drinks or other rewards to new or frequent users who "check in" at a venue with their GPS-enabled phones. Crumbs Bake Shop locations feature Friday coff ee or cupcake giveaways for customers who show their Foursquare check-ins at the counter (crumbs.com). Facebook at year end showed its continued interest
in mobile loyalty programs by hiring the Texas-based developers of Gowalla, a Foursquare competitor (gowalla. com). Atlanta e-mail automator Silverpop late in 2011 acquired PlacePunch, which builds Foursquare and Facebook apps for companies as diverse as Holiday Inn Hotels and New York's Butter Lane Cupcakes (placepunch. com). Loyalty programs now are being adopted by local business groups, powered by vendors such as Evanston, Ill.- based Sweet Perk (sweetperk.com). Th e technology that enables mobile uses also untethers POS
systems from central computers. "Cloud-based systems are perhaps the greatest thing to happen in the last decade of the information age," Lichtman says. "The advantages are endless, from enabling store owners to keep a constant pulse on the progress and status
Tablet-based POS applications allow maximum flexibility. Photo courtesy of SelbySoft
of every aspect of their daily operations, to allowing them to communicate exciting events, products, and news in real time to their entire customer base, to allowing integration with a number of peripheral services and products, and making the dissemination of all of this info, trending, and data to their core team members as
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