Geo-Local
Foursquare is getting its revenue story in order and announced it has hired Steven Rosenblatt, the former director of advertising sales and strategy at Apple’s iAd. Rosenblatt will serve as Foursquare’s chief revenue officer and will lead the company’s new ad products coming out this summer. Read More »
American Express has been using social channels such as Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter to deliver offers that can be synced to a user’s card account. But up until now, there wasn’t one place to find and get recommendations on all those offers. Read More »
Google updated Maps for Android in a way that adds value to brick-and-mortar shoppers. Maps now includes indoor walking directions for stores, malls and such, plus users can find nearby Google Offers and 360-degree panoramic views of buildings and shops as well. Read More »
Foursquare plans to offer personalized coupons through a redesigned app in July, part of a larger effort to start making money through the location-based social network. The Wall Street Journal reported that Foursquare will allow merchants to pay for special placement of personalized local offers. Read More »
Yelp has reached a settlement with employees who accuse the review site of breaking state and federal wage laws. Read More »
There are now more than half a dozen commercial Hadoop distributions in the market, and almost every enterprise with big data challenges is tinkering with the Apache Foundation-licensed software. A new report examines the key disruptive trends shaping the Hadoop platform market.
Cheap computing and the ability to store a lot of data fairly cheaply have made the concept of big data a buig business. But amid the frenzy to gather such information, especially unstructured information, are companies pushing the boundaries of polite (or ethical) behavior? Read More »
Every week the media seems to offer a new account of some dumb crook who is off to the slammer because he posted about his caper on Facebook. It turns out this phenomenon may be even more widespread than we think. Read More »
The recruiting ecosystem is changing, led by professional social networks like LinkedIn and Viadeo and companies like Jobvite and BranchOut, which are building Facebook apps for hiring and career development. The bottom line is that technology enables the recruiting process to be more streamlined, scientific and …
Kindle Fire owners wanting to include locations in their tweets can do so with the updated version of TweetCaster. Nearby tweets are available too, even though Amazon’s tablet doesn’t include a GPS radio. Instead the slate uses a Wi-Fi location solution from Boston-based Skyhook Wireless. Read More »
The emergence of the big data phenomenon is fundamentally changing everything from the way companies operate to the way people interact to how the world deals with outbreaks of infectious diseases. Here we highlight 10 case studies illustrating how big data is changing the world.
After attracting attention last summer for social commerce initiatives with Foursquare and Facebook, last week American Express announced a new coupons hook-up with Twitter. Amex has the potential to be a powerhouse in social commerce, but so far that potential remains ... Read More »
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 »
It all seems so easy: You log into Facebook, update your status, tell everyone where you are and — voila! — your Timeline is geospatial. Only, while it’s just one extra step for you to add location, building that capability was a tad more complicated for … Read More »
The future of location-based services is in commerce, payments and deals, said Sam Altman, founder of Loopt. He just sold his startup to pre-paid card provider Green Dot and is working on mobile payment products. That’s where he said location will have the biggest impact. Read More »
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 »
Today, Yelp had a spectacular initial public offering and is worth almost a billion dollars. There is more talk of a Twitter IPO and that too would be spectacular. But one thing in common between these two companies – a propensity for airbrushing the past. 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.
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.
This year’s CES was the biggest in the show’s 44-year history. It boasted 15 miles of exhibit hall aisles, 3,100 booths and 153,000 attendees. It is easy to be jaded by the endlessly repetitive products, but the thousands of innovations point toward a future of connectivity.
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.
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 »
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 »
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 »
Life360, a mobile family safety app, has been on a tear and is now up to 10 million users. That growth has helped the San Francisco start-up pull in a $3.5 million Series A round from a host of investors. Read More »
Nobody was surprised when Gowalla announced that it would be shutting down after selling to Facebook — after all, almost none of the services it has bought in the past five years have stayed alive. But is this sell up-shut down approach fair on users? 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 …
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 »
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 »
A new wave of apps aims to replace the increasingly crowded space of long-winded five-star user generated reviews (like those on Yelp and Amazon) with straightforward social recommendations. The newest entrant in this field, an iPhone app called Stamped, aims to win with simplicity. Read More »
Six of Yelp’s top executives and investors cashed out $36.8 million worth of company stock during Yelp’s Series E funding round in early 2010, according to the company’s IPO filing, with CEO Jeremy Stoppelman and board chairman Max Levchin each selling some $15 million of stock. Read More »
Yelp, the San Francisco-based local reviews website, has filed official documents to raise up to $100 million in an IPO of its stock. The filing reveals that Yelp pulls in solid top line sales, but has yet to turn a profit at the bottom line. Read More »
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 »
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 »
Prospective college students are already using their mobile devices to upload Facebook photos, update Twitter, and text their friends. Now, colleges are beginning to use smartphones, too — as recruitment tools. YourCampus 360 is one company smartphones as platforms for a full-blown college tour and information … Read More »
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 »
Apple is not done taking on application makers with iOS 5. It just announced it is launching a new location-sharing feature called Find my Friends, that will allow users to easily share their location with other users. It should spark some competition with existing location-sharing services. Read More »
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 »
In a matter of hours, Facebook is going to host f8, its annual developer conference. By now we have all heard everything that is coming at the event. Sources say Facebook will make some sort of announcement around NFC technologies at the event as well. Read More »
