Today has been an extremely busy day. We have launched the World’s first Mobility Rewards Program.

After the online world picked up the news, all hell break loose and – sorry folks – our servers experienced a 7.5 minute downtime.

Our team has been working hard to keep the outage short and, even more important, to prevent iMiles from going down anytime again in the future.

While we were pretty sure that a truly independent affiliate program that rewards mobility could be a cool service, what we did not expect where the many information requests we received from the international press. One recurring question we’ve been asked relates to the very nature of iMiles, its central underpinnings:

Why did we chose to build a location based affiliate program as opposed to a “nearby-friend-and-places-finder”?

The short answer: At the heart of iMiles is our fundamental believe that in an increasingly mobile world, location becomes your currency.

If you do a quick check on the most reported mobility related news stories in the past couple of weeks, you will find that the vast majority is about location based social networks (Brightkite, Foursquare and others), established services adding native support for location (the most prominent one being Twitter) and services extending their location-related feature set.

As another good example, Google Latitude recently added the ability to let Google store your location.

There seems to be a rapidly increasing number of companies and services asking you to conveniently send your location to their servers.

Why?

Chances are, they want to use it for what they call targeted advertising. Some might not use the word ad, but consider the tiny messages that hint you to a potential point of interest recommendations. And quite obviously there are parties that are willing to pay – in exchange for your location.

Don’t get us wrong: We clearly believe in location based advertising, if it’s done right. In fact the team members at iMiles are also heavy users of Brightkite, our favorite location based social network.

We do, however, also believe that the time has come for giving users something back for the new mobile currency without compromising privacy.

And that’s exactly the mission of the iMiles program: To create an independent location based affiliate system, that truly rewards its users and orchestrates between location providers, YOU and its affiliate partners.

We’ve come a long way and the release of the iPhone application marks an important step for us to get some feedback from other users, than our private beta group.

Be aware of some fantastic announcements that will bring together the complete picture about what iMiles is and how we are planning to fulfill our mission!

We are now working on finishing the parts that will let our affiliate partners integrate conveniently into the service. Don’t worry, though! As to our very simple and short Privacy Policy (compare that with the one of your favorite social network!), we do not share your location.

We don’t have to, because we simply don’t return ads for the mobile world’s new currency!

Though, what we do allow our partners to do is to access your current iMiles balance.

The API that will further allow program partners to request a specific amount from your account is currently in private beta.

Redeeming your iMiles will be a seamless, fully transparent process, all done right on your phone. (Yes folks, we are working on an Android version, too!)

We believe this to be a true win-win proposition and are excited to having you here!

Thanks again for joining the iMiles Mobility Rewards Program.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 at 22:54 and is filed under iMiles Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.