The first physical Facebook fan counter for local businesses

This is genius and fills a real need, here&#x27;s why:<p>I&#x27;ve spent the last two years building out a customer acquisition program for a brick &amp; mortar chain with ~50 locations.<p>We CONSTANTLY try to train the people in the store to ask for reviews &#x2F; likes &#x2F; etc which is a cornerstone of local SEO and the customer acquisition process.<p>The biggest issue that we encounter is that store employees have trouble figuring out how &#x2F; where to have the conversation, and how to ask.<p>With one of these on every store counter we literally have a conversation starter and the novelty for the customer of clicking the &quot;like&quot; button on their phone and seeing the physical roll over is just enough bait to make it worthwhile for them.<p>I see two issues with the hardware:<p>a) €300 (~$450 US) is steep. I get this is prototype. But at $100 I would put them in every store.<p>b) There&#x27;s nowhere on the sign for the URL &#x2F; or a call to action &quot;Like us at fb.com&#x2F;blahblah&quot; which means literally every Like you get requires a transaction &#x2F; discussion w&#x2F;a store employee to guide people there vs. just letting it hit organically.<p>Regardless I&#x27;m going to buy one, and if the devs are here and watching and would like us to knock out a case study of how well this works feel free to drop me a line via my profile -

Once you&#x27;ve saturated the local businesses market, you can also sell this to narcissists.

Cool idea. It would be nice if this was generic and hackable. For example, I have a mailing list, and it would be cool to see the # of users on the mailing list, or website subscribers, etc. It would need some type of API to go along with it, I&#x27;d purchase it, if the price was around ~100.<p>Branding, maybe just send along a pack of stickers, so if someone wants a facebook tracker, they just apply the facebook sticker, etc. Maybe just a template that people can print their own branding, etc. then you don&#x27;t need to print anything on your end!

It was a really smart decision to eschew a LCD or LED display. The old-school flip display really humanizes the numbers.

Instead of saying on the page &#x27;pre-orders are coming tomorrow&#x27; you should have an email collection form there. You&#x27;re likely getting a large amount of traffic and could be losing out on a lot of potential pre-orders because people will forget to go back to your page tomorrow. Just toss in an email collection form saying you&#x27;ll notify people when pre-ordering opens. Otherwise, neat product.

I once used to lead 20 telemarketers. I would create all sorts of board games on a whiteboard, using magnets and a marker. 1 Sale would equal 1 move.<p>Adding bonus fields, and a finish line, Those who made it to that where allowed to go home for the day.<p>Believe me, it did wonders to sales

Is everyone really serious saying this is amazing? I really do not understand the price tag being stated and what the product actually does? - Just to be clear this shows a particular business&#x27;s facebook likes? with an added bonus for real time and turning numbers. Maybe I just do not get it.

Interesting. My local chipshop has had a like us on Facebook sign up for the past year. They have 13 likes.. The only use for this I can see is in an office so everyone can see the count going up.<p>Putting it on the shop front of a small business would be a bit embarassing as the majority of small businesses have a miniscule number of likes..

Am I the only one who thinks this is stupid beyond any reasonable limit?

I just want those split-flap modules. Those would be fun to play with.

In the Taipei Hackerspace we had a number Facebook Like Counter designs a few months ago, and in the Maker Faire Taipei there were a bunch of others too, so this is definitely not the &quot;first&quot;. Looks nice, though, and finished up.<p>Arduino+Wireless Routers+7-segment displays: <a href="https://plus.google.com/b/100085911445404984901/100085911445404984901/posts/4dtfnEW3FZt" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plus.google.com&#x2F;b&#x2F;100085911445404984901&#x2F;100085911445...</a><p>PyMCU + computer + LCD display: <a href="https://plus.google.com/b/100085911445404984901/100085911445404984901/posts/PaxuRAgYdqR" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plus.google.com&#x2F;b&#x2F;100085911445404984901&#x2F;100085911445...</a>

Is the counter in _real_ realtime? I mean, updated every seconds?<p>Do you have backend layer or your device is directly consuming the Facebook API?<p>I&#x27;m asking because with an intermediary layer you could provide different types of counter. In a few seconds, I could be able to choose from different sources of data for the counter. Through a simple web interface hosted by you.<p>Uses would becomes unlimited. Twitter followers, Foursquare checkins today&#x2F;this week,...<p>Even number of kilometers traveled with runtastic as an example,... At max 100€ people could buy one for their home. More like a moving&#x2F;interactive object for decoration. This market is potentially bigger.<p>I didn&#x27;t found the price too high for a prototype.<p>And +1 for the NFC tag!

Great idea, but I once tried something similar with a Raspberry Pi and a 15&quot; cheap TN LCD panel to hang in my apartment for the amount of &quot;likes&quot; one of my Facebook pages received.<p>This is far more elegant, although far more expensive as well.

That&#x27;s cool. Are you already building the Instagram, Twitter, etc... versions?

Nitpick, this seems to have some funky grammar: Connect you to the “Smiirl” Wi-Fi network &amp; connect Fliike to your own Wi-Fi via your browser

Innovative idea, why was this not designed before...

I&#x27;d love to have it in my office.

What happens when you have more than 100k likes? Our business will soon grow out of this limit...

This is a cool idea. Although isn&#x27;t 5 digits a little limited?

is there a counter where i can actually connect to my own metrics?

Does it cope with unlikes and the counter having to decrement?

Build in an NFC tag so users of recent Android Phones (and hopefully the next iPhone) can like by just touching the device with his&#x2F;her phone.

While I may not be on Facebook anymore...this is actually real intuitive. Kudos.<p>I hope they implement more products similar to this...like twitter followers.

I&#x27;d love this to be more general&#x2F;programmable. Great to put in an office for morale-building around a major metric.

One could also build a version of this with a Raspberry Pi, LCD screen an a little scripting for less than $60.

The website should have a webcam of one running for Smiirl&#x27;s facebook page!

You should build one for google analytics too

What a great idea.

$450 per unit and they couldn&#x27;t design it to run on a battery? #fail