Jonah Jones, Lead Designer, Google Maps

When compared side by side with early versions of Google Maps, the difference between the maps of 2006 and 2013 is the equivalent to the difference between a Rio MP3 player and an iPod. “We originally created the draggable maps and now we sat down and basically wondered how were we going to reinvent the mapping experience,” said Jonah Jones, lead designer for Google Maps, who has spent the past seven years at Google working on maps. “It wasn’t as much dissatisfaction with the current maps, but more about how we can do this better.”

The new Google Maps marries data, social and the concept of hyper-personalization, tastefully layering those principles on top of beautiful and detail-rich maps. Google used the popular Google Earth app to enhance the Google Maps experience itself.

In doing so, Google is acknowledging that today we live on a much faster internet; we work on personal computers that have a lot more muscle and as consumers we have an expectation that everything should be personal to us. “There was more and more information which was being layered on the maps and we wanted to simplify and personalize that,” Jones said. “We think this is what next generation of what mapping looks like.”

Instead of delivering graphic tiles that have traditionally made up the base layer of a map, Google now uses vector maps and is using data as a stream, processing it on the graphical processing unit (GPU) of the new fangled computers and creating a brand new map, which is personalized not just based on a Google account. Like a chameleon, it changes personality and redraws itself based on what you want to focus on — venues, driving directions or recommendations.

It’s about the data stupid

And though it will be sometime before the new maps offering finds its way from the desktop and Google’s Chrome browser to the mobile devices, it really is the sign of the times and where mapping is headed. Since the introduction of Google Maps, Microsoft, Nokia and Apple have all introduced maps and mapping products. The enthusiasm of these technology giants for mapping is best described by Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley when he says maps are the bridge between our physical and digital worlds.

He is right. While Crowley has always wanted to build Harry Potter’s magical map, it seems Google has built something for today. “Maps is the interface,” said Bernhard Seefeld, Google Maps Product Management Director, who pointed out that the passive information alone makes the new maps richer and deeper.

Bernhard Seefeld, Google Maps Product Management Director

It takes a few seconds to realize that the key to these new maps is interweaving various disparate streams of data — from restaurant reviews to places of interest to transit maps. The usage of the maps — especially when logged into Google — is going to make the experience of the maps better.

It is pretty obvious that data is going to be a key part of building user experience in tomorrow’s apps and the new Google Maps is a good early example of that. For instance, when plotting a route, the new Maps shows you all options — walking/biking, public transit and driving — and highlights the time it will take you to get there using different routes. It also tells you when the next bus or subway is going to come.

You can do all of that on Google Maps today, but this is now just a simple, one click experience. It seems after years and years of collecting data, Google is finally putting that data to work.

Little things that matter

Search is front and center of this new product. The big, bold graphical interface is inviting and attractive. The new Google Maps web app is packed with dozens of minute but important design improvements that are meant to make using maps immersive and simple. In its official blog post announcing the new product, the company’s spokesperson writes:

In addition to a customized map, we’ve also made it easier to find and discover the best local places. Search results are labeled directly on the map with brief descriptions and icons that highlight business categories and other useful information like restaurants that are recommended by your Google+ friends. Info cards provide helpful information such as business hours, ratings and reviews so you can quickly decide where to eat, drink and play.

I got a chance to take a closer look at Google Maps before today’s launch and was impressed by the subtle design touches. For instance, the new maps takes a lot of inspiration from old print maps (in an atlas) where the changing landscape and different bodies of water (lakes, rivers, seas and oceans) had different hues. The colors of the mountains, deserts, plains and grasslands were different in those maps. Google has taken some of those elements and incorporated them in their new maps.

There are more subtle changes: the fonts are different, cleaner and more legible. When you plot a route, the roads taken become more prominent while the rest of the map fades into the background. Smaller bylanes that are unmarked become more prominent and their names legible. Yes, these are little things, but when you are lost, these little things matter. (We’ll be diving into the little design things that matter at our RoadMap event in November in San Francisco — sign up here to get first access to our tickets that will go on sale this Summer).

