Dennis Crowley, the chief executive and co-founder of Foursquare, shared his thoughts and insights into the mapping and location world. Foursquare continues to dominate the space and really doesn’t have any direct competition in the areas it sees itself competing: points of interest and overlaying social location data.
Crowley said that Foursquare isn’t about badges, leaderboards and other gamification features and that the real power is in the immense amounts of data being collected every time someone ‘checks in’. This data starts to really to get scale when you think that Instagram and Flickr, amongst others, use the Foursquare location ID to tag the photos.
Harry Potter’s Marauder’s Map was how he positioned the future success of Foursquare. Crowley argued with all of the data that Foursquare has it should be able to provide information about friends, what they are doing now and what they have done, places you might like and things that you should check out – based on other things you may have visited or attended.
There are now more than 30 million people using Foursquare globally. There are more than 50 million locations tagged. Foursquare are collecting somewhere in excess of 3 billion data points. That data is growing exponentially as users increase at 1.5 million per month.
When Crowley showed a video of New York doing Hurricane Sandy using Foursquare data, it clearly showed that during the storm NYC slowed down its data to Foursquare but it increased in Brooklyn.
Crowley said that now with the launch of the Foursquare Retailer app, the local retail store may be able to see that you walk past his shop every day to get a similar product down the road. They can then specifically send you an offer specific to your habits that may make you visit their store. Another SXSW trend: Personalisation.
Foursquare is continuing to evolve into a more powerful social media company. The power of their data to personalize and localise the data is going to see them powering a lot more applications. In the near term we might be able to see on news.com.au or SMH the effects of a news story on the local businesses, based on real time Foursquare information.
Matthew Joyce
Chief innovation officer
TMS