background preloader

Foursquare

Facebook Twitter

Meet Swarm: Foursquare's ambitious plan to split its app in two. Jump To up down Close By Ben Popper and Ellis Hamburger Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley has spent the last year trying to convince the world that Foursquare isn't what it used to be. The company emerged back in 2009 with a novel app that let people “check in” to a location. That vision, and the local information that followed, propelled it to amass tens of millions of users, hundreds of millions in funding, and billions upon billions of data points from people who used Foursquare to check in around the globe.

“Listen, the point of the company, this whole thing, was never to build an awesome check-in button,” says Crowley. With the check-in front and center, however, Foursquare was still struggling to enter the mainstream and saw its user growth overtaken by younger startups. So Crowley decided it was time to do something radical.

Today, the company is announcing the first fruit of this labor, a brand new app called Swarm that will exist alongside the current Foursquare app. Check please.

Foursquare new version (june 2012)

Original Foursquare Investor Pitch Deck 2009. Foursquare is one of the biggest, buzziest startups in New York. Scratch that -- anywhere. The local check-in startup raised $50 million this past summer from Andreessen Horowitz and Spark Capital. It recently reached 15 million downloads and it has been rolling out tons of new features including Lists and Radar. Foursquare has come a long way in two years. We asked cofounder Dennis Crowley for a copy of his original pitch deck so other entrepreneurs could see what Foursquare looked like in its early days. "Decks don't have to be super formal," says Crowley. With “Beyond Check-In” Notifications, Foursquare Goes Android-First.

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. But again, just as interesting is the new Android-first approach.

People in the Android-iverse, you’re first to play with this; download today’s update to get started. Foursquare has hardly been the only major app to focus on iPhone-first over the years. Clever Foursquare Hack Turns New York City Into a Giant Game of Risk. The board game Risk, in which players maneuver plastic armies on a map in order to achieve "world domination," has firmly occupied one corner of nerdom for about 50 years.

Foursquare stationed itself in another more tech-oriented corner of that same kingdom about two years ago. Now, at last, the two categories of nerdom meet. "World of Fourcraft" uses Foursquare and Google Maps APIs to turn New York City into a giant game of Risk. Users decide which team they are on by swearing allegiance to one of New York City's five boroughs. Checking into a neighborhood on Foursquare is the online game's equivalent to placing plastic man on a country in the board game. "We wanted to make foursquare more compelling for long-term use," says Ricky Robinett, one member of the seven-person team that created the game during a weekend hackathon at New York's General Assembly.

Three days in, it looks like Manhattan is winning the game, which took the "Best Location Hack" award at the hackathon. Foursquare: How New Businesses Are Using It [Stats] Location based social network Foursquare celebrated 10 million registered users yesterday but how are businesses and organizations using the platform? I wrote a year ago next month about the incredible potential offered by Foursquare accounts for organizations: following a Foursquare page as a user is like opting-in to view the world through the lens of that organization's geo-annotations. It can be awesome. (My favorites? History Channel and Eater.) Are businesses getting into it? The 128 Newest Foursquare Page Account Holders... Their success on Twitter before joining Foursquare... 17% didn't have linked Twitter accounts at all or have zero followers there47% have less than 200 twitter followers6% have between 200 and 500 twitter followers20% have between 500 and 2000 twitter followers24% of the newest have more than 2000 twitter followers Top tweeters just joining Foursquare: Bon Chic, Interscope Records, Impact Wrestling and Best Friends Animal Society Foursquare followers...

Tips Left. On 4sq Launch at SXSW 2009. Foursquare is the Breakout Mobile App at SXSW. Many of us have been anxiously awaiting a smarter Twitter that not only lets us update our status and connect with friends online, but also lets us find our Twitter friends — in real-life — when we're in the same place at the same time. Wouldn't that be genius? As with most of our Twitter-related needs, a creative application developer has used the Twitter API to build what Twitter never will. And as for the challenge of finding Twitter friends in the same vicinity, we can now turn to the hottest mobile app to take over this year's SXSW: Foursquare. Foursquare is essentially a re-envisioning of Dodgeball, Twitter's precursor and a cult phenomenon until Google left it for dead, and actually hails from one of the guys that worked to build that app. Using the Foursquare iPhone app, you can automatically check-in and post shouts based on where you are and what you're doing.

See Also: 15+ Free iPhone Apps to Navigate Your World. 1st Patent Infringement suit. It’s part of the ritual for tech companies who achieve a certain status in the world this day and age, whether riding solely on the waves of hype or by making a ton of money, to get targeted by trigger-happy patent owners at one point or another. Well, Foursquare, today’s the day. Foursquare Labs, Inc., the company behind the popular check-in service, has been slapped with its first patent infringement lawsuit by a company called Mobile Commerce Framework. I’d link to the latter’s website, but patent trolls usually don’t even bother to have those – they’d rather spend their time suing companies who actually make and/or sell something – and this one is no exception. Funnily enough, it looks like the company was simply named after the title of the patent-in-suit – how’s that for creativity?

On April 6, 2010, Mobile Commerce Framework (MCF) was issued US Patent No. 7,693,752 by the USPTO. In summary, this patent describes: MCF is represented by Jonathan Hangartner, owner of X-Patents. BonApp, a delicious new Foursquare hack suggests dishes at restaurants. I love Foursquare almost as much as I love food. And my love of food means I’m always up to try the best recommended dishes at a new restaurant. The problem with Foursquare is that it will tell me what restaurants are around me, but once I get there I have to dig through the tips to find out what looks good, which can be a bit awkward if you’re on a date with a non tech-reporter. A new Foursquare hack launched in New York City today called BonApp, which sends you a SMS with the most popular dishes every time you check-in to a restaurant on Foursquare. They built their information extraction engine entirely on Foursquare, which determines which dishes are being mentioned most in tips.

BonApp says they plan to expand their reach beyond Foursquare and provide information for more cities soon. This is a taste of something a lot bigger. In theory, the app sounds awesome. Check out the beta build of BonApp here. This Email Got One Stanford Student A Huge Job At Foursquare.

Foursquare BizDev

Foursquare Growth.