For instance, there is a carousel at the bottom of the screen that brings together all sorts of images — Street View, Business Photos and Photo Tours — and gives you an easy view into the venue or location you might be visiting. These stitched together photo tours are pretty awe-inspiring and in some cases you feel like you are almost there. This stitching together is based on proprietary Google technology. And then there is the whole Google Earth 3D app packed right into the Google Maps (as long as you are using a WebGL compliant browser.) Just play with it and you will know what I am saying.

Of course, this is Google, so it has to be about the ads. Even the ads are native and tightly integrated into the overall offering — not offensive, intrusive or out of place. The focus is on more action-oriented advertising such as making hotel reservations. Even in a few minutes it became obvious that there is a certain blurring of the lines between what is actual information and what is advertising. I guess, that suits Google’s mercantile goals.

Privacy nightmare?

While Google likes to say that it will have our “friend’s recommendations” and social signals in the new apps, in all honesty they are unlikely to have that information. I don’t use Google+ and neither do others who are happily poking away on Facebook.

What Google will do, however is use brute force machine power to make best guesses about our likes and favorites, and in doing so, they will make the same mistake others make: they will have built a product that lacks empathy.

Google, for instance will know where we live and where we work — after all, we are going to mark those spots and use those markers to find things to do and roads to drive on. It will also know where we are going, how we are going there and when we are going. And this brings up the same privacy issues I have with Facebook and its Home (and other mobile apps.)  And just like my ongoing skepticism of Facebook’s ability to do the right thing, I am pretty sure Google is going to put profit before people. That conversation is for another day, perhaps.

So what do I think?

Ever since Google search was integrated into the browser, I have lost a reason to go to do search on Google.com. But I am very likely to make the new Google Maps as my starting point on Google.com. While a 15-minute demo doesn’t mean a hit product, it is safe to say that this is a worthy upgrade and it showcases Google’s core competencies: putting its big infrastructure and data to work. It also highlights that when it comes to mapping, Apple is not even close to catching up.

What is more disappointing is that the new Google mapping experience isn’t available on the mobile devices as maps are more useful when on the go. Let’s just hope we don’t have to wait eight years for the mobile version of these new Maps.

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Crowley, who like all founders is running a million miles a minute, took a moment to bask in the glow of positive reviews for the new version of the software. Obviously, not everyone likes it, but as a long-time member of Foursquare, I like the simpler interface that marries discovery, search and check-ins for a glance-able and quick interaction.

There are doubters — actually, there are many who are convinced about the inevitable failure of Foursquare. I am not one of them. I actually like using the service. I am a believer, and I’m not afraid to say it. Because it is indeed the way of the future. Sure, Dennis gets spanked publicly for not doing a good job, but that doesn’t mean he is wrong about the marriage of digital and physical.

While some people may have been surprised by this new Foursquare, Crowley and his cohorts have been fairly consistent about their vision of the world and what Foursquare has to do. He and I talked about this three years ago, and it has taken them a long time to get there. There is a ways to go before Dennis can get to his “Harry Potter’s Map” dream.

The positive reviews and the buzz of the new release are going to last a few days, and then it will be back to the grind for him. The grind that consumes all founders completely. The grind that means managing a big company. The grind that means parting ways with your co-founder. The grind that means dealing with constant naysaying, haters and giants who exist to copy your ideas, poach your people and generally make you miserable.

Those of you who have started a company know what I am talking about — the constant, daily upheaval of emotions. There are days when you don’t want to get out of bed, when you whimper without tears and then shake it all off because deep down you know you would rather be doing this than something else. Founders live to capture lightning in the bottle: sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but we still keep trying. And that is the part the non-builders don’t get.

Building things that are different, inventing the future and creating a real business is a long and often very lonely slog. But you don’t hear about that. Instead what you get is a lot of babble about startups from so-called mentors, advisors and startup gurus. Peel away their sharkskin and you find they have never started a company, and they continue to live in the reflective glory of the company that once employed them. Others are the creation of social media, having struck a pose. And some are born consultants. They find willing listeners among a growing army of entrepreneurs who like enterprenuership as a lifestyle. Sorry guys, entrepreneurship isn’t a lifestyle, it is life.

This spectacle of technology has attracted fake messiahs, and every day I see this mockery of entreprenuership. I overhear it in coffee shops. I am forced to confront it on social media. And I have to remind myself of Pandora founder Tim Westergren, who sacrificed it all to see his bet finally pay off after more than a decade of struggle. I like to think of Aaron Levie, who returns my email at 3:52 a.m. — a minute after I’ve pinged him. And I think of my friend Paul Evans, who has gambled it all on his company, Shareband.

