Though Foursquare is now busy trying to take on Yelp, one of its more rewarding, but personal, use cases (now that the fervor around badges and mayorships has died down), is its ability to add insight and data around your check-ins. Often after registering your location, the app rewards you with a little encouragement or commentary via a pop-up message. Today, the service is making these little moments shareable with a new button that lets you edit and post that message to Facebook, Twitter and more.

For example, you might learn that you hadn’t been at some airport since last December, or it’s your third day in a row at a favorite location. In Foursquare’s blog post about the feature, it gives the example of a user who wants to brag about hitting the gym three days in a row. (Though let’s get real, we’ll probably see more people posting about their ongoing bar streaks, don’t you think?)

The update may seem to be a minor one on the surface, but it’s one that could encourage more of Foursquare’s users to return to the app more regularly in order to post and share rather than try to win a mayorship crown or some other tired prize, like a badge. These things were fun at first, but the excitement has worn off. But Foursquare still needs a steady stream of data to keep its local recommendations current and accurate.

The feature also ties in nicely with the new movement in “quantified self” devices – where users are trying on items like the FitBit or Jawbone UP, for example, in order to track and learn more about their daily activities through data.

Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley, in fact, expressed an interest in the quantified self space, during an interview he did with TechCrunch last week at Disrupt NY. Though he had dismissed the rumors about Foursquare developing wearables of its own, he did say that this is an area Foursquare would like to further explore.

Also of note, Crowley used an auto-checkin utility recently, when he ran the Boston Marathon (ahead of the attacks), which let him track his progress mile by mile – so he’s clearly a fan.

Foursquare is actually sitting on a goldmine of personal data through its historial check-ins, but prior to now, the messages taking advantage of that info have been ephemeral – you would see them and then hit close, nothing more. Today’s update is the first step towards letting users better interact with Foursquare’s data store, if only by posting it to social networks or saving images to their Camera Roll.

The new feature is available for iPhone and Android.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Fred Wilson, legendary New York venture capitalist and partner at Union Square Ventures, is the latest VC to highlight his interest in startups that help move money, “an area that is still very much up for grabs,” in his opinion. “Money is information, like bits,” he said today, giving currency a spin that puts it in a continuum with the many blogging and content companies that his firm has invested in over the years. (That list has included Twitter, Tumblr, FeedBurner, del.icio.us and Disqus.)

Speaking on stage today and continuing on the e-commerce theme, Wilson added that he is also interested in more startups focused around marketplaces. Wilson is also an investor and board member at Etsy.

Two days into TC’s conference, bitcoin has been a buzzword that’s already come up more than once among the investors on stage. Yesterday, Chamath Palihapitiya of Social+Capital Partnership called bitcoin “Gold 2.0″ as he described how he invests in bitcoins not just as an investor in startups, but as an individual. Earlier in the day, Chris Dixon at Andreessen Horowitz also said he plans on investing more in bitcoin startups.

Wilson described his interest as about the movement of money. “We’re interested in forms of currency and money,” Wilson said, highlighting in particular the way that there are still a lot of areas where companies can come in to bring down the costs of taking money from one place to the other. “If I’m sending you money, why should that cost me or anyone?” he asked.

Highlighting Dwolla, one company that focuses on this area, Wilson also mentioned that Square, Stripe and Braintree are three other companies he rates highly in this space, but he also said that money is “still very much up for grabs. There is way way more to do.”

On another monetary theme, Wilson today also reiterated his support of companies in his portfolio that were investment targets in pre-revenue phases, but are now moving into stages where they are starting to monetize. One of the big poster boys for this transition has been Foursquare, led by Dennis Crowley, which effectively spearheaded a new space in mobile with check-in services but has more recently been trying to convert that into an actual business, often with some very public attacks about how well that business is proceeding.

“I think Foursquare is doing great,” Wilson said today. “I think Dennis has gotten through the hardest thing you can do in a company, which is to turn a product into a business. That is difficult, and it reminds me of where Twitter was a few years ago. I think he’s gotten behind that now.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Today at Disrupt NY 2013, Foursquare founder and CEO Dennis Crowley denied rumors that growth was stagnant for Foursquare. “I think there’s a little bit of perception that we’re not growing,” Crowley said. ”This is false.” In reality, March 2013 was the best month to date.

