If Xtify has it's way check-ins will be a thing of the past, before they even became mainstream... Xtify is ushering in the era of “persistent location,” one in which the user’s location is passively used to deliver relevant information. According to GigaOm's Ryan Kim "Xtify is on the cutting edge along with Placecast and others using geo-fences, a digitally drawn radius around a place, to create a landscape in which our movements trigger offers, coupons and messages from companies we have relationships with."
Xtify CEO Josh Rochlin says “There is going to be growing comfort with passively-derived location that will be an asset to consumers, but brands will need to figure out how to take advantage of location without becoming a nuisance,” he said. “Brands will have to decide what is the proper cadence to message users.”
It all sounds a bit like Minority Report-ish to me, and that's not necessarily a bad thing (at least from this geek's perspective). The promise of these technologies are that they are opt-in and provide fully anonymized user data with no emails or cell phone numbers stored, and that is much more comforting to the average non technical user who's big concern to date with location based services is privacy.
