Foursquare Continues The Sprint Beyond Check-Ins With Partner Badges. Foursquare just announced that it is partnering with RunKeeper, an application that helps users track fitness routines, to allow members of the location-based social network to earn badges without actually having to check-in. So users of RunKeeper will earn exclusive badges on Foursquare by hitting different milestones within the app. For example, you an unlock a Marathon badge by using RunKeeper to track long distance running without having to check-in to a gym or park. The badge will show up in your RunKeeper profile as well as with your badges on Foursquare.
We’re told the integration will work with both the free and paid RunKeeper iPhone and Android apps. The interesting part of this announcement is that it is further evidence of Foursquare’s intention to move beyond check-ins. Foursquare goes on to say that it is going to develop similar partnerships to allow users to unclock badges via “real-world experiences” with “carefully selected partners.” The Steve Jobs Foursquare Badge. How To Meet Real People With Twitter And Foursquare: Use Agora. Foursquare's Google Moment: Recommendations Launch Tonight. The race between tech companies aiming to tell you what to do with your free time will heat up tonight with the midnight launch of version 3.0 of location-based social network Foursquare. According to the company, its long awaited recommendations feature will be included. It's one thing for Amazon or Netflix to recommend movies or other products you might like (that's a huge business), it's another thing for an automated system to tell you where you should go when you walk out the door of your house, what real-world venues you should patronize.
That's something a whole lot of companies are going to try to tackle, including Google and Facebook. The Enormity of Real-World Recommendations Inside every "where should I go? " It's a very ambitious goal. What Foursquare Brings to the Table Foursquare first began talking publicly about experiments with recommendation technologies six months ago. Here's how the company said today that data will be put to use: A Design Challenge.
Foursquare adds five new languages to platform, big focus on API this year. In an on-stage announcement at Mobile World Congress, Foursquare founder and CEO Denis Crowley said the location-based startup had added five new languages to its mobile application. These are: Spanish, French, German, Italian and Japanese. He said the new app (2.2.5) will be available on versions for the iPhone, Blackberry, and Android today. The analytics platform for merchants and venue owners remains oriented towards the US, but Crowley said they were looking at further internationalisation. He added that they would be focusing on the API this year. Crowley also put out the latest Foursquare adoption figures of 6.5 million users, 2 million check-ins per day. He jokingly described Foursquare as “almost like Pokemon for adults” and their continuing emphasis on mashing-up location and the social graph.
Foursquare’s Crowley: The Giants Are “Generic,” We Are Fun. I Wonder Who He’s Referring To… Foursquare may have a tenuous partnership with Facebook Places— but don’t let the Kumbaya presentation fool you, these frenemies are gunning for the ultimate mayorship and Dennis Crowley is feeling very confident. On Friday’s taping of Gillmor Gang with former TechCrunchIT Editor Steve Gillmor, Kevin Marks and John Taschek, Crowley discussed the opportunity for places, outlined his plan for the next iteration of Foursquare and knocked Google for its social awkwardness. While his disgust with Google’s mismanagement of the ill-fated Dodgeball is well documented, in his explanation you don’t need to read between the lines to understand he’s also talking about Facebook and how he plans to beat Goliath. “It’s difficult to build services that are supposed to scale to you know 30, 50, 100 million users right off the bat, because they got to be kind of tailored down, by definition they have to be a little bit generic to speak to that large of an audience.
CrowdFlower - - Crowdsourcing / Labor-on-Demand. Skype Etiquette. Skype is one of the most important work and social tools I use. It’s nearly perfect. Except that you people are using it to drive me crazy. It’s made my list of “can’t live without” products for the last five years, and more recently the screen sharing feature has made Skype even more important as a productivity tool. What I like about Skype is that you can use it for chat, or audio, or video. It’s an extremely versatile tool and most people in the startup world use it as their primary instant messenger application.
It’s nowhere near as popular as Windows Live Messenger with 303 million worldwide monthly users, or Yahoo with 79 million. But it’s in a solid fourth place with 18 million users per month, according to Comscore (just the IM feature). A lot of people know I like to use Skype for communicating, and I get a lot of inbound messages. It’s not a conversation until both sides are engaged. You: Hey Mike You: Mike! Instant messaging is both synchronous and asynchronous. Comment débuter dans la programmation WEB? “Stop being weak.” An Interview with Angelo Sotira, CEO of deviantART.com (TCTV) This week’s episode of Speaking Of… is the CEO of deviantART. One of the greatest things about TechCrunch is that they celebrate and reward each writer’s own voice rather than forcing every writer to sing from the same hymn-sheet. They encourage differences of opinion. While deviantART isn’t Erick Schonfeld’s cup of tea, I’m definitely a huge fan.
