But tastefully.
UK startup Ambient Industries is preparing to introduce advertising into its Flook social location iPhone app.
The app, which lets people browse virtual cards of nearby sights and secrets, has a deal with GeoCast which will insert offers into the app as individual cards.
"It's a coupon, but it will look like good content, as if Flook is telling you something useful," Ambient Industries co-founder Roger Nolan tells ME.
"We want to make ads live on their own merits within Flook, fitting into the same algorithm. So if you make a good ad that people read, it'll get presented more to users."
Nolan says that Flook is currently adding thousands of users a day, and that the average session length is 18-20 minutes.
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He thinks that the way Flook focuses on more than simple check-ins at locations is encouraging its users to spend more time browsing and creating content.
"If you just ask people to check-in, it's a shallow experience, and people will get bored of that quite quickly," he says.
"Check-in is great, but I don't think it's the future. Semantic location is going to be commoditised by the end of this year, as it's so easy to get that data."
For the full Roger Nolan interview, including his belief that Android may be making the same fragmentation errors as Symbian in the past - Nolan was a co-founder of Symbian - click here.
