online at: http://rewards.whrrl.com It’s free to sign up, and Whrrl Society Rewards offers:

Measureable results: See who is checking into your business and what they have to say.

Virality: Recommendations are shared to networks including Facebook and Twitter.

Community: Extend your brand into mobile and build a strong community of loyal customers helping each other.

So, I know don’t know about you, but these odds sound pretty darn good! :)

We have more news in the coming days and weeks about Society Rewards, including a special VIP event at Eva Longoria Parker’s Eve Nightclub. Stay tuned!

Read the official press release on the Vegas Society Rewards here.

To Attend BlogHer ‘10 is Human, to Whrrl it is Divine

Last Thursday, I flew to The Big Apple for the BlogHer ’10 conference – my first time attending the ever-growing, widely popular yearly affair. I was excited to meet bloggers in real life (finally) who I’ve followed on Whrrl, Twitter, Facebook, etc.  And of course, new bloggers so I can introduce them to Whrrl!

While it’s impossible to capture all of my experiences in one post, I wanted to share some of my favorite highlights from this year’s conference:

Sex and the City Walking Tour

Saturday, Whrrl hosted a Sex and the City walking tour in Greenwich Village. We stopped off at the most famous places from the series- Carrie’s doorstep, Magnolia Bakery (where Miranda & Carrie bought cupcakes), Jefferson Market Garden (where Miranda and Steve got married) and more.  It was so fun to meet everyone in a smaller, more intimate environment and get to know some fabulous bloggers one-on-one while teaching all of Whrrl’s features.

You can read two awesome blog posts with more details about our walking tour on Tonya’s blog here and Jennifer’s blog here.

Thank you so much @tjstaab, @mommadanddaboyz, @aliciamarie112, @pacifierpocket, @boredmommy, @sandyel, @doniree & @lastminutemandy. Your attendance meant everything!

Cheeseburger Party:

Holy cow. I heard about the famous Cheeseburger party tradition – but I had no idea how fun and silly it would be. Imagine hundreds of people with decorated, glittery and flowery McDonald’s bags on their head, dancing their booty off in between eating Mickey D’s cheeseburgers. If that isn’t the makings of a great party, I don’t know what it! Thanks to all the people who made the evening even more fabulous – @scrappinmichele, @carissarogers, @misslori, @jamielovely, @nomadicmatt, @katelin, @doniree @wishfulnals and more! The nomination for the best decorated cheeseburger hat EVER goes to @sweetlifeinthe. Pinwheels and everything on there! It was amazing, I tell yah!

Other Parties & Events:

The BlogHer conference during the day was awesome – but the parties and nighttime events were where it was at. Thanks to Nikon for gifting us with Staten Island firemen as eye candy all night, Nintendo for escorting me through the streets of NYC in a pedicab driven by Mario, and the talented Alison Sands for sneaking me in last minute to the Glamour and Games party with e.l.f. and Xbox. And how cute is that pic of Kim Tracy Prince Xbox dancing above! By the way Kim, hanging out and chatting with you was some of my favorite times at BlogHer this year.

But, even better than all the parties, all the food, all the sightseeing – the people I met!

I loved meeting April, Joanie, Stephanie and Tauni and the well-attended CraziBeautiful Event that Whrrl helped sponsor. Congrats to those who won for checking in to sightseeing places around NYC with Whrrl! After so many planning emails with the ladies over the months, it was great to bring our online relationships offline and relax with each other over fruit, cheese and girly things in their suite at The Warwick!

I wiggled into MiracleBody’s fabulous “look 10 pounds lighter” jeans with Julie, @Stage_Mama, and Yolanda from @cuponeandoLive at Audrey McClelland’s super fabulous Getting Gorgeous party!  (Not to mention, finally being able to meet Audrey for the first time, who is everything I thought she’d be in person – so stinking cute and nice! What a powerhouse).

I ran into Janice Croze, @5minutesformom, steering her toward the Pepsi booth in the Expo hall for her interview and loving her fabulous K-Mart bag. It might have been only a 10-minute meeting and conversation, but I liked her instantly.

