That’s the impression I got after listening to Crowley speak Monday at an Advertising Week event Monday. While he didn’t make the direct ad revenue comparison, he shared about how the location-based social network’s early ad product called promoted updates is doing since launching in limited trials with national retailers this past summer. He didn’t talk numbers, but he said a “high percentage” of people who are presented with promotions while searching for places or getting recommendations through Foursquare’s Explore engine are walking into the promoted stores. Foursquare didn’t provide more context around the performance of its ads.

“When someone searches with Foursquare and types in a keyword or asks what’s interesting and we put a promotion in front of them, we see a high percentage of users that went to check out this place,” Crowley said. “A lot of people don’t see it as paid advertising, that’s the best thing.”

As Foursquare has learned to harvest more and more data and turn it into tailored recommendations, it’s become more of a personalized mobile local search engine for its 25 million users. Since it not only understands what’s near a person but what is relevant to them based on their tastes, their friends’ tastes, the time of day and other signals, Foursquare is able to generate better results than a traditional search engine, said Crowley.

Foursquare, which launched in 2009, has been slow in ramping up with ad products. But Crowley said its free merchant tools have allowed businesses to contribute their own content, first with specials and more recently with news updates. That’s become a popular part of the experience for more and more users, who turn to Foursquare to save money, Crowley said. Now, with fully paid update promotions from businesses and retailers, the merchants are able to get in front of users with more targeted messages which many users are happy to accept as just more valuable content.

“People see (promoted updates) as part of the product. It’s not an ad-sponsored story or banner ad. That’s the most telling thing from our survey results: People see what will generate Foursquare money …and say that’s my favorite part of the app.”

As I wrote before, Foursquare still has a lot to do with its ad products. But the fact that it is becoming a local search engine that can close the loop, or confirm the effectiveness of an ad, through check-ins and card-synced American Express transactions is putting it in a great place to make some money.

As David Pakman, a partner at Venrock pointed out recently, not all traffic is the same. Advertisers, he predicts, will direct their spending toward transactional content that has a lot of intent and can easily convert to a purchase. That, he said, will win out over a topical content found on Facebook and Twitter, which produce content with low signals.

Chris Dixon, who is an investor in Foursquare, has also played up Foursquare’s revenue potential saying its user intent data positions it well against other social networks: ”Foursquare is the one of the few (only?) social networks with purchasing intent. Which means monetization can be non-annoying and high RPM,” he wrote in a tweet.

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The new Always On feature setting may prompt some uneasiness for the way it makes it easy for people to follow the movements of their friends. But Foursquare has previously allowed people to find their friends through the service and the data has already been available through Foursquare’s news feed.

The way it works is that a user can now visit a friend’s profile at Foursquare.com and set the Always On feature for that particular user. Then when that person checks in somewhere, the original user gets a push notification. Previously, users could only get notifications for friends checking in nearby in the same city. Now, for example, a wife can see when her husband checks into a hotel on a business trip or a person can know when their friend has started their vacation.

This is just another way to find people on Foursquare. The Nearby Friends feature was temporarily left out of Foursquare’s latest update but has been reintroduced. Foursquare also has a Radar feature that alerts users with a push-notification when their friends are nearby. Always On also shows why location can be interesting for users who are not turned off by the idea of friends and family knowing where they are.

Of course, if you somehow have an ex-boyfriend on Foursquare with you, it could be a little creepy. But you shouldn’t be friending people on Foursquare you’re not comfortable sharing your location with. That’s one of the main points of the service.

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That’s the gap that Snapette is trying to fill. The New York company, a 500 Startups alum, launched last August with a sort of Pinterest for the real world model, letting users share pictures of local products, which fellow users can discover nearby. But, now, with its latest iPhone app launching Wednesday, the service is becoming more of a resource for local merchants and brands, who can use Snapette to alert users to products they might like.

With Snapette 2.0, brands will be able to send push notifications to nearby users on products that fit their tastes or they can alert users to special offers or unique discounts. Snapette will meter and filter the push notifications so users aren’t overwhelmed by messages, particularly ones that aren’t relevant to their tastes. This gives brands a way to walk consumers right in the door and it doesn’t rely on consumers opening up the app to browse the activity feed.

In addition to the upgrades to the mobile app, Snapette is also launching a full website that offers all of the features of the mobile app, except photo uploading. And the service is now expanding beyond shoes and bags to clothes, jewelry and accessories.

