Scott Kurtz can predict the future! And there’s Starbucks discounts
If you read pvponline.com (a great webcomic, by the way), you’ll recall a story line where a character uses a fictional Foursquare like service to become the mayor of a coffee shop. In the comic, this entitles him to discounts on coffee. In a strange twist of life imitating art, Starbucks is now providing discounts to actual Foursquare mayors of various Starbucks across the land. This is a pretty cool blending of the virtual space with the actual space and starts to highlight a lot of the promise of Location Based Services. It turns it all into a sort of ‘meta game’ and I, for one, find it utterly fascinating (not least of all because I find PVP hilarious!) I think you’ll begin to see more and more of these sorts of blurring between the real world and the virtual world.