Foursquare has tweaked its history page this morning, in order to give users a more functional, searchable version of their past check-ins. Although you could see your old check-ins before, they weren’t as accessible as they are now. The new page lets you click on a drop-down box to head back into the previous months or years (somewhat reminiscent of Facebook Timeline functionality), while sidebar boxes lets you search and filter your check-ins by location, category or who you were with at the time. → Read More
Foursquare today rolled out the ability for users to add short personal “bios” to their profile pages on the site. These bios are limited to 160 characters or less, and can be imported directly from a user’s Twitter account or written from scratch.
It’s another small step in Foursquare’s progression from a fun app that plugs into sites such as Facebook and Twitter to a more self-contained, standalone social network in its own right. Since the company secured $50 million in funding at a $600 million valuation last summer, Foursquare has been steadily adding new features such as restaurant recommendations and passive location detection aimed at fleshing out the app’s user experience and increasing its stickiness. → Read More
Foursquare made a slight, but welcome, change to its Facebook integration today that will now offer “prettier” Facebook Wall posts regarding your activities. Instead of posts that just show a standardized icon as before, the posts will include a full map, or your photos, if you’ve taken any, to accompany the check-in. Foursquare will also turn a long stream of check-ins into one, aggregated summary story. And Foursquare will begin posting a summary of your “recent activity” for the past month, which includes your check-in history, top places, new badges unlocked and more.
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When I was in Barcelona this week, I met up with Dennis Crowley, the CEO of Foursquare, just after he had gotten off stage from a keynote presentation with the CEOs of Nokia and HTC at the Mobile World Congress event.
The check-in app that was once little known outside of the world of tech early-adopters may only have around 15 million users, but that number has actually made it a leader in its field, and that has amplified the company (and Crowley). → Read More
When Dennis Crowley, the CEO of Foursquare, visited the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last year, he told me he spent a lot of time explaining Foursquare to the operators and vendors that are the main visitors at this event.
This year, he said the stack of business cards he was handed was “like this,” making a big C-shape with his index finger and thumb. Why the change? “I think we are one of a handful of companies that builds products that would actually encourage people to upgrade their devices,” he said — an important fact to remember as smartphone penetration continues to grow and takeup slows down, specifically in the developed markets where Foursquare has most made its mark.
That growth in reputation has been matched by a growth in Foursquare’s business: the company has tripled its numbers in the last year, going from “around five million” to more than 15 million, Crowley said. But perhaps more interesting, he says, is that the company is starting to notice a marked change in behavior… → Read More
Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley spent this afternoon in Barcelona, explaining his location company’s potential to Mobile World Conference attendees. Someone else didn’t need to hear the presentation, though. Existing investor Spark Capital is buying $50 million worth of its stock, according to sources, in a deal to provide at least some employees with liquidity.
The result is a valuation north of of the already-impressive $600 million from its last round, I’ve heard. This is even though the company continues to focus on product development instead of trying to maximize revenue.
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Six years ago I first set foot in Silicon Valley to attend one of the early “Hack Day” events that are now perpetual. It was an event where fellow nerds were creating web-apps using whatever technology they could get their hands on. VC’s and Valley luminaries were judging and dishing out fat prizes. Mike Arrington was moderating. We were being treated like rockstars, and I was hooked.
I quickly found myself obsessed with creating products; trying to follow the work of Steve Jobs and other product leaders that did it best. With so many approaches to product management, I found but a single common philosophy that bound all successful products together
Following five months of work, location-based Q&A platform Localmind is launching its biggest release today since its original debut with the arrival of Localmind 2.0. The newly revamped platform represents a shift for the company, which, as you may remember, sits on top of Foursquare, allowing you to pose questions in real-time to those checked in at local venues.
Today, the company is expanding its focus by allowing users to ask questions of local “experts,” even if they’re not currently checked in to a given location. However, answers can still be replied to in real-time, preserving the sense of immediacy found in the original product. → Read More
In addition to the updated “Explore” feature that rolled out to Foursquare’s Android and iPhone applications this week, the social discovery service also added a special feature to its Android app that sort of flew under the radar: support for NFC.
NFC, or near field communication, allows devices to exchange data over short distances, typically with a wave or a tap. In Foursquare’s Android update, NFC support has been added for the app’s Venue, Lists and Me pages. → Read More
Sure, your mom carried you for nine months. And yeah, she wiped your bum for years, put clothes on your back, and made sure you got a decent education so you could move to California and rock a hoodie and work somewhere where there’s always beer in the fridge and go-karts to be ridden. But can you really be expected to call her from time to time to let her know where you are? Time is money, Mom. Get on Foursquare or something.
Looking to ease the anxiety for the mothers of the world whose brats kids are too busy to call is #hashtagmom. You check-in somewhere on Foursquare with the titular #mom hashtag, and it’ll do all the talking (or texting) for you.
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The nominations have been tabulated and the votes are in. Over 300,000 nominations were calculated across 20 categories. Along with our partners GigaOm and VentureBeat, we are very proud to announce the finalists for 2011′s best in technology. Voting begins now.