The addition of push notifications builds on a transformation that was already happening, as brands and retailers have increasingly been filling the Snapette feed with pictures of their own products. Now, 40 percent of the pictures are supplied by stores. Snapette co-founder Sarah Paiji said the plan all along was to closely partner with store owners. Now that they have a base of users and more than 100 retailers and boutiques on board, the company has upgraded the way they can utilize Snapette to reach consumers. Brands will pay a monthly subscription fee to be able to push out notifications to users.

But Paiji said Snapette isn’t just about delivering offers to consumers. She said, ideally, the service will offer a mix 0f user-generated images alongside branded offers and deals, all of it discoverable by location.

“There isn’t a go-to app that helps you find stores in the real world. There’s a lot of ways to help you find food or restaurants nearby. But to find (clothing) stores nearby the best thing you might look at is Yelp. But that doesn’t include products, it’s more text. But fashion is visual; you want to see what’s what,” Paiji said.

Co-founders Sarah Paiji and Jinhee Kim

Snapette currently works with stores in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, London and Tokyo. The international reach of the app allows users to also see what what styles are trending in other cities around the world. In addition to browsing by location, users can also search by store or brand and see current trends.

Paiji started Snapette along with fellow Harvard graduate Jinhee Kim. The two have taken $1.5 million in funding so far from Shoedazzle founder Brian Lee, 500 Startups, Forerunner Ventures and others.

I like Snapette and its location-based approach to fashion. While there’s a lot of action online, the bigger opportunity is still in local commerce, helping small businesses and boutiques bring in customers. Snapette isn’t alone though. Companies like Shoptiques help bring boutiques online but also help shoppers find local products to buy. Hipswap, mostly a hipper Craigslist, also invites local merchants to join its marketplace. We are still early in the era of location-based services and there’s still a lot more that can be done to help people leverage smartphones and location to discover the world around them.

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Geo-social discovery apps were the “it” category at SXSW in March but for the most part they’ve fizzled, failing to catch on with mainstream consumers. But Banjo has been one of the lone exceptions, hitting 1 million downloads last month after launching last July, putting it on a faster initial adoption pace than Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare. The company, which helps people find friends and others nearby, has a new update and downloads are up to 1.5 million across iOS, Androidand the web.

According to App Data, Banjo has more than 500,000 monthly active users, well ahead of competitors such as Highlight with just 80,000 MAUs and Sonar with 10,000 MAUs. Glanceee, another competitor that got bought by Facebook, has 30,000 MAUs. Banjo is consistently in the top 100 of social networking apps on iOS and continues to garner solid reviews from users.

I recently sat down with Damien Patton, the founder of Banjo, to find out how his company has succeeded while others have stumbled. He said Banjo has caught on with users because it first allows users to see other people they follow or are friends with on a variety of social platforms, not just users of Facebook but also Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Instagram, Vimeo and Google. Users can get alerts when their friends are nearby. Banjo allows users to view other people around them based on their public check-ins, tweets and activities. That has made the app useful right from the start, instead of plopping someone into a lonely first-time experience. And users don’t have to give away their location just to see what’s going on around them.

Banjo founder Damien Patton

“Other competitors are based one social network but that leads to a zero-users problem,” said Patton, who had a career as a NASCAR mechanic before diving into startups. “We solved it by taking it all and putting it all into a super feed.”

Patton said Banjo has also tried to strike the right balance on privacy by using the data in a way that is consistent with what people have allowed in their own privacy settings. So only updates with publicly broadcasted location are displayed on Banjo’s map and services such as  Facebook only show direct friendships if that’s all a user has allowed. He said the service doesn’t filter by male and female or home and away.

Banjo gives people a way to understand the world around them as if they were viewing a location-based browser, said Patton. And it allows people to drill down further by searching for keywords, so people can find other users nearby who have similar interests. One of the cooler tricks for Banjo is the ability for users to not just see what’s around them but zoom into another place and view what people are saying there. That’s another reason why people have found utility in the app beyond what’s nearby. Patton said that’s key because consumers are still not grasping the value of location-based apps.

“The average person doesn’t know why location is valuable to them,” Patton said. “You can’t tell them, you have to show them.”

Banjo has also made some practical decisions to help the service take off. It launched on iOS, Android and the web instead of just starting out on iPhones. And it chose a less battery intensive approach to tracking, updating location when it feels like a person has moved a significant distance instead of persistently following someone. Those were some of the problems of Highlight, which is available only on the iPhone and has been dinged for the strain it put on batteries.

The new updates to Banjo are designed to showcase photos and make them easier to share. The feed allows for bigger pictures and there’s a new pop up tool for quickly sharing photos to different social networks. There’s also a list view to check out what’s going on nearby.

