I was in Brisbane for a few days last week with my family, and not having spent a lot of time in that city, I don’t necessarily know all the good places to go and things to do. Many times I pulled out my iPhone and fired up the Foursquare app to see what was around.

Foursquare is one of a number of location aware apps that knows where you are and tells you what’s in your immediate location. You can explore what’s around by category, for example restaurants. To narrow down the results, I searched for Indian – there were several but they were on the other side of town – too far to walk.

The I searched for the most popular restaurants. With each restaurant, you can see tips that have been left by other people who have been there. We read the tips left by the top restaurant and there were 22 rave reviews. So that’s where we went, and it really was a great dining experience (the restaurant was Vapiano).

On Foursquare, once you get to a place, you can ‘check in’, and have the option of notifying your friends, and even posting your location to your Facebook and Twitter account.

There is a marketing component to all this that businesses can take advantage of. A business can offer deals to those who check in, which in turn promotes the business to the customers online friend network, which can be substantial.

Also, when in an area that you are unfamiliar with, you can not only see what’s around, but also see what deals are being offered to Foursquare users. The place offering the best deal might just get your business.

Foursquare is a great tool, but it may well be left behind by the newly launched Facebook Places, which is a similar concept, but with 10 million Australians already using Facebook, they have a big head start.

Location based social networking services – they really are the next big thing.

It’s a good idea to write regular articles, or blog, on your website if you want to increase traffic (and who doesn’t!).

If you do this, you can automatically send notification to your Facebook , Twitter and other social media accounts.

This way, everything you write gets sent out to your network, and links back to your website.

There are a number of ways to set up a system like this, for example, you can add the RSS feed from your blog to third party website Twitterfeed, which will then post updates to your Twitter account.

As more people spend more time in social networks, that is where you should be sending your content.

The internet has changed the world already, but as the internet continues to evolve, we can look forward to many more far reaching changes.

Back when the only way to connect was via a slow dial up connection, websites like YouTube were impossible, they had to wait for technology to catch up. As the volume and speed of data transfer increases, more things become possible, including things that haven’t been thought of yet.

Get ready for more regular use of the buzzwords eHealth, eBusiness, eLearning and eGovernment. These describe everyday activities that affect us all, that are moving onto the internet in a big way.

eHealth: With fast broadband, online diagnosis becomes possible, allowing medical data to be transmitted in real-time, and enabling patients to get consultations from specialists without moving from home. Patients will be able to get online consultations and remote monitoring from a distant hospital through high speed Internet connection.

eBusiness: Fast internet promises increased business efficiency and productivity. Online software delivery and backups deliver benefits like security and mobility. Virtual boardrooms reduce the need for travel, saving time, money and resources. New opportunities will create jobs in different areas, including regional areas.

eLearning: Access to world class education resources is becoming commonplace. Students can learn online at their own pace whenever they get time. People living in remote regions can receive knowledge from specialists and have conversations with the help of video conferencing.

eGovernment: Online government services allow citizens to interact with government agencies freely. Services like ATO and Centrelink can all be accessed at a time convenient to the user. In the near future online voting will become the norm.

The internet was created in the late sixties, but didn’t really start to catch on until about 1995. Back then, it was never conceived that it would be used for many of the things that it’s being used for today.

Where is the internet heading? Many trends have already emerged.

People use the internet as the first point of call when searching for information – no longer a library or yellow pages.

Socialising and meeting new people is no longer limited by geographical boundaries. If Facebook were a country it would be the third most populous in the world, with over 400 million users networking with each other.

For business, high quality video conferencing in virtual boardrooms will become normal, those who have had a video call on Skype will have had a glimpse into this future.

Watching TV shows when they are scheduled is a thing of the past already. Video hire shops are limited by the stock they can hold. Video on demand over the internet will allow viewing anything anytime, without having to go out!

Some of these innovations are constrained by currently installed technology. The Australian government has proposed a National Broadband Network (NBN) which will improve internet speed, but it won’t come online for years, and it will still be slower than what other countries can access.

In the USA, Google is starting to build a network with speeds of 1 gigabit per second, 10 times faster than that proposed by the NBN.

The internet is the modern day equivalent of the 19th century railways, and the 20th century telephone. It warrants significant investment in infrastructure to enable Australia to engage with the world on a level field into the future.

Remember phone books? You know, those big heavy things that take up all that room on your bookshelf.

They still get delivered to us each year, but they’ve started getting smaller, not bigger. That’s because more businesses are moving their advertising budget onto the internet.

That makes sense when you consider that people are spending more time on the internet, and the ability to search is literally at their fingertips. Younger people especially are more likely to search online, rather than get out the big heavy books and wade through all the pages looking for something that could be found virtually instantaneously using Google.

Those Yellow Pages ads aren’t cheap, and they have to be renewed each year. Ok, so a website is often not that cheap either, but a basic online presence can be achieved at less cost than a yellow pages ad, and can continue to work for you year on year, as well as being accessible the world over.

As people transition from spending time offline, to spending more of their time online, you should consider increasing your online marketing budget to successfully engage your online customers.

Having a Twitter and Facebook page that’s regularly updated will bring more traffic to your website.

But just a minute, I hear you say, I don’t have time to go around updating all those websites – I don’t even really know what they’re all about!

Well, you don’t have to! What you do need is regular content, and if you’re in business that shouldn’t be a problem.

New products, specials, industry trends, client profiles, testimonials, general news, press releases – this is the kind of information you should be generating as a business, and at a frequency greater than once per month.

The best place to publish these things is in a blog attached to your website. From there everything can be automated – publish once and distribute to many places instantly.

To find out more, contact Arrowsmith Websites for a free consultation.