Bouncity, the Indonesian location based gaming platform that offers rewards from not only check ins but challenges and activities, is going to be launched on June 8 with an event at the @america center at Pacific Place in Jakarta. Bouncity is one of the candidates that won selection to pitch at Echelon Launchpad in Singapore in a couple of weeks.
If it sounds familiar, then you’ve probably heard of SCVNGR, or you’ve heard the name Bouncity being mentioned on Twitter and blog posts for the last several weeks. The product of application development company PhaseDev, this social game will initially launch on BlackBerry with Android and iOS versions to follow.
Why BlackBerry ahead of the others? Apparently the most active social media users in Indonesia are on BlackBerry as evidenced by the popularity of UberSocial Twitter app among Indonesian Twitter users and the relatively rapid adoption of Foursquare over Gowalla early on as Gowalla had no BlackBerry app until much later.
Wenas Agusetiawan, CEO of PhaseDev had been nothing less than excited about its launch. He’d been courting restaurants, merchants, bars, mini-marts, as well as various brands of consumer apparently signed up (rest of line removed) major partners and famous restaurants (rest of line removed).
PhaseDev is aiming for parallel participation between businesses and customers as this social game aims to act as an engagement layer between the two parties. Businesses can increase customer interaction by getting them to perform a number of activities after they check in to the location to earn rewards. Businesses can also use Bouncity as a promotional platform to increase customer awareness and engagement.
While it’s easy to draw parallels with Foursquare, Bouncity’s additional attraction would be its activity layer. In Foursquare, points and rewards are accumulated only by checking in. In Bouncity, additional rewards are given following completion of several other activities such as taking photos, visiting on a particular day, or any other kind of activity specified by the business. In fact, checking in is the least involved and the least rewarding activity in Bouncity.
We’ll have more information about Bouncity as we get closer to the launch date.
Update: We were asked by Bouncity to remove restaurant’s name.
