The massive amount of data that is emerging from connected, digital systems, is fundamentally changing everything, from Internet search to entertainment, to disease management, to energy consumption. Here’s 10 case studies that highlight the power of big data. Read more »
Time Magazine is offering some special content to Foursquare users who check in at the Republican National Convention in Tampa in August or… Read more at paidContent »
UPDATED: Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai is likely leaving the company. Selvadurai and Dennis Crowley started Foursquare together. Selvadurai worked on the first Foursquare iPhone app. The reasons for his leaving the company are not clear just yet. Foursquare has nearly 15 million users. Read more »
Mobile deals combine location-aware discounts with mobile marketing campaigns. What are the largest pitfalls in this promising space, though? Privacy and security issues must be addressed to assure consumers their purchases are secure and their location is being closely guarded. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
A week after mobile social network Path found itself in the tech industry spotlight for uploading iOS contacts without explicit permission,… Read more at paidContent »
Foursquare has updated its Android app to include support for tap-and-go check-ins and P2P sharing using NFC. The app will now be able to read NFC tags at a location and immediately take a user to a venue page, where they can check-in. Read more »
New York City kicked off voting on Thursday on its third annual BigApps competition, which rewards apps that use its open data sets. But one of the most popular resources appears to be Foursquare, which is in use in more than half of the top apps. Read more »
This report outlines the myriad issues at play in Facebook’s move, from examining how CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to rewire the world to understanding the company’s infrastructure dependency. But from every angle, it’s clear the effects will ripple throughout the startup and tech communities. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
If you’re like many of us, you’re already thinking over some New Year’s resolutions that will make you a better “you” in 2012. But how are the tech industries’ thought leaders approaching the new year? We asked 12 of them for their resolutions. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
A Finnish company called Walkbase is looking to bring to market a very simple and scalable solution for indoor positioning that can help map out rooms using crowd-sourced data and smart algorithms. It’s showing off its technology with a new auto Foursquare check-in app called Checked. Read more »
From SOPA to Microsoft’s expanded Xbox live platform to cloud-based content storage from Apple and Google, the fourth quarter in consumer electronics and media was all about the continued battle for digital living room dominance. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The fourth quarter may have lacked a dominating big-event product announcement like Q3’s Facebook platform extension or Q2’s unveiling of Google+, but the NewNet world continued to buzz along. In the battle for mind share, everyone wanted to be a platform. Meanwhile, consumer and social technologies continued to gain momentum, and new vehicles for content and service discovery presented both challenges and opportunities for NewNet companies. And it is hard to ignore the overcrowded but growing world of daily deals. This quarterly report analyzes these trends and others, and it also provides a near-term outlook of trends, technologies and companies to watch in 2012. Companies mentioned in the report include Amazon, Facebook and Socialcast. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Foursquare today introduced its Explore recommendation and search function to its desktop website. The company, which began as a mobile app, is finding new opportunity in beefing up its web presence and leveraging all of its check-in data, recommendations and tips. Read more »
About two years ago, Fred Wilson and I were talking about which startups we found interesting and I mentioned offhandedly that Foursquare wa… Read more at paidContent »
Dennis Crowley, the CEO of FourSquare, explains how as a company grows, the chain of communication changes and it’s a difficult balance to make sure the company can be as transparent with 100 people as it is with 20 people. Read more »
In what purists see as capitulation to attention deficit disorder, several Boston theaters plan to offer special “tweet seats” for cell-phone wielding patrons. Boston is following in the footsteps of venues like the Palm Beach Opera and Norma Terris Theater that already breached the tweet/no-tweet divide. Read more »
Mainstream mobile users have been slow to embrace location-based services. But location apps could really see a boost through the smart use of voice activated AI systems like Siri, which can help users more easily unlock the world around them. Read more »
At last week’s MongoSV conference in Santa Clara, Calif., a number of users shared their experiences with the MongoDB NoSQL database. One common theme: NoSQL is necessary for a lot of use cases, but it’s not for companies afraid of hard work. Read more »
Gowalla has had a good run in the location-based check-in market, taking on Foursquare before getting lapped by its New York rival. Now, Facebook is confirming it has bought the team behind Austin-based Gowalla to bolster its new Timeline feature. Read more »
If your company has a cloud application with a predictable audience size or one that is costing you more than $25,000 a month to host, you may want to consider maintaining a private cloud. This paper provides an overview of the factors that decision makers who are developing a public-to-private cloud-migration strategy should consider, recognizing that public versus private cloud strategy is not an all-or-nothing proposition. It also details pitfalls that must be avoided along the way and provides a case study of Zynga, a company that has found a way to use both the private and public clouds to create a hybrid solution. Companies mentioned in this report include Akamai, Foursquare, Nimbula and ARM. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Today there is a far greater chance that ordinary folks can bring, say, the next MMO to market. What’s changed? The arrival of specialized Platform-as-a-Service. Lisa Petrucci of Joyent explains why it’s easier than ever to innovate. Read more »
“Save to Foursquare” buttons now appear alongside web content at New York magazine, *Time* Out, and a variety of other publishers, allowing… Read more at paidContent »
