Foursquare + Google Maps = FourWhere

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

Erick Schonfeld is the Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. He oversees the editorial content of the site, helps to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produces TCTV shows, and writes daily for the blog. He is also the father of three adorable children. He joined TechCrunch as Co-Editor in 2007, and helped take it from a popular... → Learn More

With the SXSW conference approaching in Austin, we are seeing a lot of geo-location launching this year. A lot of startups are taking advantage of Foursquare’s APIs in particular to get their geo apps quickly out of the gate.

Take FourWhere. It is a pretty basic mashup of Foursquare comments and venues overlayed on Google Maps. You can search by city and neighborhood, and see all the recent tips from people who have checked into various nearby restaurants, bars, stores, and offices. The site forces you to right-click to see comments or venues instead of just having a menu in the side, but it does the job.

I’m kind of surprised Foursquare doesn’t offer the exact same functionality, but that’s what APIs are for. Sometimes startups need other startups to show them what they should be doing.

FourWhere was created a demo app for SXSW by social media analytics firm Sysomos. It plans to add more data from services like Yelp, Twitter, and Gowalla in the future, which brings up the issue of whether it picked the best name.

Company: Foursquare
Website: foursquare.com
Launch Date: November 3, 2009
Funding: $71.4M

Foursquare is a geographical location based social network that incorporates gaming elements. Users share their location with friends by “checking in” via a smartphone app or by text message. Points are awarded for checking in at various venues. Users can connect their Foursquare accounts to their Twitter and Facebook accounts, which can update when a check in is registered. By checking in a certain number of times, or in different locations, users can collect virtual badges. In addition, users...

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Product: Google Maps
Website: maps.google.com
Company Google

Google Maps is Google’s free web-based mapping application. As of May 2008, Google Maps includes photos, videos, and user-created maps along with location searches. It uses Panoramio and YouTube for the content.

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Company: Sysomos
Website: sysomos.com
Launch Date: December 9, 2007

Sysomos offers social media monitoring and analytics products that give corporations, marketers, public relations agencies and advertisers the intelligence and insight needed to make smarter business and strategic decisions. The Sysomos platform brings business intelligence to social media, giving you instant and unlimited access to all social media conversations so you can quickly see what’s happening, why it’s happening, and who’s driving the conversations. Through the use of contextual text analytics and data mining technology Sysomos collects billions of social...

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