Patton said the app is still a work in progress and some of the upcoming improvements are aimed at giving people even more privacy controls. He said he’s working on giving new users the ability to see how other users are viewing them. That can alert them to whether or not they want to adjust their privacy settings on Banjo or their social networks. He’s also looking at giving people more control over what notifications users get, so they can filter out more noise but potentially get alerts on more events and people that matter to them.

I think Banjo and other geo-social apps that show you people around you are still pushing the envelope for many users. A lot of people may not be aware how much information they’re publicly broadcasting. And many aren’t aware of some of these services that organize and display this data in such a visual and location-centric way. That may prompt some people to rethink how much they want to share through various social networks.

People have been largely skeptical of check-in services. But increasingly we are seeing users getting more comfortable with sharing all kinds of information and broadcasting their location through networks like Foursquare. Services like Banjo, when done well, can explain some of the power of location and provide the kind of utility that makes location-based services useful. But it will take a constant attention to privacy to ensure that people still feel in control with how much they’re sharing.

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The partnership has the potential to kickstart a lot more location-aware apps. Appcelerator has 1.6 million iOS and Android developers, who use Titanium to create apps. Now, they can drop in Appcelerator’s tool kit into their apps to enable geo-triggered events.

For example, apps with Geoloqi can understand when someone has entered or left a predefined geo-fence — say, a coffee shop — using carrier signals, GPS, Wifi and indoor tracking systems. The apps can track a person’s location and push out messages or trigger actions based on where they are. Geoloqi can also provide app developers with location and dwell-time analytics on users.

Geoloqi made its first iOS and Android SDKs available in February, but the integration with Appcelerator opens up the service to a large existing community of developers who use Titanium to speed up their app development efforts. Appcelerator is giving new Titanium developers a two-month free trial when they register and download the Geoloqi Titanium module before the end of June.

The Appcelerator integration is the first partnership to go live for Geoloqi. It has also inked deals back in March with data aggregation platform Factual and  Locaid, a carrier location platform.

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Rosenblatt, who was Quattro Wireless’ SVP of advertising sales before it was bought by Apple, told Ad Age that the new paid product will appear mid-summer. He said there will be more ad products launched that will build off a newly redesigned app, set to appear in June.

“A special (offer) is one tactic that could be used by a merchant, but there’s lots of other ways to drive loyalty between merchants and consumers, and that’s what our goal is,” he told Ad Age.

The hiring shows that Foursquare is really working on figuring out the big monetization question that’s been hanging over the location-based service. Foursquare has eschewed traditional banner ads, but like a lot of social networks and publishers, it’s looking for non-obtrusive ways for brands and advertisers to reach out its 20 million users.

With the updated offers product, Foursquare will allow merchants to pay for special placement of personalized local offers. It will also use its Explore technology to better target the offers to users, who will check-ins to redeem them. Currently merchants can list special offers for their location for free, but the new ad product will ensure they can get better reach for their offers. Foursquare also recently announced it would charge merchants $10 to instantly verify their business instead of doing it through the mail. Ultimately, Foursquare is hoping that it can be a paid resource for merchants, helping them draw in new customers and keep them loyal.

Foursquare still has a lot to prove in showing how it can turn its network into a money maker. But with a team that’s well over 100 people now, Foursquare seems to have decided it need a few veterans to lead the charge.

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NSide builds off the work Point Inside did in helping create the Find-It application for midwest retail chain Meijer. That app helped consumers locate items in a store and plot their shopping route while providing weekly specials and product promotions. With nSide, retailers will be able to send targeted ad messages, coupons and content based on a user’s location within a store, their shopping route, their browsing history and shopping lists.

Retailers embed Point Inside’s nSide technology in their mobile apps, which enables their users to create shopping lists, see specials and find items in the store. When a customer goes to the actual store nSide takes their browsing patterns, shopping list items, and purchase history if available and matches it with their exact location and expected path inside a store to offer up relevant deals or coupons from the retailer and its brand partners. For instance, if a user is planning on buying flour, nSide can offer up a coupon or ad for cookie dough nearby. As the customer heads to the next thing on their shopping list, nSide can suggest another thing to buy that matches their preferences or their location.

The ads are not static banners. They will be incorporated into the shopping list or show up in search results while in the store. Or they will appear on a store map when a user is next to a promoted product. And it’s not just ads and coupons; retailers can offer up how-to videos, recipes and other content.

Josh Marti, the CEO of Point Inside, said nSide allows retailers and brands to engage consumers inside the store at critical moments when they’re looking to buy.

“With the private ad network, retailers can maintain control, keep an integrated experience and open deeper channels of communication while making money through brand spending,” said Marti.

