IRISH FACEBOOK developer BetaPond has secured a €220,000 investment to help it advance its location-based rewards platform for the social network.
The firm has entered into a one-year RD agreement with the Telecommunications, Software and Systems Group in Waterford IT for its RewardAble product, with funding from Enterprise Ireland.
“The project has got some really good skills and they have a really good culture with good engineers,” said Declan Kennedy, chief executive of BetaPond. “It’s a big pot of research cash that we have now to put into our underlying technology so we can put out a highly scalable, location-based platform.”
BetaPond is the only Irish company, and one of only a handful in Europe, to be accredited as a Facebook preferred developer consultant. The company has worked on a number of high-profile marketing campaigns utilising the social network and is also a social media partner with Tourism Ireland and Visit Britain.
This week BetaPond also moved into London’s TechHub.
With RewardAble the idea is that companies will offer tailor-made rewards to customers who “check in” to specific locations via Facebook or Foursquare, which in turn will act like an ad for the company in that person’s timeline.
“It’s targeted at the US market and we’re doing some high-end proof of concept in the UK,” said Mr Kennedy. “The ultimate play for that product is a play for a web model where a retailer or a brand would have a suite of tools to build a Facebook app themselves.”
Mr Kennedy admitted the idea of a check-in had not caught on with many people and privacy was a large part of the reason for that.
However he was extremely positive about the changes Facebook has made recently and believes they significantly affect the way people use the location function.
