In many ways, SitorSquat is the ideal archetype for a brandable mobile app. It started online in 2007 as Google Maps mashed up into a wiki for ladies to list convenient & salubrious bathroom facilities. Add time and virality and suddenly it’s a leading community-destination with UGC data – for male, female and family toilets, and that’s just for starters - relevant to major cities in > 50 countries. Add mobile capability, and you’ve got the enhanced utilities of portability (a significant plus, one imagines), GPS, photo-posting and more besides (NFC in this context = Nearest Functioning Crapper?).

Brand match: The good people at Charmin aka Procter and Gamble became global sponsors of SitorSquat in March 09, endorsing the tenet that there are so many unsponsored developers out their begging for marketing savvy and a few extra $, that brands just need a bit of imagination to partner up with existing apps rather than build their own. One cool thing about the website is the open API that allows for free syndication of the content, even if the sponsors would like to own the experience. Online hits of SoS have topped 500,000 but downloads of the app at time of writing were only 1600. Let’s see what Charmin can do about that. While SoS was originally targeted at women, presumably the cocktail-guzzling type, there must be a big market for this among young tourist families, and a powerhouse like P&G will know how to reach those people. It will be interesting to see if they use only mobile media to spread the word, or start to integrate awareness campaigns cross-platform.