I met Jessica from the hilarious blog, BernThis.com and Alma from OlliBird.com (who has seriously the best story on how she met her husband – ask her!) while waiting in line for a poem from Jenny, The Bloggess, who wrote me the following poem and signed it (hello, awesome!): “Marilyn Monroe would like to be you. And not just because youre alive and shes not” [SIC].

Sara Lancaster, @saucydipper, and I chatted about books (and food blogging) at the BlogHer book store & Angela, @hangingwitmrsc, and I shared an inside joke about McDonald’s oatmeal booth while cruising the Expo Hall. I’ve laughed for hours about that, Angela! Thanks for making my day!

I met so many women during lunch every day! Namely, Karen from VolunteerSpot.com, Dawn from BecauseISaidSo.com, and the beautiful Stephanie Bryant from S Bryant Social Marketing, who won our $250 black leather Hobo bag giveaway for checking in at The Museum of Modern Art.

Thank you Carissa Rogers, @carissarogers, Rachel Ferrucci, @rachelferrucci, Lori, @misslori, and Michele, @scrappinmichele, for dancing the night away with me – you ladies are so much fun and put a huge smile on my face.

And finally, thank you to all the 20-something bloggers I was finally able to meet in person, and a big shout out to @Doniree from Doniree.com for introducing me to the group and being the best midnight in Time Square partner ever. Allison, @amblass, all the best in your job hunt; Rachel, @livitluvit you can rock a cape like no one else; Jamie, @jamielovely and Jess, @bayjb,  you girls both crack me up and are so much fun; Katelin, @katelin – I wish you all the happiness in the world in your up-coming wedding; and Matt, @nomadicmatt, – you are THE Dooce of travel blogging. ;)

You can see all of the Whrrl check ins and stories during BlogHer ‘10 here.

Till next year’s BlogHer ’11 in San Diego!

Post-BlogHer Contest – Create Your Own Whrrl Society; Win A Kindle!

This past weekend was BlogHer ‘10 in New York City – and l was there on behalf of Whrrl to meet and hang out with all the fabulous bloggers who attended. The weekend literally flew by, filled with super fun parties, conversations, new friendships and sightseeing in The Big Apple. I’ll have the post recap up tomorrow with pics and details, so stay tuned!

In the meantime, we’re holding a Post-BlogHer Contest for the bloggers who attended our Sex and the City Walking Tour and BlogHer ‘10! You can win a Kindle from Amazon.com with free 3G! I don’t know about you, but I’ve always wanted one of the wireless reading devices for beaching, flying, bussing and more. The Kindle is Amazon.com’s  #1 bestselling item for two years running. It’s also the most-wished-for, most-gifted, and has the most 5-star reviews of any product on Amazon! And it can be yours…

How can you win? Simple: just create your own Whrrl Society!

What are you passionate about? You can create a Whrrl Society around that passion, whether it’s shopping, sushi, yoga, wine, your favorite band – whatever! Societies enable you to bring your online community offline, creating your own location-based network and rallying together to share recommendations around a common passion. Everyone can add their own recs of fun, cool things to do and share them with each other. Now, you and your Society members will have relevant real-world places to go and activities to do in the palm of your hand, from a community of like-minded people. Pretty neat, huh!

You’ll find a tutorial on how to create Whrrl Societies on Whrrl.com here, and on the iPhone here. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to send an email to jeanna [at] pelago [dot] com!

We’ll choose our favorite Society based on the following:

1. Quality of your Society, ie: your idea, Society image and description, and the recommendations you fill your Society with.
2. How many members you’re able to recruit to add their own recommendations, plus bonus points if you have members of your community use Whrrl to check in to these real-world places.
3. A blog post and Tweet about your Society (minimum needed to qualify for entry).

You can even create your own contest on your blog to inspire your blog community to add their own recommendations and check in to real-world places with Whrrl. We’ll give you two weeks, Friday, August 13^th through Friday, August 27^th to create and promote your Society. I’ll select the winner and announce who won on Tuesday, August 31^st on the blog!  You can read full contest details here.

