Yesterday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt sat down with a group of reporters after his panel at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA. He said he was open to taking any questions, so I decided to ask him about Foursquare.
It’s a particularly interesting question for Schmidt because back in 2005, Google bought Dodgeball, the company Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley previously started that was… → Read More
Alex Rainert, a co-founder of Dodgeball, is joining Foursquare as head of product, according to a post on Rainert’s blog.
Rainert was a seed investor in the location based social network, and has been working part time with the team over the past two months on product development. Of course, this is also a reunion between Rainert and Foursquare CEO and co-founder Dennis Crowley. They both founded… → Read More
Google has an unfortunate history of buying companies — and then running them into the ground. Sometimes, this leads to a bit of ill-will between the Internet giant and the companies’ founders. We saw a perfect example of this when Dodgeball’s founders (including current Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley) quit Google in a huff. Today, the co-founder of another acquisition, Panoramio, is out… → Read More
Back in November, at our Realtime CrunchUp event, I sat on the geolocation panel with members of Twitter, Foursquare, SimpleGeo, GeoAPI, Hot Potato, and Google. At one point, I raised the question if location was going to be the next battleground between startups large and small, much like social identity plays (Facebook Connect vs. Google Friend Connect) and status updates (Twitter vs. Facebook). → Read More
Stealth startup Hyphen-8 has been beta testing their new mobile social network called Lime Juice in San Francisco since October. Using your phone to create or enhance real world interactions is a killer application, but no one has cracked the nut yet. The reason is that the network is useless until it achieves a critical mass of users who are online and using the application via their mobile… → Read More
Google Accounts were integrated into dodgeball.com — a company Google acquired back in May 2005 that allows users with cell phones to notify their friends via text messages (SMS) as to what bar or restaurant they currently are at (and thus where their friends can meet them for a drink). Earlier this week, Google Mobile, which is Google’s search engine for cell phones, revealed public… → Read More
The DEMO conference is wrapping up here in San Diego and unlike when it began 16 years ago the conference wasn’t dominated by mobile launches. None the less, there were some very interesting mobile services here like ScanR and Realeyes3D image scanning by mobile photo, Flurry‘s simple email and RSS on Java phones and Grand Central (which I’ve written about at length). 3Jam and… → Read More
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