I have five pictures up on my wall that I’ve purchased from the site, and they’re absolutely beautiful. Deviant recently passed the milestone of their 100 millionth submission or “Deviation” as they’re called. DeviantArt was bootstrapped with 15k in cash, was profitable immediately and the company ran without any additional investment for 7 years. During my interview with Sotira, we traveled back to the site’s roots. What advice does Sotira have for new entrepreneurs? The title of the episode is Speaking Of… Flying, because of Angelo’s love for flying RC helicopters and the fact that our interview takes place in a cockpit of a plane.
About liquidpubs :: digital publishing apps + services. Partners with foursquare – Checking in Just Got Easier With Voice | Vlingo. Do you live on Foursquare, Facebook and Twitter? Well if you do (or even if you don’t), Vlingo has just made your life even easier! Today we are excited to announce a new feature for Android users that allows you to speak to your phone to check in, connect with your friends, or shout out an update on foursquare. Check out what execs at both Vlingo & foursquare have to say about the new partnership! “Location and social networking have become an integral part of consumers’ everyday lives—so having a strategic alliance with foursquare to provide users with a simple, easy way to connect with their friends is a natural fit for Vlingo,” said Hadley Harris, VP of Marketing at Vlingo. “”By making it easier for Android users to check in and communicate with friends through foursquare, Vlingo is broadening our consumer appeal,.” ,” said Holger Luedorf, VP of Mobile and Partnerships for foursquare.
So, how does it work? Quite simply. Watch it here in action! Think Vlingo and foursquare is great? Android Users Can Now Check In To Foursquare By Using Their Voice. Thanks to a partnership with Vlingo, owners of Android 2.0 or higher-equipped phones can now check in to Foursquare and update their status on Facebook and Twitter simply by speaking into their phones. To try it out, download the free Vlingo app to your Android handset. Using your voice, you can then update your location status on Foursquare by saying “check into Logan Airport”, locate your friends with commands like “where are my friends?”
And “who’s nearby?” As well as send shout-outs to your buddies (e.g. “shout at Logan Airport waiting to board a plane to San Francisco”). That’s not all though. Previous Vlingo features remain, too: you can still use the app to send text and email messages, search the web, use Google maps and more. As for BlackBerry, iPhone and Nokia S60 users – they’ll have to be patient for a while before they can start updating their status and locations with their voice. Local Merchants, It’s Time To Ditch The Sidewalk Chalkboard For Foursquare Welcome Screens. As Foursquare becomes more and more popular, so is the sidewalk chalkboard sign beckoning Foursquare users into the local coffee shop or bar and hailing the store’s current Mayor.
While the chalkboard signs are quaint and add a nice personal touch, they don’t really change much throughout the day. What if a store put up a digital sign instead that welcomed the Mayor whenever they checked in, or really any patron when they checked in, and alerted them to Foursquare specials? A small Canadian startup called ScreenScape now offers a Foursquare app for their digital signage service which lets local merchants display their Foursquare specials and welcome Mayors and other Foursquare users whenever they check in.
Everyone loves seeing their name up in lights, and it doesn’t require a busy employee to go write a new name or promotion on the chalkboard. For $10 a month, merchants get an online dashboard to manage their digital signs (they supply their own screens). Stickies. Is Facebook Places a Foursquare killer? CEO Dennis Crowley isn't worried | Technology | Los Angeles Times. Foursquare fueled the popularity of location services, one of the hottest categories on the Web. Now Facebook has emerged as a competitor with its new feature Places. Where does that leave the New York start-up? Even as it closes in on 3 million users, Foursquare is dwarfed by the world’s most popular social networking site, which has more than 500 million.
But Dennis Crowley, Foursquare's chief executive, said he’s not worried: His company’s service has a very different appeal. Foursquare attracts users by getting them to compete for rewards and bragging rights. Foursquare was in talks this summer to be bought by Facebook but instead took a gamble and a $20-million investment from venture capital firms including Andreessen Horowitz, which valued the company at $115 million. We talked to Crowley about his take on the situation: Q: Facebook Places has been in the works for months and you’ve been talking to Facebook about it for a few weeks. Q: You were the pioneer in this space. The Facebook Effect: Foursquare Had Its Most Signups Ever Today. Leading up to Facebook’s location announcement, there were two schools of thought. Either you thought Facebook Places was going to destroy Foursquare. Or you thought that this new service would help the startup by bringing more awareness to the location field.