Ask Dennis what it is all about, and he will tell you: seeing someone check into a location, finding a tip and then acting on it.

That moment is what gets you ready for tomorrow — when all hell breaks loose and the second guessing starts all over again.

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But now, more than four years after the startup launched at SXSW and more than $70 million in venture funding later, it seems gamification isn’t enough to keep Foursquare going. The company is rapidly embracing the concept of local search, launching a new version on Wednesday morning that highlights the “Explore” tab as a primary focus, and making clear that the quintessential Foursquare experience is no longer about being mayor of something: Foursquare wants to be your personalized version of Yelp.

“We’re crunching all our data to show the best of what’s nearby, anywhere in the world, the second you open up the app,” the company wrote Wednesday.

The app looks substantially different than before, eliminating the different tabs at the bottom that used to let users navigate from check-ins to search to profile, and instead creating one primary feed. The new design has a large check-in button at the bottom, and shows the Explore tab at the top of the main screen. It places more emphasis on where your friends are checking in nearby, and popular businesses at the moment.

Foursquare has been moving toward local search as its primary focus over the course of the last two years or so. Foursquare first launched the “Explore” tab in March 2011, allowing users to discover businesses nearby, but didn’t add a desktop equivalent until January 2012, when the company started to get serious about the feature. In October, the company opened up the search engine to everyone on the web, not just registered users, and CEO Dennis Crowley explained that they wanted users to start seeing Foursquare as more than just a place for check-ins. The company established an American Express partnership in June allowing customers to link their credit cards to unlock deals, and expanded tools for local merchants.

But it’s not just that Foursquare is tired of the whole mayor business — local search presents more opportunities to make money, and Foursquare needs to make money. A report in The Wall Street Journal in November said that Foursquare’s investors, who have put $20 million in June 2010 and then another $50 million in June 2011 into the company, wanted to see more growth than the company was experiencing. Despite bringing in more than $70 million dollars, Foursquare still only had about 8 million active users at the time, which isn’t all that substantial for a four year old company (Twitter now has more than 200 million active users, for comparison). And reports said it was bringing in only $2 million in revenue for 2012 – even after all of the new tactics for improving local search to make money.

So what’s the solution? Clearly, it’s to double down on local search.

“One of the challenges is to get people to think about Foursquare less as points and badges and more about local search and discovery,” Crowley explained to GigaOM back in October. “We really see Foursquare as reinventing ourselves with local search and recommendations. We’ve been telling users for a long time and now we can tell the same story and illustrate it for folks.”

The move presents challenges, obviously, in that Yelp is a clearly established leader in this market, and has a serious head start in convincing most businesses to set up pages there. However, Foursquare does add a social element to its business discovery that isn’t as much of a focus for Yelp. While Yelp has built a business around reviews, which are social to a certain extent, and interaction with reviewers, if I open Foursquare right now I’ll immediately see what businesses my friends have recommended. And for some people, a friend’s suggestion could be more powerful than a five star Yelp review.

Foursquare made one of the most high-profile attempts at re-building local commerce around the idea of loyal customers through app check-ins, but it seems that convincing people outside of Silicon Valley to check into their favorite establishments hasn’t worked. And without mass participation, that’s not a big enough audience to build a profitable business. Steve Wozniak might continue to maintain his mayorship of several Baskin Robbins, and the company will need people to continue checking in to build its data.

But for Foursquare, it’s time to start checking into more traditional forms of gathering revenue with discounts and desktop search.

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As CEO Dennis Crowley explained at GigaOM’s recent Mobilize conference, Foursquare is quickly evolving from a simple check-in service to one that’s aggregating the best of local businesses to challenge traditional search recommendation tools like Yelp or Google. Friday’s announcement that the company will partner with popular restaurant booking service Open Table is just another step in that direction, allowing users to check out menus and book reservations right from the app.

