“Using your Smart Phone, such the iPhone, collect loyalty card stamps and browse nearby shops, restaurants and cafes. Reduce the amount of loyalty cards you carry to zero. This application is one of the easiest to use. Simply open the application & hold the Smart Phone’s camera up to the digital barcode provided by the café or shop that you are making your purchase from. The appropriate information is then sent to that retailer & the “stamp” is recorded. Think of this application as totally replacing the coffee /loyalty card.”

It’s great to see that they recommend our product to both consumers and retailers. We are looking forward to making their lives easier

“Whether you are a consumer or a retailer, this application is certainly worth looking into. There are many applications out there related to the hospitality industry yet this is a prime example of a product that is beneficial to all parties & aims at making life a little easier through electronically stored loyalty card stamps & direct mobile marketing to the consumer.”

Read full article here.

New version, new features
A new HopShopper version is available on AppStore – redemption and navigation is easier, instructions are clearer, performance is better – make your life a little easier – download now!

Watch this space as we continue to deliver new features, exciting promotions and stampede-causing specials.

Once again, thank you for the support!
Team HopShopper

Sydney Central Plaza
——————————
SumoSalad
Bagel House
Mrs. Fields
New Zealand Natural

MLC Centre
——————————
SumoSalad
Bagel House

Galleries Victoria
——————————
Citicafe
Valeries

Market Street
——————————
Taste Baguette

You can download the application and start collecting your stamps today.

We are hoping to learn as much as we can about what you like about the app, what improvements you would like to see and any other ideas that you have. Send us an email to feedback@hopshopper.com and tell us all about it.

Read the full article here

It all started with Dave McClures’s post which rips into all these platforms in a pretty hilarious fashion using very colorful language. I love reading Dave’s posts because they go straight to the point, no BS, no pretty pictures.

Dave raises a few very valid points around the eventual success of all these companies. Critical areas they need to focus on if they want to win this game:

• provide users with real value (coupons)
• grow VERY rapidly
• get some serious money to finance the growth ($100mil+)
• provide payments (virtual or real cash) as a part of the solution

Nick O’Neill’s post reiterates some of Dave’s points but also states that:

• there is a way to incentivise people to check in without using coupons (i.e. virtual currency, owning virtual properties, etc)
• there is a massive location based marketing pie that everyone is after including Apple, Google, Facebook and Twiter

While I do agree with most of the ideas in these two articles, I think there is another category of companies that are going to be an essential part of the LBS ecosystem, irrespective of the eventual winner(s) of the LBS platform tussle. Let me explain.

All of the aforementioned companies are trying to dominate the LBS space the way Facebook currently dominates the social networking space. Some of the most important parts of this domination will be critical mass of users, identity management, location, social graph and payments. Solving these problems will force all of the players in the space to focus on building robust, market dominating platforms that will revolve mostly around location aware social networking. This will leave an opening for solutions that are more focused on providing real value to users in more specialized areas like shopping, dating, clubbing, community work, etc.

What I’m really trying to say is that “Zynga+Facebook” of today will be replicated by “Niche LBS apps+LBS Platform Winner(s)” tomorrow.

Let’s take HopShopper as an example. HopShopper is focused exclusively on providing rewarding shopping experiences to its users. This means focusing on loyalty, rewards and coupons. One focus, shopping. Not social networking, sharing photos or finding who’s having lunch around the corner. We provide very specialized functionality like scanning coffee stamps with your phone, which would be very hard to integrate into existing LBS applications without cluttering them up.

However, we need all the services of LBS platforms to make our application useful to the masses. We want to check in users into existing platforms, let users share information with their friends over social networks, we need an identity platform and a payment system that will allow gifting and mobile purchases, etc.

There are a bunch of companies out there trying to provide users with real value on top of existing LBS platforms and real value is a critical part of the equation according to both Dave and Nick (be it physical or virtual). I would argue that the LBS platform that is open to working with companies like ours and provides us with essential services will reap the benefits similar to those Facebook got from their application platform. It’s big pie and the race to build the oven is on!

Within the report market trends are highlighted that point towards a ‘perfect storm’ for mobile retail marketing:

• Rapid consumer adoption of smart-phones
• High-speed mobile networks – increasing availability and decreasing costs
• Personalisation of mobile devices by users
• Mobile’s inherent marketing potential – unparalleled metrics; targeted campaigns responsive to user behaviour, time and location factors.

The report also defines the market as consisting of three segments, Mobile Coupons, Mobile Smart Posters and Mobile Advertising, and then projects a shift in contribution to the total market of each of these segments as the mobile retail market matures.

Another trend highlighted in Juniper’s report details a gradual evolution from bulk SMS, through to banner advertising, and then into targeted advertising and smart-phone applications enabling direct retail.

Junipers’ The Mobile Shopping Basket whitepaper is an extract from the Mobile Marketing, Retail Strategies report, and is available to download. For more information on Juniper’s mobile retail marketing report click here…