Sign Maker Central

Locations have personalities of their own which can be unlocked via the expansion of location-based applications like Foursquare, SCVNGR, and Gowalla. The launch of Facebook Places offers the promise of extending the check-in dynamic to mainstream users.

At the end of the day, it's all about data. The connections between friends on Facebook, purchase patterns, likes and dislikes, geo-targeted social trends, product recommendations, check-ins, etc, can be brought together to create a flood of actionable insights. The data swimming around our physical world is soon to be harnessed. With greater adoption of check-in services and other location-based applications, we will create detailed information systems framed by dynamic data discovery. Those systems will play an invaluable role in defining our relationships to places, products, brands, and each other.

The world of location-based services can support the bubbling up of critical data to enhance the depth of our physical world. The data capture capabilities of the Internet can now be replicated in physical environments. Instead of placing tools which could invade our privacy everywhere we live, the idea is to use communities to build the structure around previously invisible data. The continuous flow of data will take shape once we can connect all the pieces together through technological innovation.

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