Three years after launching Foursquare in New York City, co-founder Naveen Selvadurai announced that he is leaving the company.
Foursquare Co-founder Naveen Selvadurai Checks Out
Posts Tagged ‘Naveen Selvadurai’
Mediabistro Events
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.
Use Social Media to Market Your Business
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 Tweaking Brand Pages with an Eye Toward Monetization
foursquare is looking to ramp up the use of its brand pages, ramping up some cash flow for itself in the process.
$50M in Capital Checks Into foursquare
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.
CNN.com, TIME.com Launch Global Public Square Blog
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.
foursquare 3.0 Set to Debut for Android, iPhone
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.
Social Media Week Executive Director Toby Daniels: ‘Our Most Spectacular Yet’
Social Media Week kicks off Monday in nine cities — New York, San Francisco, Rome, Paris, Toronto, São Paulo, London, Hong Kong, and Istanbul — and Crowdcentric CEO and Social Media Week founder and executive director Toby Daniels said year four of the event will be “our most spectacular yet, and one of the largest distributed conferences in the world.”
Speaking at the opening press conference at Hearst Tower in New York, Daniels said, “I am amazed by the creativity and the depth and the variety of the content. What I’m seeing now is a shift away from the technologies and toward specific industry sectors.”
Hearst Magazines president David Carey said:
This is one of the hottest topics in media on one of the coldest weeks of the year. We’ve always felt a special kinship with social media. As a magazine publisher, in many ways, magazines were the original social media. We have many of our top editors lined up to be in panels and programs. We’ve made understanding social media and applying it to our top brands a priority.
