Dream and Hustle

Real-World Demo of the Airport Geo-Location Hustle

I put a working demo of the airport geo-location hustle for you cats to test and see how it works. It seems like a people are interested in it so much. The airport geo-location demo is located at http://swagg-scientific.com/geoairport.aspx. I hard-wired the application and overwritten it to use Hartsfield-Jackson airport because it’s the only airport I assigned deals to for this demo. However, this is a full function working application with the exception of the localization that automatically translates the language which I disabled also. I’m only talking to brothas and sistas at this moment at this opportunity.

I don’t know if anybody realizes that the airport hustle is built upon the same geo-location framework as our upcoming invisible pop-up store in the hood project. Instead of targeting hoods, we are targeting airports around the world. This is why I explained to build your technology off building blocks because this is the kind of flexibility you get.

As I stated before, by focusing on the database and an XML web service, this is a reusable platform that allows you to launch a whole lot of geo-location based hustles. I made some enhancements to the code and I will be discussing in detail this whole application. Let’s talk about the demo application in this article because the technical section will be very long and will save it for another article.

This is how the web site is broken down into three pages:

Geoairport.aspx – this is the home page or start page and basically, this page detects the language of the mobile user and set the language appropriately. So the next step is to press the “Start” button and it will be in the user native language.

Offers.aspx – this page first attempt to detect the mobile user location. When the mobile user location is detected, we then sent the latitude/longitude coordinates to our XML web service and database code to determine the nearest airport. In the demo, it actually does grab your current location but it is hard-wired to put you in Atlanta. BTW, I’m not capturing and saving your latitude/longitude if you paranoid and quite frankly, your IP address since mid-2000s already give up your location and who you are in case you didn’t know that. Our service will return all of the offers based on the airport detected. Click on the blue title to go into the offer detail.

Offer.aspx – this is the specific offer that you selected when you clicked on the blue link. Now notice there is a barcode at the bottom. Most merchant cash registers use barcodes to capture their discounts. Now, I do not have a barcode generator and you don’t need one. Just to go to a web site like barcodz.com and generate a barcode and host it as an image for that vendor offer on your web site.

Really, that’s about it and you know what – it’s that short and straightforward but it’s very powerful. This is an international-based mobile application available in multiple languages should be – very short and sweet. While you got some cats looking at it like it has only 3 pages, it is truly an effective application that works around the world for the busiest airports and you now got a serious customer base you can market this service to. Now let’s talk about the vendors and getting business.

You should notice there is no web form or page for the vendors to sign up or place their own ad on your airport geo-location service. However, I did created the database and xml service for you to create vendors and create ads and upload the images. I even created a service that allow you to determine if the vendor is in reasonable range of an airport to qualify for a listing on the service. But I did not put it in the UI for a reason and that is because you don’t know if that “vendor” is real or a craigslist poster.

I left this open because let’s think about it for a minute – who are your customers of this airport hustle? If someone land at LAX and they need to make a car rental reservation, wouldn’t the car rental firms be a national chain as they situated at most of the airports? What about the national chain hotels? All of these are corporate vendors and they usually have a main office where you have to approach them, they not going to go to a web form and whip out a credit card and post up info.

Remember that you dealing with travelers and you don’t want some seedy cat trapping your customers like they do on those cruise ships when you get off ports and they want to offer some garbage “tour” of the island taking you to all of their people spots to have you spend money there. If you run this operation, you will need to do your business homework and remember that most airport vendors are public information as they won contracts to operate out of the hub. Now, the international angle, we going to have to figure that one out but it is the same.

So check out the example and when I get into the technical part, you will see how to do the international translation service, how the business class library work and some of the new database functions. In reality, this is a powerful application – it just look simple to you with 3 web pages and that’s what’s it supposed to look like.

So the first thing to keep in mind is simple intelligent design. We need to keep our stuff simple and straightforward and do the main job. This is that cornball NewMe/Black Web 2.0 reading crowd problem where they focus on too much chasing recognition and seeking validation and acceptance and bragging about how popular they think they are. You just want something that is geared towards the customer to do something like find a deal in their area and that’s it – remember that the average person today do not have a great attention span and especially while they in an airport to be grossly engaged. That’s why simple apps sell so well in the technology market nowadays.

The second thing is remember to divide technology out into “tiers” or “entities” as we call it in the game. See, you can reuse the database and XML web service code and create a food truck finder service, create a “check-in” service like Foursquare for brothas and sistas that go to clubs and spots, create a war driving treasure hunt contest were cats pay an $10 fee to go find the grand prize of a $500 gift card.

Ok, check out the demo site at http://swagg-scientific.com/geoairport.aspx and we’ll talk technology in the next and last episode.