For 2011, we’ve added some new categories. Best Location App, Best Cloud Services and Biggest Social Impact join the Crunchies ranks this year. You’ll also find Best Social App (Google+ is up against Facebook Timeline, the New New Twitter, Instagram, and Path 2.0), the NYC-dominated category of Best Shopping App, Best New Startup and the year’s best VC’s and Angel Investors. Newcomers like Task Rabbit’s Leah Busque and Keith Rabois for his angel investments (Airbnb, LinkedIn, Yammer, Path, YouTube) made the list of finalists, as well as industry favorites such as Marc Andreessen, Jack Dorsey, Mark Pincus and Ron Conway.
In addition to today’s announcement of the Finalists, we are happy to release our next batch of tickets through Eventbrite. The release begins now, so act fast and get them while you can. → Read More
Everyone’s favorite check-in service Foursquare is rolling out a major redesign of its developer site today, with a focus on making it easier for new developers to find their way around. The website now offers better organized links to guides and resources, a revamped Getting Started Guide and a new “Showcase” section which promotes some of Foursquare’s own favorite apps.
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Over the last year, Foursquare has been actively buddying up with the daily deal players. Groupon, LivingSocial, Gilt City, AT&T Interactive, BuyWithMe and Zozi all provide their daily deals to Foursquare. And today, Atlanta-based Scoutmob joins the ranks of deal sites partnering with the check-in champion, as Foursquare will today begin offering Scoutmob’s 50 percent-plus discounted deals in 13 U.S. cities from the within Foursquare’s mobile apps.
Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley has said before that he thinks daily deal companies are version 1.0 of the tools merchants will eventually use to drive foot traffic to their stores. But, while daily deals are hot and companies are adopting them, there’s obviously no use in resisting. The more daily deal sites that Foursquare partners with, the more localized and nearby deals it can display to its mobile users. → Read More
Foursquare, and most of the apps built on top of the location service’s developer platform, are great for exploring the physical world for entertainment. But a new iPhone app called 4sqwifi (download here) offers something that could help those of us who need to be productive remotely — a way to see nearby wifi locations, and the passwords to go with them.
Those of you who have been stuck needing to send an urgent work email while experiencing poor smartphone data reception will understand why this app is useful.
Yes, there are a bunch of other web sites and apps that try to help people find nearby wifi locations. All the ones I’ve seen have had various shortcomings, like outdated or incomplete databases, and no passwords. 4sqwifi solves this problem by finding Foursquare venues near to the user, then searching user tips related to getting WiFi connections (“free wifi,” “wifi password is…” etc.). → Read More
How many times have you checked in to Foursquare via the web? If you’re like me and I’m willing to bet most people, the answer to that question is “None.” Foursquare, who is likely well aware of this, has just pushed the latest in the series of #New4sq updates, in an effort to improve (and not solely to garner data from) the lives of its web users. One million daily unique visitors is a terrible thing to waste.
The Foursquare.com site redesign is the third major product development that aspires to move Foursquare beyond the check in; The company recently launched Explore to derive value from all the checkin data it has accumulated over the past three years, then Radar which allowed users to take advantage of that data with minimum effort. → Read More
Happy anniversary to me: I’ve now been writing this here weekly column for exactly one year. In that time I have opined, prescribed, and predicted many things. And now, as part of my one-man crusade for greater opinion-journalism accountability, I’m going to take a moment to go back and look at what I got right … and where I went horribly, hilariously wrong.
With luck this will be an annual event. I mean, assuming Erick doesn’t take a look at this track record and decide to can me on the spot.
(cracks knuckles)
OK, then: without any further ado, let’s see what I said over the last 52 weeks, and why… → Read More
After talking scale and product at Web 2.0 Summit, moderator John Heilemann started asking CEO Dennis Crowley about the competitive landscape. “Has Groupon made your life difficult?”
Then Heilemann turned to the Google and Facebook rip offs both Facebook and Google Places.”Does that scare the shit out of you?” Heilemann asked Crowley. “It’s one of the most challenging things to deal with.” Crowley said he looked upon the competition with an attitude of “They’re either going to kill us or we’re going to survive this.”
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U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron recently joined social networking sites LinkedIn and Foursquare in an effort to expand his digital presence and better connect with both citizens and businesses alike. On LinkedIn, Cameron will network with “people and businesses the PM meets regarding U.K. business, enterprise and manufacturing,” according to the official blog post from the PM’s office.
Meanwhile, on Foursquare, the PM will check-in to various venues in order to “illustrate the events the Prime Minister participates in during his day-to-day duties beyond Downing Street.” → Read More
While it doesn’t have any sort of valid office in Europe, Foursquare does have its first European employee. Yes, Foursquare has hired the London-based Omid Ashtari as Director of Business Development. Woo hoo!
Before the Foursquare opportunity knocked, Ashtari attended the University of Working At Google, where he spent seven years plugging away at sales and business development roles — migrating between Dublin, San Francisco and London.
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Earlier this month, Foursquare held its second hackathon, with 500 developers from around the world contributing. Today, the company is announcing the winners. The grand prize goes to Plan Your Next Trip, which uses the Foursquare API to help you plan out your upcoming 2-day trip to any city in the world using the recommendations from Foursquare’s “Explore” feature.
Several grand prize finalists were also named, including Sqavenger, Intersquares and sponsor-chosen winners Near.co and VenueMachine. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