Fondu, a New York start-up, is launching its mobile app on iOS today, introducing a purpose-built mobile social network designed specifically for discovering places through friends. It mixes some of Yelp’s structure with Foursquare’s tips and Twitter’s short messages. Read more »
When it comes to the promise of data as the currency of the web, the current state of affairs has privacy advocates and many consumers up in arms. But it doesn’t have to be the one-sided affair it is today, in which companies have all the data and all the rights, and we shouldn’t have to be afraid of who’s doing what with our information. With laws, products, practices and education, data can become a far more valuable currency than cash ever was. Keeping that in mind, this research note examines five issues that must be addressed by policy makers and entrepreneurs so that they can deliver on our data-driven digital future. Companies mentioned in this report include Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Thirty years after Steve Jobs and Bill Gates revolutionized personal computing, there’s a new generation of entrepreneurs focused on bringing people together. Folks like Zuckerberg, Dorsey and Crowley are leading the charge in changing the way people communicate andinteract with each other. Read more »
Connectivity changes everything. That’s the credo driving just about every corner of our day-to-day lives. As human beings, we are now connected to one another through not just our social networks but also our cars, the books we read, the albums we download and even our own health and wellness habits (to name just a few areas). With that in mind, GigaOM Pro has singled out certain areas in the technology industry where we see this shift to constant connectivity taking place most drastically. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Investors are not the only ones who see Groupon (NSDQ: GRPN) as a money maker these days. In a lawsuit filed today, a California company is… Read more at paidContent »
Foursquare is poised to relaunch its Add to Foursquare feature as Save to Foursquare in the next month. It will allow users on the web to save locations to their Foursquare app when they use an embeddable button, which has been simplified for publishers. Read more »
Foursquare probably can’t grow forever on the backs of those who like sharing their location with their friends, and Apple’s new iOS 5 has g… Read more at paidContent »
Foursquare has launched a new version of its mobile application for the iPhone, Foursquare 4.0. The biggest change in Foursquare 4.0 is the addition of an opt-in feature called Radar, which is made available by the latest version of Apple’s iOS mobile operating system, iOS5. Read more »
Last quarter’s big headline in social media and real-time technologies came from Google, which launched Google+, its first social tech product that seems legit. In the third quarter, things were back to normal. Google+ is still growing, but Facebook’s platform update dominated the news. And as Google+ passed 25 million users and won some raves from the digerati, its competition with Facebook intensified. Additional companies mentioned in this report include Zynga, Salesforce, BranchOut and Foursquare. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Spending in the mobile advertising space will be approximately $4 billion worldwide this year, so despite perceptions to the contrary, we can safely assume it’s an area to watch in the coming years. To get a clearer picture of mobile advertising’s future, it helps to first explore the current landscape — the key drivers and players involved today. With these as a backdrop, a five-year outlook such as this comes into greater focus and leads to a discussion of the major players to watch as 2016 approaches. Companies mentioned in this report include Foursquare, LivingSocial and Zynga. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Last week I caught up with Naveen Selvadurai, co-founder of the New York-based startup, Foursquare. While I’ve spent a lot of time chatting with his co-founder Dennis Crowley, it was the first time I got to spend quality time with Naveen; here’s part of our conversation. Read more »
As our demand for data increases, so too do the number of mobile devices and services. Add to that the infrastructure needed to support such connectivity, and a wide, complex picture of the mobile industry emerges. This report examines the various sectors of the mobile landscape and what the future holds for each. Hardware, cloud services, mobile search, advertising, location-based services and the growing ubiquity of the Internet of Things will all play an important role in the concept of mobility as it shifts and evolves over the next several years. With the help of more than a dozen contributors, GigaOM Pro presents a comprehensive analysis of the companies and trends that will lead us into the next era of mobile. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Gowalla, like many other check-in services, has had trouble keeping pace with Foursquare. But the location startup is relaunching its service with an eye toward becoming more of a city travel guide, downplaying the role of check-ins in favor of discovery, travel and storytelling. Read more »
Today marks the launch of EchoEcho, yet another app that lets smartphone users keep track of each other. The twist here is that the Google-b… Read more at paidContent »
Google has bought restaurant ratings publisher Zagat, in a deal whose value hasn’t been disclosed. The deal helps Google bring in a source of recommendations and user generated content that meshes well with its engineering-centric culture and could boost Zagat’s profile among the digerati. Read more »
Despite the firing of Bartz, Yahoo is not out of the woods yet. It’s time for a complete face lift of Yahoo’s board. Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang needs to bring on folks who have a deeper understanding of the changes around and ahead of the company. Read more »
The Pew Internet Project found that 28 percent of American adults use some form of mobile and social location-based services to get directions, recommendations or check into a location. But Pew found that only 4 percent of adults use their phones specifically for check-ins alone. Read more »
As location-based services grow up, we’re seeing that games are not the appealing part of location and increasingly it seems like start-ups are acknowledging that games are tough to build a business on. Gowalla seemed to acknowledge that by killing its virtual items feature today. Read more »
