Starbucks as a Safe-Zone for Location-Based Networks
Starbucks’ announcing their plans to make WiFi free in all of their stores was enthusiastically received by laptop-sporting coffee drinkers everywhere. But tech commenters brushed it off with only a brief mention. I found this odd, as the platforms and applications the tech obsessed champion daily might find huge potential within Starbucks’ news. With just a bit of development, Starbucks could become a major bridge between the internet and real life, a platform for actual and virtual social gathering and content distribution.
By putting some software structures around their WiFi networks and customer cards, Starbucks could cannonball into the field of location-based technology. This field is made up of location-based networks like Foursquare, hyperlocal/niche publishers like Twitter or Blockchalk, and augmented reality-ish startups like Stickybits or Tagwhat (Google Maps and local business products fit in there somewhere…) Despite the numerous buzzwords, all of these companies do essentially the same thing:
- They collect and convert real-world information to digital information
- They organize said digital information
- And they overlay relevant digital information over real-life
Simply put, they bridge the real-world with the digital.
And while the growth (and hype) in this sector is huge, seamlessly connecting the digital and the real in a simple and functional way is really, really hard. To grossly oversimplify, this challenge is composed of two types of problems: people problems and tech problems.
One of the reasons we’re seeing so much growth in this space right now is because we’ve recently made huge headway against the tech problems. Smartphone growth is through the roof, and these devices ship with location-based services and open-platforms. Additionally, WiFi growth and always-on broadband supplement our network coverage. Certainly, some cellular networks shudder under the load but the fundamental function is still there, in sufficient quantities for businesses to develop, form footholds, and advance.
But what of people problems? These problems are the human quirks and concerns that must be either avoided, changed, or accounted for in order for a platform or business to succeed.
When it comes to the business of bridging the digital and the real, privacy is perhaps the number one people problem. And to make matters worse, working around privacy concerns often creates more people problems. For example, making check-ins manual and not automatic means having to create a new behavior: the habit of taking out your phone, opening an app, and checking in. Companies like FourSquare and Gowalla have had some success literally gaming these people problems, but their engagement is still limited to the pool of people whose privacy concerns have been addressed and are willing to create these habits.*
Which brings us back to Starbucks. To my mind, a Starbucks platform would be an intermediate step for location-based networks. Rather than ceding to privacy (a losing battle) and trying to build new habits, Starbucks could serve as safe-zone for people to grow comfortable with the idea of location-based data: people would opt-in to passively check-in every time they enter a Starbucks. It sounds mundane, but convincing people to turn their phone into public beacon is proving near impossible. Limiting the function to predefined spaces allows people to comprehend the risks.
Further, an intermediate step is exactly what location-based networks need. In other fields, early phases that slowly walk their audiences through ‘safe-zones’ have worked phenomenally.
When we started the conversion from physical to digital media, iTunes served as the safe-zone. It launched as an application to import our existing CDs. After a few years of managing our own digital media (with a physical backup of course) the idea of purchasing digital files from the get go was less of an issue. When companies started to introduce the internet to the mass market, safe-zones like Prodigy and AOL found footholds. People understood these intermediary environments and they perceived them to be safer. One could even argue that Skype did this in reverse. Facebook achieved amazing growth in a short-time frame by using college campuses as a safe-zone. When content was limited to your own school, people published without a thought.
Many networks that bridge the digital and the real are attempting to go from a standing stop to 100 mph. They have yet to find a safe-zone that can serve as a staging ground for the mass market. And while Starbucks might not have plans to build a platform (though a partnership with their Seattle neighbor Amazon seems like a match made in Heaven), an intermediate step needs to be found. Otherwise, privacy concerns and the difficulty of creating new habits will stand in the way of these networks accruing the critical mass of content needed to build a network around.
* It is possible to solve for these problems without creating a new habit. Mint, a financial aggregation company, has perhaps the largest database of location based data: credit card activity. Without thinking about it, Mint users fundamentally ‘check-in’ with every swipe of their card. No new habits were created, the existing ones were just captured.