When it comes to growth numbers, Crowley started by saying that “[they] don’t talk about growth numbers so much.” But Foursquare tracks the number of active users, monthly sign-ups, check-ins, web visitors, etc. “All of these numbers are up 10-30 percent,” Crowley said.

Yet, Crowley was very candid about the situation the company is in right now. “We’re not the shiny new thing anymore,” he said. The company is currently trying to become the main location tech company and turn into a recommendation app for restaurants, bars, etc.

“A lot of people understand what we’re trying to do, being the location layer on the Internet, but there are a lot of people that don’t,” Crowley said. “People are still skeptical,” he continued.

“We are like that company that quietly pushes out big enhancements,” Crowley said. The company just wants to focus on improving the product and generating revenue, even if Foursquare receives negative thoughts from time to time.

A good part of Crowley’s fireside chat was about busting rumors and stating that Foursquare is a focused company that is on a good path: “We’ve set ourselves up with nice ambitious targets, and we’re set to hit our goals.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

During our Disrupt event today, New York City company Foursquare’s co-founder Dennis Crowley spoke about how people are talking about the company these days. One of the interesting things about the company is its strategy to be the “location layer” of the Internet. For four years, the company has been trapping all of this location data, tips and social graph information.

On its location data, Crowley said that the company is generating all of this information that will be important moving forward, like finding all of the interesting places on say, a Monday morning in New York City. These are the bits of data that Foursquare has just started leveraging in its own app and it’s only going to get better.

Crowley says that its API is underutilized by partners and people aren’t “leaning” on them as much as they could be, as of yet. He says that in the next year you’ll see more apps that use Foursquare’s location data get smarter about the world around it. This means that the company has a lot more evangelism to do to educate companies on how their data is best used. I can’t think of many services that do a really good job of it right now. Sure, apps like Flickr let you add a Foursquare venue to your photo, but that’s all. It would be nice if Flickr could suggest places to visit and shoot photos based on other interesting places are close to your current location, and those are the types of applications that Crowley suggests when saying that its API isn’t used to its fullest potential.

When asked about how the company is viewed from the outside, Crowley said Foursquare is going through a period of time that other big startups have gone through:

We’re not the shiny new thing anymore, we’ve been around for four years. People are understanding what we’re trying to do, become the location layer. We’re in that interesting hazing period where people are skeptical on whether we can be success or not. Facebook went through it, now we’re going through it.

“The biggest haters and critics of Foursquare haven’t used the app in the past six months.” Crowley continued. He went on to call some of the predictive modeling that Foursquare is doing for users is somewhat like “rocket science.” However, getting people to stop thinking of Foursquare as the same company that it was in 2009, focusing on badges and leaderboards, is a hurdle, Crowley admits.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Ch – ch – ch- changes! The six-year-old media startup Tumblr is going through quite a few right now, namely focusing on profitability versus growth in its product efforts — enabling a promoted post feature in addition to just recently launching mobile ads. The company is looking for a “Sheryl Sandberg-type” COO, amidst a series of executive departures and layoffs.

Business Insider confirmed this with Tumblr board member and Sequoia Roelof Botha, who will take the stage with founder David Karp at TechCrunch Disrupt New York next week to talk about Tumblr’s future and perhaps even announce the COO new hire (we hope!).

In any case, the talk will probably be illuminating after a week filled with tough but optimistic decision-making, ”The team usually walks out of those meetings feeling a little beat up. But your best teachers were probably your hardest teachers. Your best coaches were your hardest coaches,” Botha told BI.

Karp and Botha join our amazing list of Disrupt NY speakers that currently includes Dennis Crowley, Bill Gurley, Chamath Palihapitiya, John Donahoe, Limor Fried, Ron Conway and David Lee.

Tickets are available here. Worth it.

Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here sponsors@techcrunch.com.