Personally, I was never a huge Foursquare fan until I moved to San Francisco this year. I didn’t understand the point of becoming “mayor” of something, or seeing where my friends were hanging out. But living in a new city, I found that Foursquare is actually a pretty good resource for finding nearby restaurants and businesses when I don’t know the area well, often much better than Yelp, which provides an overwhelming amount of information. I like the more limited options that Foursquare suggests, and it’s helpful to see what local friends have recommended.

A big part of Foursquare’s increasing utility is the recently-updated “Explore” feature, which allows a user to search the nearby area for popular restaurants or stores, partly based on where someone’s friends have checked in, but also based on Foursquare check-ins overall. At Mobilize, Crowley noted that the site’s 25 million active users have produced more than 2.5 billion check-ins, a staggering amount of data that can inform recommendations for others. The company has already worked to monetize the app through promoted suggestions in the Explore tab, so connecting users from searching to booking seems like a logical step.

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On the one hand, people were happy. A small company that had built up a strong following with a great iOS product had made some money — with The Verge reporting that the deal was worth something up to $25 million.

On the other, people were disappointed. The news that the app would effectively be discontinued, and the team absorbed into Gmail, left many cold. BoingBoing’s Rob Beschizza had a wry take, while Daring Fireball’s John Gruber summed at least part of it up in a brief note:

Congratulations to the Sparrow guys, I guess, but this gives me The Fear for Sparrow’s future. Hope you like Apple Mail.

I can understand that bittersweet feeling — as a Sparrow user myself, I felt something similar. But ultimately, isn’t it really just hipsterish posing? At its worst moments, the backlash smacks of the disdain that only those with no real skin in the game can afford. “Oh no,” they weep, sipping on a PBR. “My favorite indie band sold out and got a big contract: I hate them now,” before their attention goes somewhere else and they forget about the episode entirely.

Not everyone thought it was a bad thing, though. iOS developer Matt Gemmell put forward his forthright opinion — that those complaining about Sparrow’s sale were not just issuing “predictable squawking” but that they were acting like spoiled children.

Sparrow doesn’t owe you anything. You paid, you got software. They can sell and/or kill it if they want. No right to complain. Sad, true.

— Matt Gemmell (@mattgemmell) July 20, 2012

He’s largely correct. But does that make the disappointment invalid? Or just human? Software consultant Rian van der Merwe added some nuance to the argument by pointing out that part of the backlash may be because it undermines a strong philosophy in the indie community:

We’ve chanted this refrain wherever we could: If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold. We point to Facebook and Delicious and ad-supported sites and lament the fact that we’re all just a set of eyeballs being sold to advertisers. So we came up with a solution. We decided that we don’t want to be free users any more. We decided that we want to pay independent developers directly so that they can have sustainable businesses and happy lives […] But with Sparrow’s acquisition the cracks in the philosophy starts to appear.

That may be true to a degree: people don’t like having their philosophies challenged.

But let’s be honest, Sparrow may have been a great email app, but it was still just an email app used by a small community. It may have made some profit in the long run, but it was a venture-funded business that was also limited by its very nature.

For me, at least, there was a different and more particular reason for the purchase that gave me a sad little twinge. It’s not just that Sparrow will no longer be developed or supported: it’s that the talent on display at Sparrow may not actually make its way into Google’s products.

After all, the history of Google acquisitions, particularly the smaller ones, is not great. When it bought location-based game Dodgeball in 2005, it quickly sidelined the project. Founder Dennis Crowley left after years of frustration and resurrected the idea with Foursquare. Feedburner, a $100 million acquisition in 2007, has been pretty much left to rot.

And the list goes on: Slide.com, Aardvark, Jaiku… Even Google executives themselves have admitted that a third of its acquisitions fail. Given that track record, it’s hard to shake the feeling that Google is the place where great startups go to die.

Talent acquisitions are interesting and can pay great dividends for founders. But where Google is involved they can just as often turn sour, go nowhere and end with the founding team leaving and effectively doing the same project all over again. Let’s hope for Sparrow — and for email users everywhere — it doesn’t do a Dodgeball.

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It was worse than the Wild Wild West, he said in an interview with GigaOM this week, explaining his reluctance at the time. But then something changed: the iPhone.

The iPhone only offered web apps when it debuted in 2007. But the powerful hardware and unique user interface lit a fire of demand among developers for a software development kit. Apple obliged a year later and also introduced the App Store, kicking off the modern mobile app era. That market is now worth $8.5 billion and is expected to grow to $46 billion in 2016.