For inspiration, check out some cool Societies the community has already created:

Sex and the City Society
Cupcakery Society
Professional Day Drinkers Society
Rooftop Pools Society
San Francisco Sights Society
HelpAMotherOut (HAMO) Society
The Local Tourist Society
Gluten-Free Austin Society
Life in Temecula Society
Houston Steak Lovers Society

Good luck!

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY.  Void where prohibited.  Void in Rhode Island.  Open to residents of the United States age 18+ who are registered members of Whrrl.  Contest begins August 13, 2010 and ends August 21, 2010  Enter by checking in to a participating location on Whrrl or by mailing a legible handwritten request to Post BlogHer Contest, c/o Pelago, Inc., 1201 Third Avenue, Suite 800, Seattle, WA 98101.  Entry by check-in requires your actual presence at the location.  Prize is Kindle from Amazon.com, approximately worth $189  Odds of winning depend on the number of entries received.  Sponsored by Pelago, Inc., 1201 Third Avenue, Seattle, WA 98101.  Promotion is subject to Official Rules.  See Official Rules at [link].

Location-based check-in data on its way to becoming a commodity

Jeff Holden is cofounder and CEO of Pelago, maker of Whrrl. This post originally appeared on VentureBeat.com

Location-based “check-in” services like Foursquare, Gowalla, and my own service, Whrrl are becoming increasingly popular. These services allow mobile users to capture the places they visit in order to make their location visible to friends, to play location-based games (and earn badges or points) and to cash in special offers. While it’s still early days — Forrester recently published that only 4% of US adults have ever used a location-based mobile application — on the order of 20K users are joining just the top few services per day, with well over a million check-ins per day, and both figures are accelerating.

Just as Google Maps and similar apps have led to the commoditization of map technology, we’ll see check-in data eventually becoming a commodity as more and more such services arise and a couple of the big social network companies step in with open check-in platforms.

Future location-based startups won’t need to license their own global place listing data and build the technology to take a location fix and convert that in some fashion to a check-in. They’ll simply wire up to an API provided by Facebook, Twitter, Google or another platform provider to access that information. Such platforms are already starting to emerge, in fact, with Google’s and Facebook’s “Places” offerings. (One interesting question is whether some of the current location-based service players might get acquired by these platform companies as a part of this wave; there certainly has been no shortage of heat and noise there, but so far, no major player has been acquired. If such an acquisition does occur, I would expect the functionality to be integrated as an application standing on top of the platform rather than as the platform itself.)

In its most basic form (and I’ll stick primarily to place check-ins for the purposes of this discussion), check-ins would be supported by a simple cloud-based service that takes a location fix as input and provides a list of places as output along with a way for users to register a check-in at a specific place by a specific person. The service would, of course, include APIs for retrieving a person’s and place’s check-in state, adding new places to the database, and so on. This combination enables the most fundamental check-in capability while accruing all the data to the platform (which is clearly what the platform provider would want).

Things get quite interesting then, since such a platform could also offer syndicated and aggregated check-ins.

Syndicated check-ins would let a user check-in via one app and have that check-in propagate to a set of other apps, so that someone using, say, Whrrl to check in would automatically be checked-in also in Gowalla or Foursquare. Imagine that Facebook Connect offered new permissions: “Gowalla wants to access your real-time check-ins and your check-in history.”  (Some attempts have been made to offer services that syndicate check-ins, but they’ve been fatally flawed in that they’ve required the use of a new client that provided nothing more than basic check-in ability, and adoption of such clients has been negligible.)

Aggregated check-ins would provide an API to get at the anonymized aggregated check-in data (by place, time, demographic, etc) from all services publishing check-ins to the platform.

Obviously, with the appearance of an open check-in platform (or several), individual app companies won’t be competing anymore over the check-in experience itself (just like non-platform companies no longer compete on the basic map experience). A more interesting implication is that Facebook, Twitter and Google, as the platform providers, would likely pick off some key use cases to “own,” changing the competitive landscape for the social location-based app companies.

Let’s dig in a bit more.