David Karp
Founder, Tumblr

Tumblr founder David Karp was born and raised in New York City, attending the Bronx High School of Science before dropping out at age 15. An internship at Frederator Studios led to a gig leading product at UrbanBaby. When CNET acquired the company in 2005, Karp started his own development agency, Davidville. In 2007 his team launched Tumblr, now the home and platform for more than 100 million creators. As a top 15 US network, Tumblr serves an audience of more than 170 million people worldwide.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This hasn’t been a great year for Foursquare. “Check-ins are no longer what they used to be,” as Ingrid Lunden observed last month. There seems to be a general consensus that “Foursquare keeps resembling Yelp more and more…” but that comparison isn’t necessarily flattering, especially since there’s little doubt that Yelp has much greater public mindshare.

Then former Square COO and current Khosla Ventures partner Keith Rabois attacked them publicly (click through for the article’s amusing corrections, if nothing else!) prompting some bizarre musing from Michael Lazerow on when it’s OK for someone like Rabois to bash a founder.

(My answer, for what it’s worth: whenever he freaking feels like it. He’s not the Pope. He’s not the President. He’s just a venture capitalist. If you’re worried about public criticism hurting a company, then it’s built on apparent rather than real value and it deserves all the criticism it can get.)

Crowley responded, gamely:

@sriramk @rabois @hunterwalk Keep hating… and while you're doing so Foursquare will keep becoming the location layer for the Internet.—
Dennis Crowley (@dens) March 16, 2013

Great tone…but I don’t know about that content. So the mighty check-in was just what filters were for Instagram, a gateway drug, to soon be replaced by “the location layer for the Internet?” Uh-huh. You know what that sounds like to me, in the long run? A map. Like Harry Potter’s “Marauder’s Map,” to use Crowley’s own words.

This does not sound like wise strategy. To paraphrase Paul Graham’s on-stage Office Hours at the last-but-one TC Disrupt, “Competing with Google. That’s not so bad. But you’re competing with Google at something they’re actually good at.” And, oh yes, also competing with Apple, whose maps have been steadily improving since their first stumbling introduction. Meanwhile, Google casually rolls out insanely great maps features like ski trails or underwater Street Views several times a year.

Does anyone seriously think, in the long run, that Foursquare has a better chance of “becoming the location layer for the Internet” than both Google and Apple, both of whom clearly take mapping extremely seriously? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Yes, their API is exceptionally useful. I should know: I’m at least three of those 40,000 developers. But a great API does not a successful company make, and there are plenty of competitors; Yelp, Google Places, Factual, etc, although Foursquare is admittedly the most developer-friendly.

So I hate to say it, but Keith Rabois was one thousand percent correct. With their tactics struggling in the face of better-established competitors like Yelp, and their strategy apparently consisting of plotting a course between Google and Apple’s Scylla and Charybdis in a leaky drifting raft…what’s poor flailing Foursquare to do?

Funny you should ask. I happen to have an answer. And it is this: merge with Groupon.

Wait, no, hear me out. I know what you’re thinking: bad idea, or worst idea ever? and/or listen, buddy, two dumbs don’t make a smart. Groupon of course just fired its CEO in the face of sagging, well, everything.

But think about it. What’s one thing Groupon has that almost nobody else does? An existing relationships with an enormous number of small businesses. Frequently awfully contentious relationships, granted, but relationships nonetheless. What’s one thing that really defines Foursquare? Not the “location layer,” but the check-in. What’s a business model that just might work? Have users check in with intent — “shopping for my mother” or “hungry for lunch” — and promptly get deluged by coupons from a panoply of nearby retailers, and then collect a percentage of those sales.

Which is of course something Foursquare kind of tries to do already. (As of eighteen months after I suggested it.) But for it to really work they need a huge critical mass of small businesses to participate. What’s one thing Groupon kind of managed to do with its bizarre, multi-billion-dollar rise and fall? Connect to just such a critical mass.

Call me crazy. Call me a fool. But I think if these two long-term losers got together, they just might turn into a winner. It’s a longshot, sure — but it doesn’t seem much longer to me than believing that either has much of a glorious future on their own.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A lot of people might think of Foursquare as that checkin app with badges and leader boards and finding out where your friends are. But it’s a lot more than that now, thanks to all the map data and information that they know about places people are going to.

In a conversation onstage at SXSW with Anil Dash, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley discussed the company’s evolution from an app that was primarily focused around helping people to find their friends, to finding out more about the world that they live in.

Crowley said that one of the underreported stories is the number of companies that rely on Foursquare’s map data and what developers can potentially do with that. The place database has more than 50 million places of interest in it, and it changes frequently. Users enter new places as soon as they open up, and signal places that have closed down.