As we celebrate the five anniversary of the iPhone’s launch on Friday, the true impact of the device can’t be measured without talking about the era of mobile apps it spawned, creating success stories like Instagram, Angry Birds, Foursquare and many others. Suddenly, “apps” became an easy way of understanding software, opening up opportunities to thousands of eager developers who could sell directly to a fast growing base of users. And that has in turn changed the way people compute, weaning them off of PCs to smaller devices: first smartphones, and now tablets.

“Everything got flipped on its head (with the iPhone),” said Crowley, who has built a business worth an estimated $600 million thanks to the iPhone. “This app ecosystem has been built from scratch and now anyone from a 30,000 organization to a 10 person team can create things that are valuable to all. You could have never imagined this.”

Tapping into apps

Apple’s App Store now boasts 650,000 apps, including 225,000 for the iPad. Apple users have downloaded 30 billion apps from the App Store, generating $5 billion in revenue for developers after Apple’s 30 percent cut. To be sure, there were mobile apps prior to the iPhone, but they were either found on third-party app stores or they were controlled by carriers, which chose which apps got to appear on phones sold for their networks.

That market was so quiet, it really didn’t attract a big community of developers, said Ge Wang, the co-founder of music app maker Smule. But he said the combination of the iPhone’s great hardware, the SDK and development tools, a critical mass of users and the distribution power of the App Store suddenly opened a lot of eyes, from experienced PC developers to newbies excited at the possibilities. They quickly realized they could make a new form of portable and casual software that addressed the mobile lives of users.

“More than anything else in the last 20 years, (the iPhone) made people feel that it was possible, and not that hard, to take an idea and turn it into a piece of software that could be distributed to 100 countries around the world,” said Wang, whose company now boasts 60 employees and has generated 50 million app downloads. “I guess it’s not surprising that this happened, but the magnitude and speed [at which] it all happened is still shocking.”

Apple’s App Store isn’t the only marketplace for mobile software. Android also launched in 2008 and introduced the Android Market, now renamed Google Play, which now hosts 600,000 apps with more than 20 billion app downloads. The mobile app market earlier this year eclipsed 1 million apps overall, with platforms like Windows Phone and BlackBerry struggling to catch up.

It’s hard to quantify the exact impact of the mobile app market but according to one study, 466,000 jobs were generated by iOS, Android and Facebook apps. TechNet, a technology group, reported that 311,000 app-related jobs were created and another 155,000 jobs were indirectly created from the app boom. Whether that’s completely accurate is difficult to know but the impact has been dramatic, said Marco Arment, the former Tumblr CTO who built Instapaper into a profitable company.

“The App Store has made it very easy for far more developers than ever before to make a living by working independently,” Arment told me.

Apps create opportunities

And it’s also spawning a new market for app developer services, everything from app discovery, monetization and distribution to back-end support, retention tools and analytics. Advertisers have also found a new way to reach consumers via mobile ads in apps and on mobile websites. eMarketer expects mobile advertising revenues to hit $1.8 billion this year and will grow to $10.8 billion by 2016.

“The growth of the app economy has given marketers new environments to engage their target audiences, and mobile advertising has become the growth driver that enables developers to monetize and further grow the ecosystem,” said Matt Gillis, SVP of Global Monetization Solutions for Millennial Media.

The whole app era has also changed the way people approach the Internet. Increasingly people are spending more time in connected apps than in a browser, using dedicated commerce, search, entertainment and news apps to do what used to take place in a browser. App analytics firm Flurry noted that earlier this year that people are spending an average 94 minutes in apps a day compared to 72 minutes in a mobile or desktop browser.

Apple didn’t just help create the larger mobile app market, it also helped shape what users have come to expect from a mobile app and an app store. That leadership role, along with a great store, stellar hardware and the returns developers see from investing in iOS, has helped keep developers loyal to iOS over Android and other platforms. Even now, iOS holds a 3-1 advantage in revenue for developers over Android, making it the primary platform for the development for most developers. That has helped fuel sales of the iPhone and iPad, which are known for the quality of their apps. And over time, the investment people make in apps for the iPhone and iPad also serve to lock-in many users into the platform.

