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Foursquare’s claim to fame, the check-in, could become its downfall. What is Foursquare? The answer is far more complex than it should be. The startup’s purpose in life is so muddled that it now finds itself in the midst of a self-imposed identity crisis that could cause it to fall victim to Facebook.

“The biggest misconception about Foursquare is that it is a check-in service,” founder Dennis Crowley told me in a recent in-depth interview. “We’re most interested in taking the data from check-ins to model what’s happening in the real world, and help people find new things … the data is more important than the check-in.” What does that mean? In Crowley’s mind it means that every check-in contributes to a growing pool of information that will make Foursquare a transformative way to experience the offline world.

Crowley boils down Foursquare’s grand vision to this: “We’re making software that makes the real world easier to use.” You’d be right — to an extent. Why? Where does the check-in fit into all this? Image via giaomeng/Flickr. [Exclu] Les résultats de la première enquête Foursquare en France. Freshnews 1x43 special Foursquare - une vidéo High-tech et Science. How Foursquare is moving beyond the check-in. “We want to build tools that change the way all the people in this room experience the real world,” said Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley at the Web 2.0 Summit today, as he described his company’s retreat from the game mechanics that first made the check-in service a success.

With more than 10 million downloads, Foursquare is the category leader for location services, even as it moves away from its initial offering. Crowley said Foursquare is about much more than check-ins, and features such as Foursquare Radar and Foursquare Explorer are going to power even stronger user adoption in the future. When Foursquare launched, there were already a variety of location-based services on the iPhone, such as Loopt. Since then, Foursquare has survived the onslaught of location service launches from juggernauts such as Facebook Places and Google Latitude, while also fending off rivals such as Gowalla.

He sees Foursquare the same way.

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Top 25 Restaurants on Foursquare | The Feast. Restaurant Debuts $100 Grilled Cheese Sandwich A Chicago restaurant debuted a $100 grilled cheese sandwich in honor of National Grilled Cheese Month. The “Zillion Dollar Grilled Cheese” sandwich features Spanish black iberico ham, Oregon white... » Review: Zach Braff in "Bullets" The sitcom star and screenwriter sticks to his guns as a proud playwright in the super new musical from perfectionist duo Susan Stroman and Woody Allen. » WeLoveGeoloc. Meet the local winners of Foursquare's first global hackathon - Events. This weekend, Foursquare hosted its first global hackathon.

The New York startup brought together an insane number of developers at five official sites: NYC at General Assembly, San Francisco at Foursquare S), Denver, CO at Closely, Tokyo at GaiaX and Paris at Le Camping. Plus, many more–geographically challenged–developers organized events of their own. As you might have guessed, there are local and global winners. The local winners have been decided, but Foursquare needs you to vote for the global champs. Voting happens this week, so check out a complete list of all the hacks… here! In New York, General Assembly has once again been chosen as the breeding ground for excellent hacks. 48 Hours of nearly non-stop work (and delicious food) led to these winning hacks! #1 How ______ are you? How ______ are you? #2 DigiDJ DiGiDJ is the first ever music app that lets you request a song from a crowded club floor. . #3 Placeface While you’re waiting, take a look at some photos from the event. One more Check-in.

Browse venues SimCity-style in the foursquare playground. To show off the power of HTML5 in Internet Explorer 9, fashionably-late-to-the-party Microsoft has collaborated with foursquare to build a virtual city based on real foursquare venues. Microsoft showed it off last night at an IE 9 release party at SXSW. The result is a beautiful and interesting environment to virtually explore the places around you called foursquare playground. The playground uses geolocation to determine where you are and shows the venues that are nearby on a grid reminiscent of SimCity. More popular venues are taller and each one is themed to its foursquare category. Businesses with specials are marked with pink flags. Foursquare users who log in get some extra treats, like the ability to see how many people are currently checked in at each place (represented by a pink bubble on the roof) and a filter to only show venues that are currently trending.

The site was built by Vectorform. What do you think of the foursquare playground? Infographr - Instantly Create Foursquare Infographics. Google Latitude Adds Checkins. Google's location-sharing app, Latitude, has just added the ability to check in at a specific business or other location. In the past, users simply pinpointed their location on a map. The difference seems minute, but letting users check in at a "real place" is an important part of Google's overall strategy.

As Google Latitude engineer Joe LaPenna blogs, "Until today, sharing my location let friends and family know if I was across the globe or in their neighborhood. Now, check-ins let them see the cool restaurant I’m trying in Taipei or join me for a latte at the cafe nearby. " And real locations mean real advertising opportunities. After all, knowing your intersection or latitude and longitude isn't nearly as much an opportunity for behavioral targeting as knowing that you're at a coin-op carwash or that you frequently eat at Indian restaurants.

Here's the app in action on an Android phone: Latitude is adding a few key components to its checkin offering, too. Foursquare Closing In On 7 Million Users. Entretien avec Dennis Crowley, co fondateur de Foursquare. Foursquare fights fake friends. Popular check-in application Foursquare is facing a problem that has long bedeviled social networks — spurious friend requests. And it’s dealing with violators by putting a cap on them. Users now have a limit on the total number of friends they can have as well as the number of friend requests they can send, a change first noticed by AboutFoursquare.com. For the average user, this may not be an issue: Most users don’t want thousands of people knowing where they are at any given time. So the policy is likely targeted at businesses looking to take advantage of creating a profile on Foursquare. Like Twitter, the microblogging network for posting short status updates, Foursquare allows businesses to create profiles in the same way that people do.

