Posts Tagged ‘Location Based Services’

Foursquare for Business

April 22nd, 2010

Foursquare has just expanded its offering for businesses enabling them to easily offer promotions and view detailed analytics of the patron traffic.  The location-based social network that has taken the web by storm has launched a do-it-yourself tool for businesses to claim their venue and leverage their new business dashboard.

Now all unclaimed venue has a link asking, “Are you the manger of this business?”  The link takes you to a page prompting business owners to claim their Foursquare venue and manage their account in three simple steps.

Businesses that claim their venues on Foursquare get a dashboard with realtime stats on number of check-ins, times of day people check in, most recent visitors, and most frequent visitors – along with additional analytics and more to come.  You can also manage your offers and badges people get when they check in at your venue.

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Posted in Foursquare, Gaming, Startups

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Foursquare goes primetime

February 1st, 2010

Foursquare announced today a new partnership with Bravo TV which will integrate a number of Bravo TV shows with the site.  The partnership is designed to engage viewers after they turn their TV’s off in leveraging Foursquare’s rapidly expanding location-based gaming presence.  Foursquare will begin integrating various show personalities and their city tips, as well as a Bravo badges, into the game experience.

This new deal will include the introduction of a number of new Bravo-themed badges to Foursquare will also turn some of Bravo’s top personalities behind its hit reality TV shows like The Millionaire Matchmaker, Top Chef, The Real Housewives, Top Chef Masters and Shear Genius into content creators.  These personalities will share their tips and to-do’s with users effectively adding a plethora of new city-specific content to venture.

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2010′s breakout star? Foursquare

December 29th, 2009

It seems this time of year every publication, online and offline, rolls out their predictions for the new year.  Well, we thought we would jump on that bandwagon and make our 2010 prediction as well.  Instead of coming up with some list like top 10 ‘fill in the blank’ of 2010, we chose to be more bold and pick a solo social media star for the new year.  And the winner is….Foursquare.

Founded in 2009 by the team that brought us Dodgeball, the mobile social network that was acquire by Google in 2005 and later shut down, the rapidly growing location-based startup has a simple purpose by letting users share their location with a group of friends.

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Posted in Startups, Twitter

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Gowalla’s 10 and a half days of Christmas game

December 17th, 2009

gowallaLocation-based game and social networking company Gowalla has announced its push for the holidays with their “10 and a half days of Christmas” game (because the 12 days of Christmas is too predictable).  Foursquare competitor Gowalla recently closed a Series B investment round from an all-star Silicon Valley cast earlier this month in an effort to unseat Foursquare in the buzz-worthy location-based game/social network race.

While we have covered Foursquare in the past, we haven’t yet profiled Gowalla’s service.  Similar to Foursquare, the Austin, Texas-based Gowalla game is all about checking into various places, sharing them with your friends and competing for prizes.  Gowalla does have a slightly different spin on their game platform such as enabling virtual goods at different location points.  You can see a brief demo of the service in action below:

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Posted in Mobile, Startups

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Google’s Street View uncovers Pompeii ruins

December 4th, 2009

gmapsGoogle’s growing Street View service has been covering the globe.  They have been expanding their mapping coverage of the world in many ingenious ways as we wrote about a few months back.  The Street View service within Google Maps lets users virtually stroll through city streets in a 3D-like environment.  Typically used to see what your destination looks like before you even get there, now the service has taken on a new capability – uncovering historical places.

The latest brilliant installment is the walk through the ancient ruins of Pompeii.

The ancient Roman city located near Naples, Italy is one of the worlds most amazing sites.  The ruined and partially buried city was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D., and was rediscovered in 1738 by workers building a summer palace for the King of Naples, Charles of Bourbon.  Pompeii was excavated in the late 19th century and is considered one of the most important archaeological finds of all time.