The iPhone is now being outsold by Android, which is also closing the gap on Apple’s app lead. Microsoft and Research in Motion are also still trying to compete by touting their developer ecosystems, although they might be moving in different directions. All are trying to recreate the success Apple has had with mobile apps because they realize the truth Apple brought to light. The modern era of mobile computing has been defined by software, not hardware.

Ki-Mae Heussner contributed to this report.

Please check out the rest of our stories on the fifth anniversary of the iPhone, collected here.

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I was reminded of New York’s role in the emerging big data ecosystem over the weekend, when I was catching up with my weekly reading.

• eBay, which had acquired Hunch in November 2011, is now building out its operations in New York with a new 35,000 square-foot office, Ryan Kim reported last week. ”When fully built out, a majority of the workers will be developers, data scientists and statisticians,” he added.
• Microsoft has hired a bunch of former Yahoo researchers in New York.

Steve Lohr of The New York Times wrote about Microsoft:

The group’s research focuses in large part on the application of advanced computing tools to the social sciences. It is a fast-growing field fueled by the vast new data sources of the Web, social-network communications and from sensor-equipped devices like smartphones. The potential is enormous, as Google and Facebook prove. But Microsoft has trailed so far.

Beyond these two recent announcements, there are several other startups that are experimenting with data. Take URL shortener, Bit.ly, for example. The service, which is based in Manhattan, is creating new news reader experiences based on the data it collects and from the social context that data carries. Businessweek writes:

This year, Bitly is introducing a suite of data products for professionals developed in part by Mason and her team of six scientists and engineers. One, dubbed Bitly Realtime, tracks terms that receive sudden bursts of attention. Another is a reputation-monitoring system. The goal of the products is “to give people a Spidey sense about what’s going on on the Internet that’s relevant to them,” says Mason.

Hilary Mason, who is the chief scientist at Bit.ly told me that in “New York we are more interested in telling stories” from of data as opposed to how “big” the data is, or what database technology you happen to use, Mason told us. “This is how businesses, marketers, and social scientists need to think about data to make rational decisions.”

New York has a long history of learning from data, thanks to the quantitive revolution that swept Wall Street. Financial services, was the first real big data vertical, and quants were Wall Street’s data scientists. The markets for tradable instruments, high-volume and high-velocity data streams all came from Wall Street. (Actually, that was the rationale behind why we host our Structure: Data conference in New York.)

Mason believes that New York can leverage big data to its advantage. From art to fashion to media, New York has enough creative talent to be able to ask the right questions from the data. A good example is the Explore feature on Foursquare, which co-founder Dennis Crowley calls the “big data driven recommendation engine for the real world.” (Here is a presentation of technology behind Explore that is pretty cool.)

Similar startups such as Knod.es are helping make sense of social data as well. For instance, the startup sucks in your social data across platforms and let you ask questions like “Who do I know who likes cheeseburgers in Paris?”

“There are a bunch of interesting things happening in NYC, not all of which are startups,” Mason says, singling out Wes McKinney’s the Pandas Project, which is a time-series analysis system drawn from his experience in finance. Mason calls it “awesome.”

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“Have you tried Highlight yet?” was a familiar refrain around Austin over the past weekend. And for those who hadn’t tried it out, there was the inevitable discussion — and confusion — as one party attempted to explain the concept to another. Once the app was demoed from one user to another, the question would be asked: “So why would I want to do this?” Maybe not everybody had that experience, but I saw this interaction unfold enough times that it seemed more than a few people were unsure of the ultimate use case of these applications, which include startups like Glancee, banjo, Sonar and Glassmap.

That’s hardly fatal, of course. It wasn’t readily apparent why someone might want to broadcast his or her location data when Foursquare first hit the scene, except maybe to Dennis Crowley and a few of his friends. And people were really confused about the utility of a platform that limited communications to 140 characters at a time when Twitter first started. Use cases develop, and the utility of applications and platforms become understood over time. Despite glowing reviews that each received at the time, I doubt the inevitable success of those platforms was etched in stone due to SXSW.

Which is why I think this question of who “won” the festival is so interesting. Erin Griffith has a thought-provoking piece on Pando Daily in which she gives some pretty good reasons why there wasn’t a breakout startup this year: Basically, all the geo-local hype that’s been dished out has created more noise than signal. The event is bigger, there are more startups than ever, and there are more apps coming out that are basically all doing the same thing.

