Ten Years On, Foursquare Is Now Checking In to You (nymag.com) 18
Location social networks never took off, and Gowalla's star burned out fast. Gilt sold at a loss. And Tumblr, recently sold by Yahoo for less than 1 percent of what it originally paid, has become a cautionary tale. If you haven't been paying close attention, you'd be forgiven for assuming that Foursquare had fallen prey to the same fates as its once-hot peers. From a report: But you'd be wrong. This year, Foursquare's revenue will surpass $100 million, a critical mile marker for any company on its way to a public offering. In fact its story of success is a perfect tech-industry parable: A charming, rickety, vintage-2000s social app that's survived the last decade by evolving into a powerhouse enterprise data-extraction business. In 2014, Foursquare made a decision to shift its attention from its consumer apps to a growing business-to-business operation; five years later, 99 percent of Foursquare's business comes from its software and data products. Its clients include Uber, Twitter, Apple, Snapchat, and Microsoft. The company is still shining brightly, not because location-based social networks or New York's start-up scene have finally reached escape velocity, but because Foursquare had something that other start-ups didn't: location technology rivaled by only Google and Facebook.
[...] By 2014, Foursquare made the decision to focus on providing software tools and data to app developers, advertisers, and brands. Foursquare began charging developers for the use of its location technology in their own apps (it has worked with more than 150,000 to date) and selling its data to brands, marketers, advertisers, and data-hungry investors. The company's tools could measure foot traffic in and out of brick-and-mortar locations and build consumer profiles based on where people had recently visited. Soon, Foursquare began brandishing its power with public market predictions. It projected iPhone sales in 2015 based on traffic to Apple stores and, in 2016, the huge drop in Chipotle's sales figures (thanks to E. coli) two weeks before the burrito-maker announced its quarterly earnings. Co-founder and executive chairman Dennis Crowley says the human check-ins gave Foursquare engineers and data scientists the ability to verify and adjust location readings from other sources, like GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. As it turns out, the goofy badges for Uncle Tony that made Foursquare easy to dismiss as a late-2000s fad were an incredibly powerful tool. [...] In addition to all of those active check-ins, at some point Foursquare began collecting passive data using a "check-in button you never had to press." It doesn't track people 24/7 (in addition to creeping people out, doing so would burn through phones' batteries), but instead, if users opt-in to allow the company to "always" track their locations, the app will register when someone stops and determine whether that person is at a red light or inside an Urban Outfitters. The Foursquare database now includes 105 million places and 14 billion check-ins.
[...] By 2014, Foursquare made the decision to focus on providing software tools and data to app developers, advertisers, and brands. Foursquare began charging developers for the use of its location technology in their own apps (it has worked with more than 150,000 to date) and selling its data to brands, marketers, advertisers, and data-hungry investors. The company's tools could measure foot traffic in and out of brick-and-mortar locations and build consumer profiles based on where people had recently visited. Soon, Foursquare began brandishing its power with public market predictions. It projected iPhone sales in 2015 based on traffic to Apple stores and, in 2016, the huge drop in Chipotle's sales figures (thanks to E. coli) two weeks before the burrito-maker announced its quarterly earnings. Co-founder and executive chairman Dennis Crowley says the human check-ins gave Foursquare engineers and data scientists the ability to verify and adjust location readings from other sources, like GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. As it turns out, the goofy badges for Uncle Tony that made Foursquare easy to dismiss as a late-2000s fad were an incredibly powerful tool. [...] In addition to all of those active check-ins, at some point Foursquare began collecting passive data using a "check-in button you never had to press." It doesn't track people 24/7 (in addition to creeping people out, doing so would burn through phones' batteries), but instead, if users opt-in to allow the company to "always" track their locations, the app will register when someone stops and determine whether that person is at a red light or inside an Urban Outfitters. The Foursquare database now includes 105 million places and 14 billion check-ins.
How do I block it ? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Don't install any apps that request access to GPS will get you 95% there.
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They learned from the 'big boys' which have an extremely arrogant God complex.
If you let big Tommy Tucker beat up kids on the school yard and cause havoc, the other kids are going to start doing the same. :\
The big companies should have been penalized long ago for displaying such arrogance "We're Trustworthy(R)(TM)(Pat. Pending) and you're not!". Too bad it didn't happen.
Re: How do I block it ? (Score:4, Informative)
Hit your phone several times with a hammer, then toss it in the sea. That will probably prevent it from snooping.
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It's getting really annoying as even built-in apps are using these services. For example Samsung Gallery will no longer show location information for a photo unless you agree to share data with Foursquare. They justify this by providing additional information using Foursquare's data, but there's no way to even show just the GPS coordinates without sending data to Foursquare.
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Opt-In? (Score:2)
If users opt-in to allow the company to "always" track their locations, the app will register when someone stops and determine whether that person is at a red light or inside an Urban Outfitters.
Is it truly opt-in, or if users fail to opt-out? And why would users want to opt-in?
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$100 million revenue? (Score:2)
How is $100 million revenue/yr and negative profits still after 10 years "a critical mile marker" for an IPO? Such hype. I can create a company that generates $100 million in revenue if you give me $300 million a year to finance it. Ridiculous.
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How is $100 million revenue/yr and negative profits still after 10 years "a critical mile marker" for an IPO? Such hype. I can create a company that generates $100 million in revenue if you give me $300 million a year to finance it. Ridiculous.
They have reached the point where investors see they can bring in revenue and are hoping they can now take off and turn 100$million in a billion rather quickly. They have not flamed out but shown they can generate revenue and thus are viewed as worth a shot at an IPO to get a cash infusion and make money for the original investors. A lot depends on how they burnt through the initial money - was it to develop infrastructure and ongoing products or did they pay a lot to buy customers? If it was primarily capi
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Wait, so they only managed $100 million in revenue per year after 10 years of the biggest economic boom in modern history (after losing hundreds of millions), but somehow they are going to go from $100 million to $1B quickly? They already had a "cash infusion" of $250 million from private investment. How much more do they need?
Re: $100 million revenue? (Score:2)
'Cuz das gestapo pays collaborators well, but it's off the books.
With that title line (Score:3)
Shouldn't it be from the "In Soviet Russia Dept"?
Cautionary tale? Or example of moronity? (Score:2)
> And Tumblr, recently sold by Yahoo for less than 1 percent of what it originally paid, has become a cautionary tale.
It was sold for so little because of the owners at the time deciding to ban lewd content, which was the main draw for traffic and content creators for the site. Next up in "Cautionary tales", the story of a company that bought a racetrack, banned racing on it and then was shocked when the track lost money.
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So what made Tumbler go puritan all of a sudden? The "think of the children!" harpies? The holy rollers? The morons who think a kid who even looks at an FPS is going to go shoot up his school buddies? And why did they cave to these idiots?
I can't imagine a site like Tumbler turning into disney.com or kow-towing so easily to the control freak nutcases.
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The site is still swarming with porn and eight months later Tumblr has been unable to actually ban NSFW content because the bulk of the site was teens and col
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So in other words, they took the lazy way out, decided to go Disney, and they hung themselves by doing this.
The lesson here is that adults don't want a censored play pen, and if websites that host user uploaded content can't be arsed to keep illegal material off their site, they have no business running such a site to begin with.