It was almost exactly one year ago that Facebook launched Places, their location-based offering. Reading the press at the time, you would have thought it was going to be the Foursquare-killer, the Gowalla-strangler, the Loopt-beheader, etc. Nevermind that Facebook partnered with all of them for the launch — those guys were done.
Fast forward to today: Foursquare recently raised a large round of funding valuing them at $600 million. And Facebook is killing off Places.
To be clear, Facebook is not ducking out of the location game itself. In fact, you could say that they’re doubling-down on it. But they are moving away from the game that the “check-in” services have been playing. And a result of that is Places being killed off and being replaced by new “Nearby” area, as Jason outlined along with the bigger privacy changes today. → Read More
Foursquare has announced today that people can now check into events officially, which is weird because people have actually (unofficially) been checking into events for a long time. I mean just look at NYC Mayor Bloomberg’s check in to something called Marriage Equalitocalypse. Conceptually the “hack” is easy enough for a politician to do — Just creating an event masquerading as a venue. In fact, I am checked into an unofficial event right now. → Read More
Back in the day, the knock on the Foursquare iPhone app used to be that it wasn’t very visually appealing. That was especially true in comparison to rival Gowalla. But much has changed over the past several months. And now that Foursquare has big funding and a larger team to deal with the pains of fast growth, they’ve been putting a lot of emphasis into how things look and feel. And it’s paying off.
Today brings an update to the iPhone app which is brings a new coat of polish. Most notably, you’ll see that pictures are now displayed inline when you’re viewing your check-in activity stream. This matches the functionality that was recently added to the Foursquare website. It not only ups the visual appeal, it makes the service feel more alive and personal.
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First Facebook, then Twitter and now Foursquare; Obama sure gets around (social platforms). As announced today on the White House blog, Obama will be checking in to the location-based service as he hits stops on his economic bus tour in the Midwest. Of course.
Users who want to follow Barack can check out the White House Foursquare page here, where they can now suscribe to White House Tips as well as check in to the White House when they visit as well as Presidential events. And Barack has already left his first “Tip” linking to a blog post about the tour’s first stop at Lower Hannah’s Bend Park in Cannon Falls, Minnesota. Eh, someone should tell him that’s not exactly how they’re used. → Read More
Foursquare has launched its Tip Lists features today, attempting to capitalize on people’s unending desire to create lists about locations, like Top Five Coffee Shops in SF, etc etc. Up until now your Foursquare Tips have sort of roamed free on the app, without rhyme or reason or real incentive to add more. Today the company is trying to improve on the Tips experience and get users to fancy themselves local experts. After all, you must know something about some place in the city you live in right?
If you visit your Foursquare profile on the web toda → Read More
Well, this is a potentially huge partnership. After extended negotiations, Groupon deals will finally start to appear in Foursquare. And it’s not just the normal daily Groupons that will appear, but also the newer mobile Groupon Now deals. The inclusion of instant Groupon Now deals sets this partnership apart from the other daily deal partnerships Foursquare announced earlier this month with LivingSocial, Gilt City, zozi, BuyWithMe and AT&T.
Those specials are all for regular daily deals which cannot be purchased immediately. You need to buy the deals, but cannot redeem them until after all the deals have been sold that day. That is just how daily deals work, which makes sense when you are buying them from your computer. But when you are looking for deals nearby on your mobile phone, you want to be able to redeem them spontaneously. → Read More
When it comes to local commerce, the ultimate prize everyone is going after right now is how to close the redemption loop. The redemption loop starts when a consumer sees an ad or an offer for a local merchant, and is completed when the consumer makes a purchase and that purchase can be tracked back to the offer. If you know who is actually redeeming offers and how much they are spending, you can be much smarter about tweaking and targeting those offers.
Groupon, LivingSocial, and other daily deal sites have created enormous value by pushing the redemption loop the furthest. When someone buys a daily deal, for instance, that translates into cash for the merchant. But for the vast majority of their deals Groupon and LivingSocial do not track whether or not they are ever redeemed, much less the amount each consumer actually spends at the store or restaurant once they show up.
In order to complete the circle and track offers all the way through redemptions, it is necessary to either tap into the payment system or create an alternative way to track redemptions. Different companies are tackling this problem in different ways, but they almost all rely on a shift from emailed coupons to offers delivered through mobile apps. → Read More
American Express is going all in on the daily deals business, striking a deal with Facebook that is similar to the one it already has with Foursquare. Through a new Facebook app called “Link, Like, Love,” AmEx cardholders can link their cards to their Facebook accounts (just like they can already link their cards to their Foursquare accounts. Once they do so they will get a dashboard of deals from brands such as Whole Foods, Dunkin’ Donuts, Virgin America, and Sports Authority.
Unlike Groupon or LivingSocial, these AmEx deals don’t require anyone to pre-purchase anything or present any coupons to merchants. One of the biggest challenges for the daily deals industry is how to measure how many offers are actually redeemed at thousands of different participating businesses. But AmEx has an advantage here in that it is already a payment network that is set up and accepted in businesses large and small around the world. All people have to do is buy the deal item with their AmEx card and they will be credited the deal amount. The Facebook twist is that the deals you see are influenced by what you and your friends “like” on the Web using the Facebook like button. → Read More
Foursquare this morning announced distribution partnerships with daily deal providers LivingSocial, Gilt City, zozi, BuyWithMe and AT&T. Missing from the list are Groupon, Yelp and Google Offers.
With these deals, Foursquare is attempting to solve two problems: liquidity in deals and its own lack of a revenue model. → Read More
Over their history, Foursquare has been an iPhone-first company. The app initially launched on the iPhone back in 2009, and new features have typically rolled out to iPhone first. But with a new feature today, Foursquare has shaken things up, going Android (and web) first.