So I think it’s too early to call winners and losers. If you really want to know who won, wait a few weeks. Maybe a few months or a year. Let’s see which of the apps that launched around SXSW gets downloaded by more than just a few tens of thousands of early adopters who descended on Austin for five days in March.

There are certainly some cases where press success stories become mainstream phenomena. Foursquare got a lot of glowing press during SXSW 2009, as did Twitter a few years earlier. But the first time I knew Foursquare “won” was the moment I checked into my parents’ local grocery store in suburban South Jersey and saw that it had a mayor. That experience showed that it wasn’t just the digital media set on the coasts and in major metropolitan areas that were using the app to signal whichever bar they had just arrived at. It showed that Foursquare was also being used by regular folks and in pretty banal places. But that was about a year, year-and-a-half after SXSW 2009.

At the same time, there have been just as many tech startups that have been lauded by the tech press but just never caught on. Hot Potato, for instance, was pushing the limits of social, location-based messaging and sharing around SXSW 2010, but failed to resonate with mainstream users. It ended up settling for a relatively modest acquisition by Facebook.

That said, just because users don’t quite “get it” right now doesn’t mean the SoLoMo segment is doomed. Ambient awareness seems to have legs, and there are good reasons to believe there will be consumer demand for this type of app in the future. And let’s remember that Foursquare was also considered creepy once upon a time, and that Twitter was ridiculed for being stupid until users saw real value from using it.

There will most likely be a winner at SXSW 2012, have no fear. We’ll just be placing that label on whichever startup it is as soon as it’s clear that the app has real user traction and isn’t going away anytime soon.

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Fab.com co-founders Jason Goldberg and Bradford Shellhammer

A year ago, Fab.com got a new lease on life, pivoting to become a design sales site after a lackluster showing in its first incarnation as Fabulis, a gay social network. As you might have read, this year has been huge for Fab, which is now up to 2.5 million members and is on pace to bring in $100 million this year in revenue.

But what stood out to me was the backstory of the restart for Fab. Jason Goldberg, the founder and CEO said in a blog post that the company repositioned itself after realizing that it needed to focus on what the team was passionate about and was in a position to succeed at. And that, they decided after 20 minutes of discussion, was design. A social network was not, in fact, what they loved doing. It was yet another reminder for me that entrepreneurs, as skilled as they may be, need to care deeply about what they’re building to be able to build it.

It might seem intuitive or obvious that if you’re going to stake your life to a new startup, you might as well do what you love. But that lesson can get lost in the quest to build a successful start-up. That’s what happened with Fab, Goldberg told me. He said he initially built something for him and his friends but realized he was really just chasing an opportunity. Goldberg told me in an email:

It was driven from being opportunistic, not from pure passion. I think a lot of people often mistake opportunity for passion. Too many people are passionate about building a business vesus being passionate about building this business.

Not built to flip

Or as former AOL co-founder Steve Case told GigaOM in an interview last year, some entrepreneurs are looking at building businesses they can flip quickly, rather than committing to something they love. ”A lot of people are starting businesses because they think it’s an opportunity to make some money,” Case said. “You occasionally get lucky, but that doesn’t really work. You have to be passionate about it.”

Kickstarter co-founder Perry Chen

The misunderstanding can sometimes come from the signals entrepreneurs receive from investors. Charlie O’Donnell, a former principal at First Round Capital who started his own fund called Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, recalled his regret passing on Kickstarter when he first met co-founder Perry Chen in 2008. In a blog post, he said he was caught up on the murky details about how Kickstarter was going to build a business and a roadmap. But he didn’t key in on the “why” behind founder Chen’s quest to build Kickstarter. He said after hearing Simon Sinek’s TED Talk he realized that people don’t buy “what” you do, they buy “why” you do it. And Chen, to his credit, kept plugging away on his idea.

I didn’t understand how important that pattern was at the time, but now, four years later, I get it.  Nowadays, one of the first things I ask someone is why they do what they do.  I used to ask it out of curiousity, but now I get how important that is to the success of your business.

