Gowalla comes to Latitude!

The Latitude London team recently moved offices to Old Street (Silicon Roundabout) and as a way of getting to know our new neighbourhood I thought it would be a fun idea to use Gowalla to achieve this objective.  As a bonus, the first person to complete the task will receive a prize from the Chief Operating Officer!

Gowalla rewards users with pins for check-ins to selected venues. It is a virtual equivalent to putting a sticker on your suitcase when you’ve been somewhere new. They also allow you to set up a “trip”, where you have to check-in to a set of venues in order to achieve a badge (perfect for a pub crawl!)

Firstly I had to carry out research to find out where the cool places to eat and drink were in the Old Street area.  My main objective was to find 20 locations that could be uploaded to Gowalla so that I could build the trip.  The process of uploading a new trip to Gowalla is pretty straightforward and the maximum number of locations you can upload for a trip is 20 venues.

When setting up a new trip, you are provided with a number of fields to populate such as Category (Bar Crawl); description of the trip; description of venue, check-in requirements (if the trip is public or private to your friends) which is all quite self explanatory.

Now that the trip is live, there has been some healthy competition within the Latitude London office to see who is the first person to complete the trip and bag a prize from the COO! It will come as no surprise that the SEO team is currently in the lead (I work in the SEO team!).