Arrived is a cool application that lets your friends know, well, that you’ve arrived somewhere. I’ll tell you why you should care.
Alexia Tsotsis, the only reason why many still read TechCrunch, informed us this morning that Arrived has Arrived.
I was immediately captivated by the concept of the service and its event implications.
What Does It Do?
As they put it:
Arrived is automatic and personal. Instead of manually checking-in every time you arrive someplace to share your whereabouts with all of your friends, Arrived automatically notifies the friends that matter, whenever you arrive at a place that matters to them.
Arrived helps you manufacturer serendipity so that you meetup with friends, when time and place are right.
Quite cool. We all send messages to friends waiting for us that we are on our way.
The twist is that Arrived let them know even when you haven’t planned to meet up.
Networking Reloaded
The service pushes networking to a whole new level.
Sometimes we ignore that our contacts may be in the same place at the same time. Foursquare helps to know who is around but Arrived is kind of different.
In a typical scenario you would arrive to a place or an event, pick up your phone, check-in on Foursquare or Gowalla and then wait for the apps to tell you who’s there. The truth is that we often forget to check-in because, well, we are busy doing whatever we have to do.
Arrived checks-in for us and notifies our friends automatically. They’ll get SMS and voila, you now have event buddies.
Why is It Intriguing for Event Planners?
The service takes privacy seriously. All check-ins remain private among the circle of friends you decide to send notifications to.
But what if Arrived decided to share check-in information with you, event planner. You would instantly know if a VIP just entered the door.
This is becoming vital realtime information to social media savvy event professionals.
On their FAQs page, Arrived respond to the question “Do You Share My Arrival Data?” as follows:
No, Arrived does not share your arrival data with anyone other than the people you specify when sending each arrival request. We do reserve the right to share data associated with your individual arrivals when you arrive at the establishment of any participating Arrived merchants.
It looks like becoming a “participating Arrived merchant” will allow you to know the above information.
Keep an eye on Arrived!