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RunKeeper raises seed round, social mobile fitness ready for primetime

November 30th, 2009

runkeeperFitnessKeeper, the Boston startup behind the GPS-based RunKeeper iPhone application, announced today a seed round of $400,000 from a group of local angel and venture investors.  While a $400k investment is small news by venture capital standards, this investment may have a bit more meaning behind it.  This funding marks the evolution of what I’m calling “social mobile fitness”.

runscreen

The mobile RunKeeper app gives fitness buffs the ability to train socially.  By using RunKeeper on your iPhone you can track your workouts – running, walking or cycling, build and communicate with your “Street Team”, and seamless update your progress by clean and simple integration with Facebook and Twitter.  This really brings a new level to not only iPhone training applications, but also potentially all mobile fitness applications.  Full integration with social networking applications really expands and enriches the fitness experience.

runshare

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Posted in Apple, Facebook, Mobile, Startups, Twitter

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Foursquare aims for world domination – one pub at a time

November 19th, 2009

foursquare_logoOnly a few days after their announcement of a new API, Foursquare is at it again.  The location-based mobile application and game has announced 50 more cities to its highly addictive and rapidly growing service bringing the global total to over 100 different cities worldwide.  A little over a month ago, Foursquare announced 15 new cities to its service all of which were in North America.  The 50 new cities announced today definitely have a more global theme to the Foursquare service.

The list of the new cities are outlined below.  As you scan through the list, you quickly see the significant part of today’s announcement.  This time, the highly popular service includes cities from South America, Australia, Asia, Africa, Europe and the Middle East.  This rapid global expansion, super addictive gameplay and intensely dedicated user base has led some anoint Foursquare as 2010′s next Twitter (via Mashable).

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Posted in Gaming, Startups, Twitter

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Foursquare unveils API to the public

November 16th, 2009

foursquare_logoEarlier today, Foursquare announced it would be opening up their API for the public.  Up until now, only a handful of developers have had access to the location-based service startups platform.  Foursquare’s hope with this move is to create a robust app-based community of developers that will leverage their unique platform.

Along with their announcement of the API, Foursquare also unveiled their existing app gallery to demonstrate a number of apps that developers have already built with the API.  So far, the following apps are in the Foursquare gallery:

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Posted in Mobile, Startups

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Google’s new ‘Trike’ hits the streets

October 16th, 2009

In Google’s ongoing effort to index everything on the planet, they tech giant has a new project underway and is asking for your input.  The Google Street View Trike may be coming to a mall, park or zoo near you soon to give the world a new look at your ‘off-road’ locations.  Check out the promo clip below courtesy of Google:

Google Street Views, which gives users the ability to view street-level images of places across the US and around the world, is one of the more interesting featuremaps_logos of the Google Maps application.  Limited by their ability to only show images from actual streets – Senior Mechanical Engineer, and Google employee, Dan Ratner came up with a rather novel idea.  A street trike designed to capture images from places automobiles can’t go.  The trike, which can be seen at Google’s 3D Warehouse, weights roughly 250-lbs.

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Foursquare expanding fast!

October 15th, 2009

We recently highlighted a unique new social networking startup called Foursquare.  It’s  the location based social network startup that incorporates elements of gaming.  Foursquare is expanding fast and asking users to suggest their city to help build demand for the service.  They recently announced they have launched to following 15 cities:

UNITED STATES
Baltimore, MD4square
Cleveland, OH
Indianapolis, IN
Kansas City, MO
Milwaukee, WI
New Orleans, LA
Omaha, NE
Pittsburgh, PA
Raleigh-Durham, NC
Richmond, VA
Salt Lake City, UT
San Antonio, TX
St. Louis, MO

CANADA
Montreal, Canada
Toronto, Canada

The cool new service is growing an international following to go along with its US growth with recent launches in Amsterdam and London.  Foursquare is currently available in the following cities:  Amsterdam, Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas/Fort Worth, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Las Vegas, London, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Montreal, New York City, Omaha, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Portland, Raleigh-Durham, Richmond, Salt Lake City, San Antonio, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, Toronto, Vancouver and Washington D.C.

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