That liberal policy is unlike Facebook, the dominant social network, which only allows real human beings to create profiles and requires businesses to use a different format called Pages. Foursquare Blog. Foursquare Talks Facebook Places, Google, and Acquisitions. In its first six months, popular check-in service Foursquare grew from 200 users to about 1 million users--a milestone Twitter didn't reach for years.

Now, the New York-based startup, which recently raised $20 million in venture capital funding, boasts more than 6.5 million users as it enters its second year. Foursquare's growth continues to buzz past Twitter's during the same development stages, but the question is whether it will have that hockey stick-like growth spurt that made services like Facebook and Twitter ubiquitous. "We're on that ramp now, but it's another struggle to get from 6 million users to 100 million," says Holger Luedorf, VP of mobile and partnerships at Foursquare.

Unlike other categories of social media that have clear, established market leaders--Facebook, Twitter--no startup in the geo-location space has yet to claim victory--and the check-in space is crowded. "How do we integrate more deeply with Google or Twitter or Facebook? " (Founder Stories) Dennis Crowley On The Origins Of Foursquare. Before all the buzz and acquisition offers, Foursquare was just an idea in Dennis Crowley’s head.

He recently sat down with Chris Dixon to tape an episode of Founder Stories. Above is Part I of that interview (we will post the rest throughout the week), in which Crowley talks about the origins of Foursquare and its predecessor, Dodgeball. The company incorporated just so that it could get into iTunes. And when he raised his first $1.35 million angel round in 2009, Foursquare didn’t even have a bank account. He remembers (at the very end of this clip, around 6 minutes in) having to run to a Chase branch office in Manhattan, and telling the bank officer, “We need to set up a business account and we are going to wire in, like, a million dollars. Is that okay?” Foursquare’s website now available in six languages. Foursquare’s website has taken on a new international focus today.

It’s now available in all six languages supported by the apps: English, Spanish, German, French, Japanese and Italian. They’ve translated everything, from the terms of use to the buttons to the badge names. Interestingly, “Douchebag” is the same in every language except French, where it becomes Beauf. Venue names and tips remain in the language in which they were originally added. You can change your preferred language by clicking “English” in the bottom bar of the site. To make this possible, they had to remove the words from every graphic on the site. With the apps available in the same languages, the website now offers a convenient way for international users to access their accounts from the website and still understand what’s going on.

Foursquare_checkin_map. Indoor LBS: Foursquare. Indoor location was discussed by Foursquare, Micello, aisle411, TCS, Skyhook, Glympse, and others at the GPS Wireless conference in San Francisco. Nokia talked about their precise indoor location technology based on Bluetooth, which IndoorLBS reported on last year (read here.) Nokia is now in trials in stores where Beacons throughout a store that leverage Bluetooth 4 can send signals to mobile devices with Bluetooth 4 and identify a user's location to within 10 centimeters.

Devices that have Bluetooth 4 include the iPhone (see here). With that level of precision, a vendor could present the mobile user with a promotion on a specific product when it is right in front of the user, and the offer could be targeted to shoppers based on past purchases or other factors. FourSquare thinks indoor location would benefit its user experience. Skyhook said indoor turn-by-turn navigation won't be the first killer app of indoor navigation. Facebook, Twitter, & startup valuations - The best properties always look too expensive. The Art of the Checkin: From Location to Content to Brand. Caroline Giegerich is the blogstress behind the Daily Marauder and a digital marketing consultant. Follow her on Twitter for more social media and emerging tech insights.

Within the spectrum of social media, the act of sharing essentially amounts to a desire to personally define ourselves to others. In the age of the social network, there are an almost infinite number of options for creating that personal definition on the web. Checking in is just one of the newer ones. There is an art to checking in and a way to make it part of your online identity. Below, we walk through some of the obstacles and best practices for doing it right. Location, Content, Brand This all began with location but has shifted to allow users to check in to TV, movies, books and finally to brands. While each of these choices from location, to content, to brand allows for an additional layer of sharing, they also each call for an additional level of activity from the user.

Location: Cast of Characters. Follow the French President on foursquare. What's Next For The Check-In? The check-in is a buzz word, but I do not check in. We've all got those friends, you know, the ones who fill up your social stream with check-ins all day long. Save for coordinating logistics, I personally feel like publishing your whereabouts is all just a bunch of noise. However, I am fascinated by where this is all headed. While Foursquare appears to be growing a formidable network on top of the location-based check-in, a lot of companies are innovating around the fringes of the check-in concept. Jon Callaghan of True Ventures likes his portfolio company Pose, which lets users check in to the outfit they're wearing.

I'm bullish about a company I've invested in called Life 360, which uses location-enabled smartphones and the check-in to provide a monitor of your family's activities. "There are cases where the automatic check-in works, such as the running monitors like RunKeeper," says Jeff Clavier, Managing Partner of SoftTechVC. Featured in this video: James D.