The company has evolved beyond being a social media app broadcasting your friends' favorite sandwich shop to become a bonafide location data firm that sells its rich dataset to anyone seeking fine-grained information about how people spend their time and money. And that makes the check-in essential.
Every day, Foursquare users check into as many as 8 million locations—that's 12 billion in all over the past nine years—and Crowley wants that number to grow. To encourage Swarm users keep exploring and checking into new places, Crowley and his team needed to do what every social media app does when things stagnate: appeal to the desires of its fickle user base. Foursquare provides technology, data and other business services to some of the biggest brands in the world, including Apple, Microsoft and Samsung About 50 million people use Foursquare Swarm and Foursquare City Guide apps each month.
VIDEO Foursquare joins with WeChat to expand location services outside of China. Squawk Box Asia. He views all the user activity as impacting recommendations around the world. They love the real-world rewards of perks and challenges.
They love playing the real world games — like mayorships, sticker upgrades, and winning the friend leaderboard. To put the growth of Foursquare into perspective, there are nearly 9 million check-ins a day, a feat that Crowley suggests is another indication of the explosive growth of engagement in both Foursquare and Swarm.
Since its debut at South by Southwest in , Foursquare has been on the front lines of keeping location-based services alive, even as competitors such as Gowalla have faded away. In its first two years, millions of users download the app and cheerleaders predicted Foursquare was on track to be the next Facebook — a billion-dollar valuation was not out of the question.
Where could the company turn? Like many technology companies at the time, Foursquare was collecting vast tranches of data that many other companies — stores, brands, and consumer-technology companies — would pay for. By , Foursquare made the decision to focus on providing software tools and data to app developers, advertisers, and brands.
Foursquare began charging developers for the use of its location technology in their own apps it has worked with more than , to date and selling its data to brands, marketers, advertisers, and data-hungry investors. Soon, Foursquare began brandishing its power with public market predictions. It also used its data to show that foot traffic to Trump properties began declining after he announced his presidential campaign, and that traffic to Nike stores increased after the Colin Kaepernick ad.
Co-founder and executive chairman Dennis Crowley says the human check-ins gave Foursquare engineers and data scientists the ability to verify and adjust location readings from other sources, like GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. As it turns out, the goofy badges for Uncle Tony that made Foursquare easy to dismiss as a lates fad were an incredibly powerful tool.
The Foursquare database now includes million places and 14 billion check-ins.
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