The new feature is a nice one: Notifications. Unlike the push notifications for check-ins you’re used to seeing on the Foursquare mobile apps, these new Notifications focus on other activities on Foursquare “beyond the check-in”. That means things like comments on check-ins and photos, alerts when friends sign up, alerts about tips, alerts when you’re ousted as mayor, swarming alerts, etc. → Read More
The overall consensus is that Google has done some good work in avoiding where they have dropped the ball in previous efforts. Also some good work in creating a way to rapidly navigate through a series of people views. And a wonderful video tool that recalls the early days when we all gathered around campfires to shoot the breeze.
The early threads are predictably self-referential, just as they have been for each new startup service at this point in the cycle. With Twitter, I lurked for months until the realtime communications bus provided an opening for Friendfeed. Still in that phase with Foursquare, which joins other iOS apps on the push notification bus as what effectively is one service to me. → Read More
Earlier this week Turntable.fm crossed a milestone. No, it wasn’t hitting a reported 140K users one month after launching, nor was it being added to the list of portfolio companies for First Round Capital (granted it was just a logo refresh from the company’s previous product incarnation, StickyBits).
In fact, the ultimate sign that the crowdsourced music service had arrived was more subtle than a milestone metric and ran under the radar for anyone who isn’t finely attuned to these things; on Tuesday the artist Sir Mix A Lot (of “Baby’s Got Back” fame) DJ’d a set on Turntable.fm replete with a custom hacked avatar that differentiated him from the available cookie cutter options. → Read More
The two houses of Congress straddle the central rotunda, where JFK lay in state before making the trip across the Potomac to Arlington. From his gravesite and the Eternal Flame, you turn around and notice how the site lines up perfectly with the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. Just as the White House and the Capitol dome are bisected by the Monument. The symmetry defines the power relationships.
At the Lincoln Memorial he sits like some grand couch potato watching Netflix, ringed by his words on flanking walls. The Gettysburg Address feels somehow modern in its 140 character-like brevity. The reflecting pool was empty, as a Martin Luther King memorial rises in the dusk. For the people, by the people, retweeted throughout the land. → Read More
Well actually it was an Instagram of a Foursquare check-in, posted to Twitter …
So I actually haven’t been following news at all today, and when I say news I mean actual news, not tech news which I keep up with like an addiction. And I so had no idea that a bill to legalize gay marriage was passing through the New York State Senate at the very moment I was writing this post about the Quora redesign.
I was actually pretty surprised when TechCrunch Managing Editor Erick Schonfeld Skyped me with “Look at your Twitter feed.” In a quick game of Internet catch up, I scrolled through my feed. → Read More
Foursquare has just closed one of the most secretive rounds of venture capital TechCrunch has seen.
The company is raising $50 million, and all of it will go towards building out the company, no secondary sales here. The valuation had been rumored to be as high as $1 billion, but our sources say it settled out at $550 million pre-money, $600 million post. → Read More
Foursquare is expanding its relationship with American Express to provide local deals to people who sync their cards to their Foursquare accounts. AmEx did a trial at SXSW, and that went well enough that it is rolling out the deals more broadly.
The discounts, such as $20 off a $50 purchase at Sports Authority, are automatically applied to your AmEx account when you check in via Foursquare to a participating merchant before a purchase. Everyone in local commerce is trying to figure out how to close the loop between deals and payments. Once companies can tie mobile ads or deals to payments, they will be able to measure directly the sales generated by these mobile promotions. And one day that could potentially be a huge new business. But for now, it’s making absolutely zilch for Foursquare, which remains a revenue-free zone. → Read More
In retail, businesses that speed up the check-out process get more business. With Foursquare, it is speeding up the check-in process, which should get people to use it even more. A new release of its iPhone app puts a new check-in button smack in the middle bottom of the app, removing at least one step to check-in bliss.
The fewer steps an app requires of users, the more they will tend to use it. Remove barriers and people will flock to your product. At least that’s the theory. Hey, it works in retail. → Read More
After about two weeks worth of false alarms, the just over two year old Foursquare has just announced an important milestone today, 10 million user accounts — up 700K user accounts registered (the company does not release active user numbers) from when it last announced a milestone in May. The company will pass 750 million check-ins later this week, with users are now averaging about 3 million check-ins a day.
The Foursquare user demographic breakdown is currently about 50/50 male versus female and 50/50 for international versus U.S. According to Foursquare, the company has seen 358 million international check-ins. → Read More
Recently I sat down with a well-connected Silicon Valley CEO who just raised a ton of money, and who knew of other startups raising even more. There is a new startup club of younger companies raising money right now at $1 billion valuations. I already knew a couple of them, but I started asking a few venture capitalists and now I have a pretty good list of who is in that club and who is trying to get in (see below).
As we all watch the established Web companies go public (LinkedIn, Pandora) or prepare for an IPO (Groupon, Zynga, Facebook), there is this new class of younger, but fast-growing, startups rising up right behind them. A lot of them are out raising money right now at $1 billion valuations. These are $50 to $100 million rounds, and they are generally going to companies showing incredible growth rates in both users and revenues, at least according to investors who have looked at these deals.
So who is in the new billion dollar valuation club? → Read More
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by (@msuster) Mark Suster, a 2x entrepreneur, now VC at GRP Partners. Read more about Suster at Bothsidesofthetable
Any company who develops products reliant on iOS spends weeks crapping their pants before WWDC. No vacation schedules allowed for weeks before or weeks after. The announcements come out in one day and then even if you survive the annual release announcements you often still have to scramble to make sure your product is ready to work on time.
It’s madness. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
