Foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley told the Wall Street Journal in an interview that his company is passing on daily coupons from these marketing partners to Foursquare users while taking a cut of the revenue. “We are trying to see if our targeting works and how users will react,” Crowley told the Journal.
Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews. 
foursquare created a Brazil-centric website in response to its accelerating user base in the country.
The number 10 million was notable for foursquare earlier this month, as the location-based mobile app reached the 10 million-user mark. The next important number for foursquare: 50 million, but dollars, not users.
So far in 2011, foursquare is adding users at the pace of roughly 1 million every six weeks, but co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley is working toward picking up that pace.
He spoke of creating a “hybrid check-in” model where the phone would recognize when you’ve entered an establishment that you previously visited and ask you if you’d like to check in there.
CNN.com and TIME.com teamed up to launch Global Public Square, a new blog that will feature insights on global news from CNN Fareed Zakaria GPS host and TIME editor at large Fareed Zakaria, as well as journalists from the cable network and the magazine, and other expert guests.
Global Public Square is edited by CNN.com World producer Amar Bakshi, and guests set to contribute over the next few weeks include: foursquare co-founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai; statistics guru Hans Rosling; and Nina Hachigian, co-author of The Next American Century.
CNN’s Nic Robertson will also provide analysis on Libya’s tipping point, and CNN Cairo bureau chief Ben Wedeman will report on the ongoing unrest in the Middle East and north Africa. Global Public Square will also feature a weekly news quiz, and a books of the week entry.
The short history of foursquare contains several ties to South by Southwest, so it’s only fitting that the location-based mobile app will ring in this year’s SXSW by releasing version 3.0 for Android and iPhone devices Tuesday night.
One of the most prominent new features in the updated app is an Explore tab, which offers suggestions based on users’ previous visited places, friends’ visited places, users’ trends, time of day, and other factors.
Highlights from a post by co-founder Dennis Crowley on the foursquare Blog:
It was almost exactly two years today that Naveen Selvadurai and I flipped the switch on foursquare, jumped on a plane to Austin, and introduced the folks at SXSW 2009 to our idea of “turning life into a game.” We’ve told the story a number of times, but we really had no idea whether people would dig the “check-ins and game mechanics” model or laugh us out of Texas. As it turned out, a lot of people loved it. By the time we got back to New York, we had 5,000 users. We started a company, raised a round of funding, and hired a bunch of the smartest people we could find.
Last year, we came back to Austin with a slightly bigger team (12 of us!) and more confidence in our ideas. Not only were people digging the “life as a game” idea, but we were seeing foursquare badges actually driving people to do things (“Gym Rat” badge, anyone?), we saw mayorships encouraging loyalty at coffee shops and restaurants, and merchants starting to reward people for their check-ins (“free coffee for the Mayor!”). It wasn’t hard to see how the social utility of check-ins, tips, and to-dos were starting to change the way people experienced both familiar neighborhoods and new cities. We launched “Trending” at SXSW 2010 — a way to see where a critical mass of people were checked in — and watched as people at SXSW used it as a “sixth sense” to know when it was time to switch parties and as a way to choose which panels to gravitate toward. We left Austin last year with just under 500,000 users.
When foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley touched on future features for the location-based mobile app during a keynote interview at Social Media Week New York last week, he must have been looking further out into the future than Monday, as he never mentioned the new languages being added.
French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Japanese are now supported by foursquare, and users’ default languages can be changed by updating their Blackberry, iPhone, or Android apps, during which they will see prompts.
The foursquare Web site will add those five languages, and more are on the way for both the apps and the site, foursquare said on its blog.
foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley was the subject of a keynote interview as part of Social Media Week New York, conducted by Fast Company‘s Austin Carr at JWT’s Media & Communications Hub in Manhattan.
Crowley mentioned that the company has grown from four employees and 100,000 users to 50 employees and some 6.5 million users, saying, “Going from 100,000 users to 6.5 million users, a lot of things break in the middle.”
Describing how the foursquare platform evolved, he said, “You can get 10 random foursquare users in a room and ask them what drew them to the platform, and you’d get 10 different answers. What should I eat? Can I get a special? We threw 10 things at the wall to see what sticks, and all 10 of them stuck. It’s a good thing, because it shows how rich the platform is and how rich it could be. How do you boil everything that foursquare does down to one sentence? I don’t think we want to tell people how to use the product. We want people to teach us how they’re using it. The initial design was, ‘I go out for happy hour, I broadcast my location, and a bunch of people show up.’ ”
Crowley continued, “Can you use game mechanics to incentivize and encourage people to go out and enrich their lives? I think there’s something good about software that can get you to try new experiences. No matter where I’m standing in Manhattan, there’s 1,000 options of things I could be doing right now. foursquare can help me filter those options.”
Checking in is the in thing, as foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley told GigaOM the location-based mobile app topped 4 million users.
foursquare reached 1 million users in March and 3 million in August, according to GigaOM, and Crowley said it took just 50 days to go from 3 million to 4 million.