Marti said retailers have been mistakenly shrinking down the buying experience to fit mobile devices. But he said the real opportunity involves building a physical representation of the store for mobile, enhancing the way people are able to shop-in store using their smartphones. Consumers are increasingly using mobile apps to do research in store before buying online, turning stores into showrooms for online retailers. But Marti said retailers can use technology like nSide to keep customers engaged and buying in-store rather than resorting to online channels. If a store has a loyalty program, nSide can integrate its buying data to better target future ads and close the loop on in-store redemptions. Point Inside is launching nSide with the Meijer chain and expects to have more retail customers on board later this year.

The nSide network also allows retailers to turn to brands for new advertising revenue. Brands that might send out coupons and ads for hundreds of products in a week can work with nSide enabled-retailers to push a much smaller number of products to the most receptive potential customers. Marti said brands that use nSide can boost their click-through rate on ads by three to five times. While consumers buy a lot of the same items each week, about 20 percent of their purchases are impulse buys, said Marti. He said that’s a ripe opportunity for brands to cut through the noise and get their message out to the customers most interested in hearing about certain products at the time they are ready to buy.

Point Inside uses Wi-fi and sensors such as gyroscopes and accelerometers to establish a user’s exact location inside stores in relation to specific products on the shelf. As we’ve been noting lately, this type of indoor mapping and location finding is a growing opportunity for big players like Google and Microsoft and smaller technology companies that are trying to help make indoor location more accurate.

I like what Point Inside is doing. It’s offering retailers a way to keep their customers inside their store and enhances the buying experience. But there are dangers in pushing too many ads to users, especially ones that aren’t relevant to shoppers. NSide will have to be very targeted, accurate and restrained to make consumers comfortable with the idea of forking over their purchasing and buying intent data and basically getting tracked around the store. But if done well, there’s an opportunity for retailers to make mobile apps really work for them in-store. And as more advertising dollars shift to mobile, this could be a way to supplement their revenue.

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The company, based in San Francisco and Austin, is releasing its first mobile app Tuesday since launching a Web site last fall.  The HTML5 app ties into Loku’s discovery service, which leverages big data, data mining and natural-language search to figure out all the interesting places, events and news happening in a local area.

The Loku app–really a mobile Website–pulls in local data on events, music, restaurants, news, photos and write-ups from local blogs. Users who turn to the app will find the data tailored to their particular location and the time of day. Those users can increase their local ranking among fellow users by exploring more of their city or contributing back content into Loku. The Loku app will launch initially in San Francisco, New York, Austin, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington DC, with other cities coming online in later this year.

The HTML5 app is a pretty slick piece of software, enabling animations like page flips up and down that let users view all the interesting and relevant things happening around them. Users can also get alerts that come in from the top and bottom of the app.

Dan Street, the CEO of Loku, told me in an interview that he first thought the company would just alpha test its mobile service using the HTML5 app before pursuing a native app first. But when he saw how flexible and powerful HTML5 was in creating native-like experiences, he decided to start right there and follow up with dedicated apps wrapped in a native shell for Android and iOS. Those apps will appear in the coming months.

“I think it’s the right order. It’s hard to change a native app when it’s in someone’s hands. With HTML5, it’s super easy to make updates and you can control distribution,” Street said.

Street said that during a limited test in Austin, Loku got 17,000 users on to the mobile Web app in a couple of weeks. That makes him think there’s no immediate need to push out a native app; to get Loku on their phone, users can just navigate to Loku.com and then bookmark the app or save it to their home screen.

“As the technology keeps maturing, you’ll see others do Web first then get it nailed and get traction before they go with native apps,” Street said.

I think Loku may be a little ahead of the curve here but it’s taking an interesting approach.  Having a Web app lets it take advantage of Web search marketing and it focuses Loku’s efforts on one product that it can more easily port to different mobile platforms. Also, starting first with a mobile Web app lets companies knock out bugs quickly, something that can be slower on iOS because of Apple’s review policy.

Native apps will always have their place, especially for more performance-intensive apps like games. And HTML5 is still in need of more seasoning, especially in providing better access to the underlying device hardware. For example, it’s hard to upload photos  and use the device camera with HTML5, something Facebook has also cited as a problem. But increasingly, the hardware makers are opening up more access to their devices for HTML5 apps. And that is going to make mobile-Web first more of an option for developers.

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The updated website features a cleaner design with tips and images pulled in from Foursquare, local daily deals from Groupon, Living Social and others, timely tweets from businesses and Facebook integration for sharing, all available through a highly interactive map. It looks more like a living map with blinking dollar signs for deals and Twitter icons for tweets from businesses. Users can filter by vertical including restaurants, bars, hotels, entertainment and shopping and there’s an OpenTable tool for making a reservation for nearby restaurants. Users can jump around to any neighborhood they want to, with the data updated with each move.

