Further on with Yotomo, Get Local Offers

Have you check out Yotomo? Yotomo, Foursquare based mobile application with local touch developed by Wahyudi and assisted by Better-B team, was officially released on 16 April together with Foursquare Day. The date was not coincidental. Yotomo used Foursquare map and check-in system. The differences are, Yotomo provide local badges, coupon information, and local events.

At their launch, Yotomo is developed for Blackberry platform first, and the next to come will be iOS dan Android. For Blackberry platform, Yotomo supports type 83xx to 98xx. The option is available at download homepage. This means Yotomo also accommodate old version OS like OS 4.5 because 83xx cannot be upgraded to higher version. Downloadable version is 1.0, which means the application is final version and ready for release.

After downloading the application you can create Yotomo account easily from its application. After login successfully with Yotomo account, you have to login to your Foursquare account to get access to venue and friends you have. This only need to be done once because on the next sessions you only need to login once. Actually this is quite strange for me, two logins for one application. Can it use Foursquare’s authentication to access the application instead of creating another account?

On the front page, Yotomo will display Top Venue at your city, and your friends’ status, the ones registered via Foursquare. Next you can check-in as usual. If you are lucky, at certain venues you can get local badges and interesting offers. For example on 16 April, Yotomo released Japan Relief badge for fundraising at 365 Eco Bar Kemang. A donation of Rp 10.000 will be made for every badge unlocking until a maximum of 500 badges unlock. You can find information on promo and special venue ata Yotomo’s Twitter account.

Yotomo is one of approach Foursquare should do in Indonesia, like I’ve said previously. This opportunity is used to reuse available system and make it more valuable for local community. This opportunity might be closed if Foursquare would be more aggressive to enhance their service in Indonesia. Luckily, that didn’t happen and Yotomo has the courage to try out this opportunity.

The obvious thing is that promotions or events here at Yotomo is still not significant in numbers, there is almost no added value to check-in at Yotomo, if compared to Foursquare. After they made the system, it is marketing and sales teams’ turn to make people who are used (and usually still using it) to check-in using Foursquare to try Yotomo. If it is flooded by discount and event information, this can make the skeptics or bored of check-in application people to use Yotomo again and really get the benefit of it, not only just informing their whereabouts.

At the end of this article, I want to ask a question, do you think Yotomo is part of different experience in check-in like my friend Aulia said here? If so, what interest thing do you find that you can have that opinion? If not, what suggestions can you give to Yotomo team for further development?

Translated by Nita Sellya.