Favorite Places on Google

It is hard to keep up with all those new services that Google is rolling out! This latest initiative aims to make Google a significant player in location based services (LBS) market by bringing together businesses and consumers. In particular, Google has just started adding prominent businesses to its Favorite Places service and, at the same time, it sent out QR codes to over 100,000 businesses in the US encouraging them to display those codes in store windows. Customers can scan the QR codes with mobile phones and will be taken to the store's Favorite Places page, where they can read reviews. They can write a review and/or star the business as a favourite if they like the place. Alternatively, people browsing Favorite Places on the Internet can view the location of the featured business on a map.



Keir Clarke from Google Maps Mania wrote a very comprehensive post on this latest service, outlining a new approach adapted by Google to ranking businesses. And Kevin Benedict from Mobile Strategies for Businesses has just published a related story on barcode scanners on mobile phones. Very interesting reading.