When talking about the map data that it has, Crowley compared Foursquare’s check-ins to Google’s web crawlers scanning the Internet for new websites. “People tell us about the places that are interesting, the places that are no longer interesting,” he said.

More importantly, the company isn’t entirely dependent on just its users anymore for a lot of its data. Thanks to the Foursquare API, the company gets location data from lots of different apps. For instance, every Instagram picture that has a location attached to it sends a data signal to Foursquare about that place of interest.

In that respect, the relationship between Foursquare and its API partners is kind of symbiotic: Foursquare has one of the best map data sets out there and makes it available. In exchange, it finds out more about the places that its partners’ users go to.

At the end of the day, the data that Foursquare has is the ability to provide more personalized maps than what is available today. Crowley said that maps haven’t really changed that much since people started making them, but now that we have certain amounts of trending data or interest data, Foursquare could help make the places that people see more meaningful to them.

Crowley likened that to Harry Potter’s “Marauders Map” and how it provides Harry with details about the people and places around them. “There is enough data that we should be able to make that Harry Potter map and give it to everyone in the room,” Crowley said.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Apple SVP of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue sent an interesting 31st tweet today. It’s a Foursquare check-in at Apple’s HQ, indicating that Cue is trying out the service at work. Moreover, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley is spending a week in San Francisco. These two circumstantial bits of information incite speculation: could they be talking about an acquisition, or a deep software integration in iOS?

Crowley has already been spending some quality time in the Valley lately, trying to raise a Series D round.

What’s the thinking behind the speculation, beyond the tweets? Apple has many reasons to be interested in Foursquare. After June’s redesign, the location-oriented startup became a Yelp competitor at heart. It wants to lure away Yelp users to find the best restaurant around you to eat tonight without having to check in or care about badges.

These days, iOS relies a lot on Yelp data for restaurants. But Apple likes to do everything in-house, and to own every part that makes Apple’s products useful. Yelp is very good for restaurant recommendations in the U.S., but provides much less information outside of the U.S.

Since iOS 6, Apple has ditched Google Maps in favor of its own Maps application. While doing so, it has incorporated Yelp recommendations to find nearby restaurants. Even before that, Apple chose to incorporate Yelp data for Siri recommendations, then redirected to the Yelp app. In June, Apple went a step further by querying Yelp directly within Siri.

Foursquare could replace everything related to Yelp in iOS. At the same time, Apple released Find My Friends a year ago. It has very few active users and bad ratings in the App Store. Apple could safely forget about Find My Friends if Foursquare becomes an Apple app.

Now comes the tough part. If Apple is considering acquiring Foursquare, it would be at a steep price. The company, 25 million users strong, has been looking to raise a new round at a pre-money valuation of between $700 million and $800 million.

Even if Apple bought the company at this exact valuation, it would be an expensive price-tag for a consumer-facing software service. Comparatively, Apple acquired Siri for more than $200 million and Chomp for $50 million. In the past, the company closed bigger acquisitions for supply-chain-related strategic companies, not for startups.

It remains to be seen whether Apple could be tempted by its talented team of 150 people in order to develop the product further. Foursquare data becomes even more valuable for the users as people check in and add other users as friends.

A Foursquare-iOS integration in Maps and Siri is more likely to happen. Its place database is used by Instagram, Uber, Flickr and many other services. With 5 million check-ins a day, Foursquare can then provide you with a list of interesting places nearby, pushing big places to the top. Talks between the two companies are exciting and intriguing at the same time. And Foursquare can certainly make Apple products and applications more useful. But the content (if any) of the rumored meeting will remain a secret for the time being.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s all the rage these days, promoting new businesses on social services, ask Twitter. Today, Foursquare is getting into the act by adding a new section called “Recently Opened” to its iOS app (no word on Android updates as of yet). The hope is that you will try out some new venues within Foursquare, and potentially like them…and continue going there.

Sounds great for a new business, right? It’s good for Foursquare, too, because it can now build relationships with venues at a very early stage, hoping that they stay on the platform for the future.