Everything is clickable and there’s a lot of data available on each place. So clicking on a movie theater will reveal showtimes or a looking at a parking garage shows the rates. Users can also conduct searches a la Google Maps if they have something specific in mind.

Elliot Cohen, the co-founder and CEO came up with the idea a few years ago while working at a real estate company. He also had a background in urban planning and saw a need for a visual map that does more than just navigation. He wanted to provide a birds-eye view of the world, a sort of Wikipedia for maps.

“The trend is for everything to go local, social and mobile and we wanted to create something that brought it all together,” said Cohen. “We see this as a virtual representation of the city.”

The move to mobile is key and makes the service extremely useful for users on the go. It gives people a way to really understand what’s around them and just beyond the corner. Google Maps, Yelp, Foursquare and other services also provide some of this capability but not with the same level of specificity and visual rendering. Being able to see live tweets from a restaurant allows a users to know what’s going on at a place without having to visit or follow a specific establishment on Twitter. That could be an important way for businesses to bring in customers via deals or to update people on what’s happening, similar to what an old blackboard outside a shop used to do.

Aaron Rudenstine, the president and co-founder of CityMaps said surveys of consumers found that half of people prefer to see things visually, rather than as items listed on a map. The goal is to continue in that vein and keep surfacing more data accessible through a map. For instance, CityMaps is looking at taking tweets from food cards and trucks and plotting them on the map. It’s also looking at incorporating Google Street Views into the service.

Cohen declines to say how the company builds up its data block by block. Generally it’s a combination of algorithms with some level of human scrubbing involved. The plan is to get 25 to 30 cities online by the end of this year. He said there are a number of ways to make money including using very local, targeted ad placement for business owners or a possible white label solution for companies that want to license the technology. There might be other opportunities for brands to use CityMaps for marketing campaigns.

The company has raised $3.5 million to date from angels including $2.5 million closed in January. It’s got 15 employees working out of two renovated apartments on the upper east side.

I like what CityMaps is doing and think that I’m not the only one who likes to experience the world through very visual maps. I think CityMaps could eventually be very attractive as an acquisition target for a lot of companies looking to bolster their local search, discovery and commerce efforts. Not everyone needs to see the world in this way. Search engines and local services can serve a lot of people now through their current tools. But I think there’s a lot of value in plotting everything on an interactive map that is live, social and mobile.

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The sale of Loopt leads to another exit for a location-based company following the acquisitions of Pelago, WHERE and the team behind Gowalla. Loopt launched in 2005 by Stanford undergraduate Sam Altman, who went on to raise $17 million from Sequoia and NEA. The service was an early pioneer in helping friends find each other through location tracking. It later helped users find better local deals and get tips on venues.

Green Dot will use Loopt for a number of things including improving customer acquisition and retention of its prepaid debit cards and drive adoption of new banking and payment products. It’s also going to help Green Dot become a player in the mobile wallet and rewards market for retailers. Loopt also holds some patents for location-based mobile marketing and messaging that Green Dot can use.

“We believe that mobile phones have the potential to change the way people interact with their bank, control their money and pay for goods and services,” said Steve Streit, Chairman and CEO of Green Dot, in a statement. “Loopt has innovative mobile technology, market leading mobile programming capabilities and compelling intellectual property. Meanwhile, Green Dot has a large customer base, a robust enterprise-level financial services infrastructure and retail point-of-sale financial transaction capabilities deployed at major retailers nationwide. When Loopt’s assets are layered into Green Dot’s platform, we believe that a significant opportunity emerges for Green Dot to become a large-scale player in mobile technology solutions at the retail point of sale.”

Here’s what Loopt co-founder and CEO Altman said: “It’s been exhilarating to see mobile become such a critical part of our collective daily lives. As this technology truly reaches the masses, I believe we’re going to see the banking and payments industry fundamentally reshaped in a way that’s better for everyone. My team and I look forward to being part of this transformation and are eager to bring cutting edge mobile banking and payment solutions to Green Dot’s retail partners and Green Dot’s millions of current and future customers.”

Again, it’s showing that location-based services are having a hard time making it on their own. But I think it also shows that bigger companies are realizing the value of location and are looking to innovators who can help them get closer to the ground and use local context to help improve their products. That’s happening with eBay’s pick-up of WHERE, Groupon’s purchase of Pelago and Facebook’s buy of the people behind Gowalla. Location-based services are still trying to break into the mainstream in a lot of ways but while the companies pushing the edge are getting acquired, I think we’ll see a lot of these services live on in bigger ways down the line.

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