5 Android Apps That Small Businesses Should Be Paying Attention To

In honor of Google’s third annual developer conference, Google I/O taking place this week, I thought it would be fun to look at a few Android apps that businesses should be paying attention to. Android will be heavily focused on during the event, and you can expect a great deal more Android app development to come, especially as the platforms moves into the television space.

That said, these apps aren’t only available for Android. They are available for other mobile operating systems as well, such as iPhone. That’s all the more reason to pay attention to them.

1. Layar

Layar is an augmented reality app, and a popular one at that. It offers different layers of augmented reality for different needs. There are layers for things like restaurants and bars. A user holds their phone up in any given direction and can see nearby businesses in that direction.

2. Aloqa

Aloqa is a local app that notifies users of nearby places and events by category. If I want to see some nearby gas stations or gift shops for example, I can do so with this app. There are numerous channels users can customize to meet their needs, and plenty of them cater to varying types of businesses.

3. Square

Square is an app that lets anybody accept credit cards, and best of all they even send users free card readers. For more on this, see here.

4. Foursquare

Foursquare is a location-based social game, and businesses have already been finding ways to entice customers with it for some time. You can read more about this here. Foursquare is the one that gets the most publicity, but there are a variety of similar location apps that should be looked into – Gowalla and Loopt, to name a couple (look for Google to do more and more with location as well).

5. Bar Code Scanner

Bar code scanner is just one such app in this category, but the point is to recognize that an increasing number of people are carrying around bar code scanners in their pockets via their smartphones. You can take advantage of this by using bar codes, QR Codes etc. in your signage, and in your marketing.

Of course, in addition to these apps there are the more obvious things like Facebook, Twitter, and Google, which mobile plays an increasing important role in.

What mobile apps do you think offer the greatest opportunities for small businesses? Let us know what you think.