The week facebook acquired Instagram for $1Bn, it also silently acquired another company Tagtile which is founded by IIT Kanpur and IIT Delhi alumni. The deal was undisclosed apart from founder saying that it was in millions of dollars but in spite of the financial figures whatever they may be, the acquisition is an important one. This article covers in brief, what Tagtile is all about.

Scoop on Tagtile

It was a conversation on deals and coupon service companies like Groupon which prompted Anand with the idea of Tagtile. The problem was that the customers who come through these sites have very little loyalty towards the stores and so the repeat customers are very small. So the idea that a store promoted itself rather than another site promoting it could the idea that solves the problem. The idea was worth trying and Abheek Anand and Soham Mazumdar founded Tagtile.

What is Tagtile? What does Tagtile do?

Tagtile is, simply speaking, location based marketing service which has innovative-ly coupled hardware and software technologies. Tagtile distributes a cube or a tile to the stores free of cost and it is through this tile a store owner can offer deals to the customers, access data related to them like the frequency of visit, purchase amount, where they come from etc. which might be helpful for the store to understand the profile of their customers and their demands.

How does it work?

Customers have to download the tagtile app from Google Play or Apple Store. When they visit a store which has Tagtile Cube, they run the app and tap against the cube. By tapping the information in pushed in to the mobile of customers and they earn loyalty points for the purchase which they can redeem to avail offers.

The most interesting aspect of it is that the cube does not require any internet connection to work. The technology uses inaudible sound waves to communicate with the device.

Among other features, through the app the customers can also check-in and share their location when they are at the store and so it integrates the features of many other apps like Four-Square.

Why did Facebook buy it?

Playing and winning loyalty points is not a new concept in Facebook where many games run on similar concept. Due to the fact that Tagtile has an offline presence as well, this could be a very strategic move by Facebook to start investing in technology product aiming for better synergies between huge online users and offline retail stores which cannot completely depend on networking platforms. Products like this could prove greater customer conversion and generate high revenues from the marketing tool that Facebook is becoming.

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