It appears that the latter is happening. “Just heard from The @HarryH that today was @foursquare’s biggest day ever in terms of new user signups,” Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley just tweeted out a few minutes ago (@HarryH is the Twitter name of Harry Heymann, Foursquare’s engineering lead). I’ve long been in the camp that believed Facebook’s entry into the location space would help a lot of these other check-in startups — at least initially. But. All that said, Foursquare does have to be concerned about what Facebook is going to do in the future. Foursquare Checks-In To A San Francisco Office. Perhaps you’ve heard: Facebook just released their new location feature called Places. If not, we have about a dozen posts about it that we recommend.
But the obvious next question is what this means for those already in the space — and specifically the current buzz leader, Foursquare. Sure, they’re partnering with Facebook on the API launch, but are they in trouble? They don’t seem too worried about it. Foursquare is on the verge of opening their first office outside of their New York City headquarters, we’ve confirmed with the company. The building Foursquare has chosen as their west coast home is one that is becoming a hot bed for startups: the San Francisco Chronicle Building.
It’s interesting that both Foursquare and rival Gowalla were able to build their startups without a major presence in Silicon Valley up until now. Obviously the lack of major Valley presence hasn’t been detrimental to Foursquare’s growth — but the new office shouldn’t hurt either. [photo: flickr/niallkennedy] Foursquare - Privacy Settings. Foursquare - Privacy 101. Ahead Of Facebook Location, Foursquare Talks Privacy 101. Foursquare Extending The Physical Reach Of Offers And Hints At Hardware Integration. There’s no denying that the location-based service Foursquare has done a great job with regard to partnerships with local merchants. A new blog post today touts that and highlights some examples of how the system is working for both Foursquare and the companies. But underneath that are a few other nuggets of interesting information about Foursquare going forward.
First, Foursquare is going to start rotating specials that users see in the “Special Nearby” tab. The service realizes that users are seeing the same ones over and over again in places they frequent, so they’re going to switch that up. Second, Foursquare is going to extend the physical reach of some of these offers. Third, Foursquare says it is going to make it more obvious as to why owners of venues will want to designate employees as “Staff” and make them ineligible for deals and mayorship. But the biggest news is buried all the way at the bottom of the post. Foursquare’s Next Game: Choose Your Own Adventure? Foursquare is growing quickly, gaining momentum from mainstream deals, and now they have the money in the bank to keep it up. But the big question remains: can they keep it up in the face of major competition?
Twitter already has location features, Yelp recently added check-ins, and soon Facebook will as well. How can Foursquare survive against competitors that have millions — if not tens of million or hundreds of millions more users than they do? Their answer, apparently, is to change the game. Today, on The Big Money’s Disruptors podcast, Foursquare engineer Anoop Ranganath appeared to talk a bit about Foursquare and its future.
When Foursquare first started, the point leaderboard was an area of emphasis for many users — it really was a game to try and get to the top of it. “Foursquare is a game. In other words, Foursquare sounds like its game is going to shift towards a more Choose Your Own Adventure-style. If you want to learn more, click here. As Facebook Location Looms, Has Foursquare Entered The Pantheon Of Services? Look at the image above. There are three services listed on the San Francisco Giants’ scoreboard during a baseball game. Twitter. Facebook. Foursquare. The first two are ubiquitous. Each has hundreds of millions of users and a firm place in pop culture.
But is it on its way to entering that pantheon of great services? This is a particularly interesting question given that on Wednesday, Facebook is expected to unveil its initial push into the location space. With location, Facebook has long been seen as the 800-pound gorilla in the room. So Foursquare is dead, right? As we’ve been saying for months, it seems highly likely the Facebook is going to take a platform approach to location.
But just as with their status updates, many people may populate that with location data via third-party services (again, like Foursquare). That’s not to say Facebook won’t be competing with Foursquare at all. Of course, Facebook could also go with Foursquare rival Gowalla for such a deal. Dennis Crowley: Here's How Foursquare Will Fight Off Facebook, T. A Private, Anti-Foursquare To Geo-Fence Those Neer To You. 10 People Are Checking-In On Foursquare Every Second. Foursquare.