Future of Foursquare

Dennis Crowley the CEO spoke at All Things D on Tuesday. Among the highlights:

- The company’s main business will be in serving local merchants over big brands
- That means serving those business with tools - including perhaps those that keep the biz owner up to date on who their most loyal customers are
- Companies like Groupon are partners, the tools could be added together
- The company is looking at passive checkin (you do nothing adn phone checks in at the correct locations)

- Mashable

Waze Wants You to Know

I just wanted to let you know that everyone’s favorite cross-platform social driving app waze just posted some really important numbers [US only I gather?] to their blog, chief among them that they have surpassed 2 million users.
What’s even more important about these numbers, is the timeframe in which they were achieved [since Jan 09]. Waze has the exponential “hockey stick” growth which is dreamed of by every startup.
We’d love for you to link to the post, or even to tweet about it.

The PR firm behind this message wants you to know:

*Best Tech PR Agency, 2009 Crunchies
*Voted #1 Midsize Tech PR Agency by the IT editorial community

SoGeo Launches Whatser, a mobile-social location app

SoGeo, an Amsterdam-based company launched Whatser today. I got a chance to talk to the SoGeo team while in The Netherlands last month and they showed me the beta version. The differentiator of Whatser is the social net aspect whereby you get recommendations about places, restaurants, etc. only from those in your network/friends. The benefit is that you are getting information from trusted sources. So, while the app is like other local search tools, it adds the personal touch of allowing you to base your decisions on those whose opinion is "qualified." SoGeo is partnering with other local search developers that use the SoGeo API platform as well. The company secured 1 million Euros in funding this past June.

Facebook Steps into Foursquare Territory

Before yesterday’s Facebook HQ meeting on mobile, the buzz was about a potential Facebook phone. Nope, it’s more about expanding Facebook places in a way that many think threatens top LBS “rewards” players like Foursquare, Gowalla and others.

...Facebook went ahead and launched a big new suite of mobile features that includes, notably, enhancements to Facebook Places that let businesses easily automate “deals” for when users check in. On the surface, given Facebook’s scale, this looks like it could spell difficult times ahead for Foursquare.

The big news is the services are “self service” and available to any business. And there are different flavors of offerings:

- charity deals, where a business gives per check-in
- group deals - where the deal applies if a Facebooker brings in friends who check-in
- loyalty deals - where individuals get deals on multiple check-ins

For now the services appears to be free; monetization, says Facebook, will be via Facebook ads business will buy. When you check-in for a reward, it’s posted to your Facebook newsfeed and follows the privacy settings for Places. Many folks have turned those up to “very tight” meaning little if any location sharing, so the “group deals” will be the ones to watch to see if this new twist ups use of location sharing.

CEO Dennis Crowley of Foursquare was speaking to the future of his company at an AdTech event on the same day. (Mashable coverage)

- C|net

Directions Media Expands News Coverage of Latest Geospatial Trends

Directions Media continues to expand our news coverage of the geospatial technology and location-based services industry by allowing IT professionals to receive the news in many forms.

Today we launched a news feeds for geospatial augmented reality on Twitter, @geospatialAR and delicious  (or RSS feed).

You can also join the Geospatial Augmented Reality group on LinkedIn.

And don’t forget follow our coverage of cloud computing with our news feeds @geocloud and the Geospatial Cloud Computing subgroup on LinkedIn.

Both the above mentioned LinkedIn groups are subgroups of the Location Intelligence and Geospatial BI LinkedIn group that now has 1950 members, the third largest geospatial technology group on LinkedIn.