Right now, we’re living through an acceleration of the check-in as a standard consumer behavior. Another way to think about this is that we’re transitioning from the unstructured status update to the structured status update. Rather than typing “I’m at Restaurant Zoe with Anne,” into a text box, Anne and I both check in to Restaurant Zoe. Similarly, if I’m currently watching “Inception,” I check into it rather than just typing it into a free-text box. Why does this matter?

Structured data opens up a whole new set of opportunities, because a single data element refers to a single real-world object. A trivial example is that you can see who is (and how many people are) checked into a particular place or movie or painting right now. But you can also ascribe semantics to structured data, like “this place is a movie theater” or “this film is in the sci-fi genre.” The result: structured data is far more useful for analysis than unstructured data. The reason Amazon.com can confidently say “people who bought item X also bought item Y” is because they have a catalog of structured items against which they capture transactions. In the case of place check-ins, this data is the real-world analog of a clickstream on the Web, which is a big deal.

Now, syndication and aggregation of this structured data has a big impact on the competitive playing field. For example, an application does not have to build up an aggregated database of check-ins itself. From its inception, it can leverage all the (anonymized) data from all the services for all of history, which kind of levels the playing field for certain use cases. Furthermore, with syndicated check-ins, an app can immediately get access to an individual user’s (non-anonymized) real-time and historical check-ins without the user ever having used that app to check in. (The user would need to authorize the syndication of his/her check-ins from other services to the new service, of course.) This would obviously help to address the check-in fatigue people are clamoring about today, but the combination of these pieces also enables powerful new use cases, like real-world personalized recommendations (serendipitous discovery), as I discussed in my talk at Where 2.0 in 2009.

All is not rosy, however. Some existing opportunities disappear in this new world. Why? Because the commoditizing here isn’t being driven by some benign standards-based organization. It’s being driven by Facebook, Twitter and Google, who (appropriately) have their own agendas with respect to check-ins. What that means is that along with the commoditized check-in capability will come a set of user-facing value propositions offered by the platform provider.

For example, given that Facebook popularized the unstructured status update, it would be extremely surprising if they did not aggressively pursue place-based friend finding (seeing where your friends are checked in). So, if you make a check-in product with friend-finding as a core value proposition, you’ll now be competing with Facebook on that front, probably at a significant disadvantage, since friend-finding is a network-effects-based use case and Facebook has the (vast) upper hand there. Facebook, of course, needs to resolve some privacy issues (for example, what if I don’t want to share my location data with my entire Facebook friend graph?), but they’re smart and issue-sensitized enough to sort that out quickly.

Ultimately, the commoditization of check-ins leads to a world in which the user experience becomes split in two: There will be a front-end experience, when the user is interacting with an app’s user interface directly on the phone, for example to actually check in — think of this as the “when they’re actually there” app — and a back-end experience, where the user’s data, probably from multiple services, is processed in a way that creates value and is presented via channels like the Web and email.

The battle for user “face time,” i.e., for the front-end experience, intensifies since there will be even more players in the space (lower barriers to entry created by the platform) and most of the user-visible value in social location-based apps today is demonstrated directly after the check-in. Earning points, leveling up, joining Societies, unlocking rewards, appearing on “the grid,” getting and creating recommendations and being presented with things from virtual items to venue-specific experiences to ads are all examples of post-check-in value. The applications that win at this face-time battle, which will be fought on a per-user basis, are the ones who’ll have the opportunity to provide these types of experiences and the monetization that follows.

The back-end battle is entirely new, and it will be much more exciting than it sounds based on the name. What is the user experience for product X if the user is not using X’s app to check in? It will come down to what value X can create based on the data, and a great example is personalized recommendations. Imagine a service that simply takes all your check-in data and the aggregate check-in data from all services and computes recommendations for you like “based on your visits to places A, B and C, you should try place D.”  That sort of service would not require you to be checking into it, but it would still offer a very compelling value proposition. Visualizations (heat maps, for example) and summaries/historical timelines of activity are other interesting examples here.

Of course, all of this is just my point of view, but I hope it sparks an interesting conversation. There’s a great deal to talk about.