Google Latitude Adds Checkins Google's location-sharing app, Latitude, has just added the ability to check in at a specific business or other location. In the past, users simply pinpointed their location on a map. The difference seems minute, but letting users check in at a "real place" is an important part of Google's overall strategy. As Google Latitude engineer Joe LaPenna blogs, "Until today, sharing my location let friends and family know if I was across the globe or in their neighborhood. Now, check-ins let them see the cool restaurant I’m trying in Taipei or join me for a latte at the cafe nearby." And real locations mean real advertising opportunities. Here's the app in action on an Android phone: Latitude is adding a few key components to its checkin offering, too. Here's a demo of how checkins will work: Checkin apps have been of particular interest to Google for some time.
Foursquare gets past the man power problem by crowdsourcing its What do startups strapped for cash — and time — do when they want to expand their brand into new places? In the case of Foursquare, they're letting their users do it for them. The location-based messaging service, begun by Naveen Selvadurai and Dennis Crowley in New York City, has been getting a lot of positive press lately. (I've written previously about the company here.) But keeping up with all of that attention is a different story. While many online companies can easily push their web presence globally, Foursquare is currently only available in 22 cities. Foursquare works by letting users "check-in" to different locations in a city and broadcasting that info to their approved friends on the service. Crowley and Selvadurai have made their product incredibly popular by turning socializing into a game. But expanding across the country (and abroad) is not as easy as creating a Twitter or Facebook login. Without a data partner, it was hard for Foursquare to even break into Canada.
Instagram Blog Top 25 Restaurants on Foursquare | The Feast Restaurant Debuts $100 Grilled Cheese Sandwich A Chicago restaurant debuted a $100 grilled cheese sandwich in honor of National Grilled Cheese Month. The “Zillion Dollar Grilled Cheese” sandwich features Spanish black iberico ham, Oregon white... » Review: Zach Braff in "Bullets" The sitcom star and screenwriter sticks to his guns as a proud playwright in the super new musical from perfectionist duo Susan Stroman and Woody Allen. » Foursquare Beats Twitter to Local Advertising Goldmine Foursquare is the mobile social game that you play by checking in at various locales while out and about. The location-based application has managed to strip the fat out of other location-aware mobile ideas, find just the right formula for encouraging check-ins, and hit at the right time. Now, they're sitting pretty with funding and a trajectory that resembles Twitter's rise to glory. Foursquare, however, isn't wasting any time on monetizing and has just beat Twitter to the business services market. Today marks the launch of their beta advertising platform — Foursquare for Businesses — designed to provide retailers with an opportunity to highlight specials to Foursquare users who check-in nearby and get data based on the location-based campaigns. Foursquare for Businesses is a natural extension of the product that we knew was coming. It's absolutely genius and here's why.
Tumblr Foursquare’s website now available in six languages Foursquare’s website has taken on a new international focus today. It’s now available in all six languages supported by the apps: English, Spanish, German, French, Japanese and Italian. They’ve translated everything, from the terms of use to the buttons to the badge names. You can change your preferred language by clicking “English” in the bottom bar of the site. To make this possible, they had to remove the words from every graphic on the site. With the apps available in the same languages, the website now offers a convenient way for international users to access their accounts from the website and still understand what’s going on.
Free Beer! Foursquare Starts Alerting Users Of Nearby Mayor Deal Last month, we wrote about Foursquare’s potential from a business perspective thanks to its location data. This week, the service has started actively tapping that potential by alerting users when locations close to them are offering special deals. As you can see in the image, a large blue alert now appears at the bottom of check-in pages on Foursquare’s iPhone app to let you know if there is a deal at a place close to the place where you currently are. With the headline “mayor offer nearby”, these deals reward mayors of particular places. Users can become the “mayor” of a location on Foursquare by checking in at a place more than any other user over a 60 day period. While there aren’t a lot of places offering these mayor deals yet, a number of establishments in New York and San Francisco (the cities where the service is most popular) are starting to pop up. Crowley also confirmed that a new version of the iPhone app, 1.4, should be out soon with a lot of new “bells and whistles.”
Foursquare Talks Facebook Places, Google, and Acquisitions In its first six months, popular check-in service Foursquare grew from 200 users to about 1 million users--a milestone Twitter didn't reach for years. Now, the New York-based startup, which recently raised $20 million in venture capital funding, boasts more than 6.5 million users as it enters its second year. Foursquare's growth continues to buzz past Twitter's during the same development stages, but the question is whether it will have that hockey stick-like growth spurt that made services like Facebook and Twitter ubiquitous. "We're on that ramp now, but it's another struggle to get from 6 million users to 100 million," says Holger Luedorf, VP of mobile and partnerships at Foursquare. Unlike other categories of social media that have clear, established market leaders--Facebook, Twitter--no startup in the geo-location space has yet to claim victory--and the check-in space is crowded. "How do we integrate more deeply with Google or Twitter or Facebook?"
Foursquare: Why It May Be the Next Twitter When we first wrote about Foursquare back in March it had just hit the web scene at SXSW and was taking the social media community by storm. We instantly saw the potential of a location-based service based on your Twitter network with an added layer of social gameplay. Now we're starting to see the app get adopted by more and more of our friends, finding traction in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, San Diego, and several other hyperlocal metro hubs. These breeding grounds of Foursquare activity are creating quite a frenzy, and we thought it appropriate to take a step back and survey the surrounding location-based social networking space as it applies to mobile apps, look forward to the future, and break down the beauty of Foursquare. While no service is likely to achieve the same scale as Twitter in the coming months, Foursquare has all the right ingredients to be one of this year's big hits. The Long and Short of LBS Google Latitude falls in the same boat.