Darby Sieben -

There is no doubt about it, if you follow the online local space that Check-In is “In” for 2010. A recent article on Mashable, “Foursquare’s Growth Not Slowing Down: 725,000 Users, 22 Million Checkins” definitely proves the point for this 1-year old startup organization.

In February I did a post on my FourSquare experience that you can read on my initial experiences and the impact on local.

A couple of days, one of my work colleagues, Mohamed Kahlain, follow him on Twitter, sent me the link to CheckIn Mania, a mashup that features checkins from FourSquare, GoWalla and Britekite. This was originally posted on Mashable.

In a nutshell what CheckIn Mania does is allows you to enter any city, click on the map and select a business. Once you select a business you can see who is the mayor of that place + how many checkins to that business and any tips. You also have the ability to select the “Search by Map” which is a neat feature that allows you to move the map and the locations update as opposed to updating the locations by click.

Here is the screenshot with one of my favorite restaurants (of which I am in the Mayor in Calgary) called Spicy Hut.

It is no secret that any of the location based services listed above have the highest penetration in major US markets like San Francisco and New York, but what about Canada?

Are Canadians checking in?

So I decided to spot check some businesses in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Montreal to see how active Canadian’s are. I decided to focus on Restaurants. My selection criteria for which restaurants and spas to choose was as following, In Google I did a local search and selected business #3 in their 7-pack. In YellowPages.ca, I selected the #8 business and in Yelp.ca I selected business #6. This would give me a random sample of businesses. I also limited this to FourSquare as this is the most popular check-in service.

Here are my findings.

Vancouver Restaurants:
C Restaurant (selected from Google) – 9 checkins
Tojo’s Restaurant (selected from Yelp) – 33 checkins
Top Of Vancouver Revolving Restaurant (selected from Yellowpages.ca) – 17 checkins

Calgary Restaurants
Calgary Marriott Hotel (selected from Google) – 21 checkins
Capo Restaurant (selected from Yelp) – 5 checkins
Karma Fine Indian Cuisine (selected from YellowPages.ca) – 2 checkins

Toronto Restaurants
Bistro 990 Restaurant (selected from Google, this is actually listing #4) – 11 checkins
Pomegranate Restaurant (selected from Yelp) – 8 checkins
The Real Jerk (selected from YellowPages.ca) – 34 checkins

Montreal Restaurants
Restaurant Toqué (selected from Google) – 5 checkins
Santos (selected from Yelp, actually #8) – 40 checkins
Arahova Souvlaki (selected from YellowPages.ca) – 15 checksin

The only thing that surprised me about the above results is Toronto. I would have expected to Toronto to come in closer to Montreal in terms of checkins because of population concentration and smartphone penetration. However, this might be a result of the fact that Toronto does not have the density of Montreal (land mass to population size), which might also explain why Vancouver is more comparative to Montreal. Calgary actually holds it own, relative to its population size and the fact that Calgary.

Although comparatively to the US, Canada is not at the 1/10 rule (see some US results below), it is pretty clear to me that Canadians in the large urban markets have started to embrace checkin. This group, like in the US, are the ones at the start of the product curve and the big question going forward is whether checkin services will hit mass adoption.

How does this compare to the top US cities. Here are the results for San Francisco and New York using the same process as above. I used YellowPages.com as the 3rd source.

San Francisco Restaurants
Zuni Cafe (selected from Google) – 459 checkins
R & G Lounge (selected from Yelp) – 296 checkins
Cote Sud (selected from YellowPages.com) – 6 checkins

New York Restaurants
Spring Street Natural Restaurant (selected from Google) – 495 checkins
La Sirene (selected from Yelp) – 52 checksin
Serendipity 3 (selected from YellowPages.com) – 236 checkins

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Here is a great presentation by Marta Kagan and is a follow-up to the original What the F**K is Social Media.

I wanted to post this to my site as social media has become a bigger part of my personal and professional career in the past 18-months. The slides in this presentation do a very good job of highlighting how important social media is becoming in the mainstream. Couple this with a book written by Don Tapscott called “grown up digital” and you get an appreciation for the “conversation revolution” that we are currently in and the importance of having a strategy to deal with in. For this post, I will not be providing any of my insights. I will do this in a follow-up article. For now, I hope that you enjoy this presentation:

Popularity: 1% [?]

In a posting done by Jeff Jarvis on December 30 titled “9 Remarkable Stats on Google“, Jeff did a very good job of highlighting some interesting stats on Google.

I spent a lot of my time in 2007 working with a number of people from the Google organization in my role with Yellow Pages Group and for as much as we hear Google as the corporate entity, like every successful company in the world, it is the people behind the company that make it truly remarkable.

Anyway, thanks to Jeff for compiling such a list, here are the ones that I found most interesting and I have included a CDN perspective:

- Google controls 65.1% of all searches in the U.S. at the end of 2007 and 86% of all searches in the UK, according to measurement company Hitwise. (For Canada, at least in terms of unique visitors and according to ComScore Media Metrix, November 2007, Google had 87.9% reach, MSN had 46.5%, Ask had 31.4% and Yahoo had 28.1% – this is not the same as searches, but gives you an idea of where Google is within the Canadian market specifically)

- Google earned $15 billion revenue and $6.4 billion profit in 2007, a profit margin of 26.9%. Its revenue was up 57% in the last quarter of 2007 over 2006, says Yahoo Finance. As of late 2007, its stock was up 53% in a year. The company has a market capitalization of $207.6 billion. (As of close of market today – Google’s valuation is 214.36B)

- Google employed almost 16,000 people at the end of 2007, a 50% increase over the year before. (I have been to their offices in Mountain View and New York, they have an incredible culture. I only worry about the employees whose first job is with Google – they are going to be spoiled for life)

- Google became the No. 1 brand in the world in 2007, according to Millward Brown Brandz Top 100. (here is the link to this report – the ranking is on page 10. Google is valued at 66.4B, GE at 61.9B, Microsoft at 54.9B, Coco Cola at 44.1B and China Mobile at 41.2B. The top Canadian firm on the list is the Royal Bank of Canada (#39) valued at 13.6B

- Google controls 79% of the pay-per-click ad market, according to RimmKaufman. It controls 40% of all online advertising, according to web site HipMojo.

“We don’t have a monopoly. We have market share. There’s a difference.”
Steve Ballmer

Popularity: 14% [?]