Here’s what the team had to say about it:

Want to find the latest and greatest in your neighborhood? With today’s iPhone update, we’ve added a one-tap way to find “Recently Opened” places in Explore. Just tap the search icon and scroll down to select it.

As we mentioned before, Foursquare is settling into its current path as a discovery and exploration company quite nicely, now giving businesses the opportunity to be proactive by getting onto the service. Basically, if you open up a coffee shop, Foursquare wants you to immediately list it on the service. It’s smart, and very yellow-pages-like.

Dennis Crowley, Foursquare’s CEO, has gone on record as saying that he considered selling the company, but he views the service as the “Best local search tool on the planet.”

We dove deeply into Foursquare’s new approach with Explore, and I called its new rating system for venues “magic.” I stand by that, as the experience I’ve had with the app has continually gotten better with each update.

Will users and businesses agree? It’s not just about check-ins anymore, folks. The real business has only just begun. Oh, and just so you know…Crowley said at the beginning of the year that half of its users are outside of the US, so keep that in mind when you wonder about how the company will do in the future. He sat down with us in June to discuss re-inventing Foursquare:

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Foursquare has been taking VC meetings recently, looking into raising a Series D round of funding of between $50 million and $100 million according to multiple sources. In previous rounds, the company has brought in over $71.4 million in financing from Andreessen Horowitz, Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures and others.

From what we’re hearing the company seeks to flesh out this round at a pre-money valuation of between $700 million and $800 million, and that number has a few VC shops skeptical due to its growth trends, which have not gotten more inspiring after the company’s recent June redesign, according to multiple sources. Foursquare raised a $50 million round at a $600 million valuation in June of 2011 and still has plenty of money in the bank as far as we know.

Rumor has it that a few firms have eschewed the deal as priced, including Ignition Partners. We’ve also heard a couple of whispers that a less expensive round might surface more investor interest, at a $300 million – $400 million valuation pre-money.

Perhaps investors are having a hard time drumming up enthusiasm because the company is valued at just under half the market cap of its public competitor Yelp, which boasts 84 million unique monthly visitors and 33 million reviews. The company has 25 million registered users according to its website, and has 4 million monthly active users logging in through Facebook Connect according to AppData (the total number of monthly actives is not disclosed by the company). However CEO Dennis Crowley did confirm that the app had more daily active users than Yelp’s 7.2 million in an interview with Sarah Lacy in October.

Foursquare reported 15 million registered users in December 2011, 20 million in April 2012 and 25 million this past October: While it seems like the traditional user acquisition rate isn’t increasing, especially in the U.S, we’ve heard that growth is promising in other countries, such as Brazil and Turkey. We’ve also heard that a particular statistic representing online to offline behavior driven by the app is assuring, as 20% of users who search for a given place on Foursquare Explore actually end up checking into that place within 72 hours.

This statistic is key as the company focuses on refining its revenue model. When users search for a venue in the Explore tab, they see sponsored venue results reminiscent of Google AdWords or ads in Google Maps at the top of the page. The company is currently testing these Explore Promoted Updates with about 25 brand partners, including Best Buy and Old Navy, on a cost per acquisition (or check-in) basis. The company views the more than 1 million merchants on its platform as the potential market for this feature but ostensibly needs a larger target user base for it to be effective. The Explore feature is presently seeing over 1 million queries from users a day.

Brand deals like its partnership with Amex also bring in cash, but investor Fred Wilson confirmed that the company did not have “a ton” of revenue yet this September. For comparison, Yelp is expecting its revenue to come in between $136.4 million and $136.9 million for all of 2012 and has over 35k paying merchant accounts.

Though a popular acquisition target because of its talented founder and 150-person team, mainstream adoption still seems to be a challenge for the darling of the New York startup scene: it’s difficult convincing potential new users that it’s a substitute for Yelp and already existing users that the product goes beyond checkins and badges.

The rumors of a new financing have been unconfirmed by Foursquare but a representative gave me the following statement on the company’s engagement numbers: “Our numbers have continued to go up, especially since we made Foursquare Explore available to everyone on the web. People use Foursquare over a million times daily to find where to go, and over 5 million times daily to share where they are.”

Word on the street is that the company will use the potential new cash for engineering resources and expansion, as it continues to hire and fill out the second floor of its New York office.

Additional reporting by Romain Dillet.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch