Hot Dog!

Take me in to the ballgame

You will be getting an indoor positioning app at Citi Field.

The idea is great – to make the experience of going to the ballpark more enjoyable by letting your phone and the stadium work together. These guys are doing it using iBeacons (which we will talk about more in a future post) and it’s really cool. We link to the full article at the end of this post.

This is the kind of thing that you will be seeing more and more of this year.

What’ll happen is that when you are in certain parts of the park, the app will notify you of things you should check out. The Mets have a lot of great history (I personally remember the 1986 season very fondly. Sorry Red Sox fans!) and even though they are no longer playing at Shea, they have artifacts from the old stadiums at Citi Field. The “Big Apple” is one of them. When you get near it, your phone gives you the chance to watch a neat video of the highlights from Shea stadium.

The other neat thing is that it keeps track of your seats and tickets. Kind of like the way you can use PassBook for your Starbucks card and your airline boarding passes, this app will hold your ballgame “paperwork” all in one place for you. I was just up at a Cubs-Cardinals series at Wrigley in August, and it was kind of annoying to have to carry around a bunch of paper printout “tickets” that we had to scan to get into the game. It’d be much better to just scan the phone and get in that way.

Lastly, this app can offer you special deals in real time. Just as you walk by the hot dog stand, your phone could buzz and you could be offered a coupon for a discount on a hot dog. In the demo they offer $2 off, which means the hot dog only costs about $8. (Hey, New York is expensive.)

If you read down into the comments you see people talking about how this app could be a huge power hog. This is definitely a risk with poorly designed apps. Here at Gozio, our products are designed to protect your battery life, so you don’t have to worry about it. We also have lots of other ideas on what you can do in this sort of venue and only with Gozio technology, and you’ll hear more about that in 2014.

Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you inside.

The Gozio Team

You can read all about it over at Tech Crunch

Photo: Randy Le’Moine Photography