Parking Douche App: Real-Time Social Shaming In Moscow
There are plenty of images on the web showing some crazy ideas of Russian drivers. This refers only only to driving but also to unique parking style;). The Village, a Moscow-based online newspaper, created a free Android app called Parking Douche that aims to make bad parking socially unacceptable using digital media.
It allows users to take geotagged pictures of badly parked cars and recognises the model, number plate and colour of the vehicle. This data is then streamed to banner ads that are targeted using an IP address so people who live or work near the vehicle see it on their computer screens.
The idea is that the pop-up is intrusive and annoying, much like the nuisance parkers, and in order to remove it from their screen users have to share it on Facebook.
It’s a really cool and annoying way of drawing attention to a problem that apparently affects all Russian cities. Well… if you want to humiliate people, do it in location-based way;).
source: Mashable
After recent financial problems Foursquare is trying to make some more changes to make the service more business friendly and more user friendly. With hole bunch of updates over last few months 4SQ hopes to finally monetize their 25mln users social network. It’s hard to believe but in 2012 Foursquare generated only $2 mln revenues (revenues, not profit!), which in case of such big organization means that for last several years they’ve been living out of investors. Ok but let’s get back to the topic.
From the other hand Foursquare will gain yet another important data source about user motivations instead of pure location data which is probably the most important from marketing targeting point of view.