Jiepang, China’s location-based service today announced a brand new Jiepang 5 app in a celebration for the company’s two-year anniversary.
The new app, which according to David Liu co-founder and CEO of the Beijing-based startup would be made available in App Store soon, will adopt a new interface design that highlights some new functions like Explore and Food Sharing with an aim to better connect location sharing behaviors and offline consumption, literally, give users a better reason to check in and share their locations.
Jiepang’s 3 million users generated an aggregate of 50 million check-ins globally since its inception two years ago with more than 8.2 million photos uploaded.
It also has established close partnerships with over thousands of brands. More than 9000 local merchants have employed Jiepang’s check-in service to provide people who check into their venue with coupons or discounts. This could be deemed as Jiepang’s ongoing effort to monetize its service, speaking of which, the firm has done some very inspiring exploration in making profit through O2O trend and LBS-based ads. For example, with a huge amount of data generated everyday that contains users’ behaviors, all Jiepang could do is figuring out a way to effectively use the data for target advertising to better match people and locations, not in a intrusive way of course.
Location-based advertising is a rather new concept in China and the market needs to be educated by pioneers like, say, Jiepang and other LBS services such as Shanda’s Qieke.