Check-in Gets You Travel Points

Remember Top Guest? I recently revisited their website to check how they were doing and I was quite surprised on how far they've come.

For starters they've finalized the deal with IHG and Hilton, which is two of the largest hotel groups on the world (pretty much makes sense as they will increase the chance of finding spots around the globe for people to check-in).
Furthermore when they started, they have only integrated Foursquare, Gowalla and BrightKite, but now they've brought in Facebook Places and Twitter as well.

I've got 50 points so far, however you do need your loyalty ID entered in the settings for it to transfer to your miles reward.
I can see that with mobile Internet growth, which it will, location base check-in will be the next big thing to promote loyalty of your customer base, I wonder how this will shape up future CRM, whether CRM would integrate more on guest's social profile. Their mobile app so far features iPhone and Android only, but it is possible to do mobile web login. 
Hopefully they'll get more hotels to sign-up like Starwood and Hyatt would be key.

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Your Business On Gowalla

Gowalla has just announced a new feature for business owners to claim their venue, you can visit the page details here - http://gowalla.com/business.
This will give them to option to promote the business, you can use it to track who has been to your place, customers can highlight your space by giving it a special recognition and you can promote special events happening at your place.

In addition your business will also be promoted on http://gowalla.com/business. See details about claiming your business by visiting Gowalla official blog post.

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Dianping Location Checkin

Dianping http://www.dianping.com, China largest restaurant and bar review website has just recently renewed their iPhone app. The new app utilize more on map, GPRS location, the ability to add reviews and post photo, as well as location base check-in. Looks like this type of SNS is seeing a growth of mobile users, especially with Dianping with their existing users presence in China.

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