I am skimming a case-study about the usage of Vindigo, a company that publishes and develops information and entertainment applications for mobile phones. Basically, they turned the Palm into a “lifestyle device.” :“Eat, Shop and Play” was the first application that combined restaurant, store, and bar information. They now focus on wireless content delivery, a.k.a. location-based services such as the ability for mobile content providers to drive traffic to nearby physical stores. It's not only a matter of storing stuff about café and bars in a database. What is interesting, is that Vindigo users are an important source of content generation.

The company cites this feature as one of the reasons why Zagat’s found the Vindigo platform so attractive. Zagat’s model is based on user surveys that are sent out annually to between 5,000-10,000 reviewers in New York. With Vindigo’s platform, Zagat’s now has 100,000 reviewers rating local restaurants for their publications. Vindigo collects this information during the hotsync process. The company co-owns the content and shares it with Zagat’s. According to Edelmann, Vindigo is grabbing all of the data from the sync process but has not yet determined how to monetize the information.

Why do I blog this? It's an interesting example of how a company let users creating/modifying the content though the use of lcoation-based services.