Getting the passion thing right can mean the difference between success and mediocrity — or even failure. Billy Chasen, founder of Turntable.fm, recounted the story in November behind his start-up, which began life as Stickybits, a QR-code provider. He said he made the decision after losing interest in QR codes and what the company was doing with it. But what really excited him was music, which led to Turntable.fm, even though Stickybits was a modest success.

When passion meets opportunity…

Simply having passion doesn’t guarantee anything. But the opposite can be true too. You can have a great opportunity and a solid team, but if you don’t have a burning passion and a vision, things can get muddled quickly and the drive can desert you. As Goldberg points out, he needed to find a place where his passion was matched with a market ripe for disruption and a belief that Fab could be the best at what it does.

Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley

Looking at companies like Twitter and Square under Jack Dorsey or Foursquare under Dennis Crowley, you can see founders who are locked in on a passionate goal. They may not know all the details of how it will unfold but they know what they want to see ultimately because they’ve been obsessing about their ideas for a long time. As Crowley told me recently, one of the reasons why Foursquare has been able to separate from other location-based rivals is because he and many others in the core team have been ruminating on location for years. This is built into the company’s DNA and guides its direction.

Again, passion is not the only ingredient to success, but trying to build a successful business without it is tough. If you can align work and passion, the payoff can be rewarding, said Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham in blog post several years ago:

Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it’s rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or forties. But if you have the destination in sight you’ll be more likely to arrive at it. If you know you can love work, you’re in the home stretch, and if you know what work you love, you’re practically there.

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The latest example is the introduction of its Explore recommendation and search function to the website. Now users can get personalized search results and recommendations on places to go based on their preferences, tastes and those of their friends. I’ve used this a lot and found it’s a helpful way to discover new places that are connected to restaurants I already like or have been recommended to me because of my connections to friends. Foursquare uses the 1.5 billion check-ins of its users as well as their tips to guide suggestions.

Explore, which debuted in March last year on Foursquare’s mobile apps, can search beyond your immediate area, so users can plan ahead. And there’s more real estate on screen so users can see venue information and also add places to their to-do list. Users can conduct in-depth searches for particular things and also search Foursquare tips for specific references to items. There are also filters that let people refine their search. People can search by:

• “I haven’t been to yet”
• “I have been to before”
• “My friends have been to”
• “Have Foursquare specials”

Explore is part of Foursquare’s larger goal to become more than just a repository for check-ins, but a powerful tool for discovering the world, something co-founder Dennis Crowley has talked about a lot in the past. Check-ins are the first step but now people are understanding Foursquare as a place for tips, recommendations and deals.

But what’s interesting to me is that Foursquare really began as a mobile-first start-up, with the website more of an afterthought. But in November, it redesigned its site, building in a big map that allowed people to discover things nearby and creating updated venue pages. That followed improvements to the list feature, which allowed people to build their own lists from the website. The site also started recommending things for visitors based on the time of day they stopped by. And it added a tool for discovering lists, not just creating them.

Increasingly, many web services are finding big business in moving to mobile. But for mobile apps like Foursquare, there’s also a lot of opportunity in beefing up their desktop web presence. Foursquare now gets 1 million visitors a day to its website.

“We’ve always been a mobile-first company,” said Alex Rainert, Foursquare’s head of product. “And most of the new stuff we’ve launched until mid-last year was mobile first or mobile only. But there are things that we want to do that are better suited for the experience on the desktop web.

“We like to design for people, place and time and location will be no. 1 for us. By and large most of those things will be mobile-first, but certain things like curating and creating can be easier on the web. We don’t want to treat the web as an afterthought.”

Rainert said users really responded well to the redesign of the website in November, particularly to the local map function. While the activity on the mobile apps is still far more than on the web site, he sees a way for mobile and the web to work together more closely, as people get alerted to things through mobile and get referred to the web version.

By becoming more of a web tool, Foursquare can help become a trip planner for people looking to travel or just head across town. It also pits Foursquare against other big web properties like Yelp or Zagat, which is now owned by Google. And it also shows how Foursquare can become more than just a check-in service. Sitting on top of so much data and becoming a resource for people looking to find where to go can ultimately open up new business models for Foursquare, which has to turn a profit.

The world is still going mobile but for companies that were mobile to begin with, there’s still plenty of opportunity improve the desktop web as well.

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