Dear Todd Brook & envisionit media,

The Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce would like to thank you and your team for a successful event last week. Your comprehensive seminar on how to make the most of your marketing efforts in the new mobile world was extremely informative. The attendees learned a great deal about the new mobile landscape and how to optimize, design, and develop within it. All of the feedback we received have been overwhelmingly positive.

envisionit media’s expertise in new and emerging technology and strategic marketing has made you an asset to the Chicagoland Tech 2020 Committee and the Chamber as a whole. We appreciate your participation in this event and look forward to collaborating with you in the future.

Regards,

Linda Dao
Member Investment Manager
Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce

Click here to view the slides from the presentation

You’ve probably all heard the latest buzz on Foursquare, the location-based marketing game that has recently been blowing up the headlines.  With over 1.4 million registered users, Foursquare is a mobile application and website that allows you to check in on your phone where you are currently located and announce it to friends and share on sites like Facebook and Twitter. Foursquare also allows businesses to award those who check in frequently with discounts and incentives.

This week, Loopt, the first of the location-based marketing applications, with over 3.4 million registered users, announced a new mobile app, LooptStar, that will compete more heavily with Foursquare and Gowalla, but with more of a loyalty program incentive. Gone are the days of those little punch hole cards that I always seem to lose in my purse! Welcome are the days where your loyalty cards are right on your phone!

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Ready or not, the mobile web will surpass desktop in less than three years. As users flock to new devices and capabilities, businesses are racing to meet a whole new set of needs and expectations. And mobile is proving to be a boon to businesses that are quick on the uptake.

Leveraging the platform
It may well be the Year of Mobile, but it’s also the Year of Budget. Fortunately, mobile is shaping up to be an extremely cost-effective channel for expanding the reach of your brand and driving some serious sales.

For starters, consider the inherent characteristics of the mobile platform:
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• Sophistication. Mobile phones are getting better operating systems and longer battery life. Other devices—the iPad, for example—will follow suit in their race to center stage. Whatever the latest device, people are ready and eager to adopt.

Barcodes. They’re on everything you buy. They’re on everything you rent. They’re on your ID cards and your membership cards. You see them all over the place, but you don’t really pay attention because they’re meaningless to you. What if those barcodes had meaning? What if you had a barcode scanner in your pocket all the time and you could learn things about that product just by scanning the barcode?

Enter the next generation of barcodes: Mobile Barcodes. These new 2D QR barcodes can contain lots of useful information like a website address, phone number, or an entire address book entry. Your shiny new smartphone can take a photo and interpret these barcodes to open a website or add the contact info to your personal address book – with no data entry required!

What’s even more amazing is that these barcodes can be generated in fractions of a second and displayed on your smartphone for others to scan. Just think of all the possibilities!
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