Moving to a come2me economy

Location based services were always about the wet dreams of advertisers where you come in contact with relevant advertisements right on the spot. We see however a different development on the same principle emerge, much more likely to occur. A come2me economy you could call it. Based on a really consumer centric approach.

Maybe it is not the best term. It has to do with permission based thinking, with VRM instead of CRM (Vendor Relation Management), that all start with the idea that the future success for a company will not be in the one that convince the most consumers to come to them and buy their products. Instead the brand has to find the customer and service them with real value.

This you have to combine with the new promises of a smart context where we can use our augmented devices to find real value deals in our direct and dynamic environment. I belief this will go further. The service has to adapt to your wishes connected to your context, for instance your location. Impulses based services as I called them in my talk for Reboot11 earlier this year.

Since this talk augmented services have become more serious than ever. And hot, as all the attention for Layar proves. And there is a location based service that is really successful: Foursquare. Brightkite try to connect to this vibe with the new 2.0 version. Chris Messina wrote a good analysis of this new phenomena.

We are just at the beginning of the new future. Smartness of our products is combined with the richness of the cloud and we move to new permission based services that offer you the stuff you need. Augmented services will force brands to think of the added value they offer in our personal contexts; how they will contribute to our experience. In that sense location based services will not look like Minorty Report where all the commercial context is personalized, brands will be open to adapt to our context and offer suggestions to use them. That is the only way to survive the attention economy.