Imagespot: Foursquare

Showing posts with label Foursquare. Show all posts

Monday, June 27, 2011

FoodSpotting API

Image representing Foodspotting as depicted in...

Image via CrunchBaseFoodSpotting's Dish As Starting Point
Twitter ---> Instagram ---> FoodSpotting

I was just reading this and it occurred to me that the solution to my number one gripe about FoodSpotting lies in the app releasing an API: social is for other independent developers to do.

Inc.: 30 Under 30: Alexa Andrzejewksi, Soraya Darabi, and Ted Grubb, Founders of Foodspotting: To learn about bootstrapping her book project, she joined Women 2.0 and started aggressively networking, talking about her plan to catalog restaurant dishes. Tech start-up veteran programmer Ted Grubb met her at a happy hour at Adaptive Path, where Andrzejewski was a consultant, and advised she steer her 20th-Century project into the smartphone era...... When he couldn’t find Andrzejewski a qualified technical co-founder, Grubb decided to learn iPhone programming himself, and he created a prototype Foodspotting app while in a decidedly un-2.0 setting: a tent in the wilderness. ...... New York media darling Soraya Darabi .... scored $3 million in angel funding. ...... "I know that I'm working more than—or as much as—I have in other jobs, but it doesn't feel like work, and that's the huge emotional difference for me" ....... on the forefront of the local, mobile, social app space ...... an international hit, with global "super spotters" staging "eat-ups" in hundreds of cities globally. ...... When it debuted in the iTunes app store, Foodspotting was one of just six apps in the location-based category. "The space has heated up a ton since last July—today it's a crowded space, actually—but back when we were raising money it was new to everybody," Andrzejewski says...... Despite initial investor skepticism, and nine months of bootstrapping, the trio was able to raise $3 million in funding from BlueRun Ventures. That's allowed the company to expand to ten employees: two in New York City, and eight in an open-air-café-inspired office in San Francisco's SoMa neighborhood. To stay connected bi-coastally, Skype and SocialCast are open constantly on everyone's computers...... "And just as many funny things happen on Skype as in the office."

The API might also be the solution to the aspect that might most excite me about FoodSpotting personally: SMS enabled spotting of dishes around the world. Food is like music: you could discover endlessly. It is not possible to spot all the dishes that got made around the world just today, no matter how much crowdsourcing you do, and dishes morph. Recipes are alive, just like language stays alive. Good cooks improvise like jazz musicians.

Jessica Mah, Mark Zuckerberg
Jessica Mah: The Most Promising 19 Year Old Tech Entrepreneur In America

Dropbox, FoodSpotting, GroupMe, Hipmunk, inDinero, Instagram, and Quora are some of the names on the list that stand out.

The Color Social Graph Might Work Better For Books, Movies, Music

FourSquare's New Round
Lytro: A High End Product?
Dial M For Murder
Tumblr: Ease Of Use?
Path + Instagram + Color
Bloomberg On Immigration
Shakti (1982), Heat (1995)
What's Up With Pictures?

Friday, June 24, 2011

FourSquare's New Round

The first place I heard about it was here.

@naveen Oh, very nice. Congrats on the new round!less than a minute ago via HootSuite Favorite Retweet ReplyJesse Chan-Norris
jcn

Then I went to the TechMeme site, pressed the F for find button and typed FourSquare. And I read up.

TechCrunch: Foursquare Closes $50M at a $600M Valuation

Foursquare has just closed one of the most secretive rounds of venture capital TechCrunch has seen. .... $550 million pre-money, $600 million post ..... Leading it was Andreessen Horowitz ..... Union Square Ventures, OATV also reupped in this round and Spark Capital came in as a new investor ..... The money will be used to build out the merchant platform, the San Francisco office and fuel international expansion ...... Some firms said they shied away from the deal, because they felt monetization was only more unclear now .... With the local space on fire, Foursquare’s target advertisers are already beset with sales people from Yelp, Living Social, Groupon, Google and others calling on them. There’s going to be a level of retailer fatigue, and business-wise Foursquare is late to the party. ..... any investor will have a liquidation preference, meaning they get paid first in the event of an acquisition. So a $50 million deal at any price wouldn’t lose money unless Foursquare winds up being worth less than $70 million. ..... Few of Foursquare’s angel investors were even briefed about it. “Loose Tweets sink companies,” Crowley said. “The series B played out very publicly and it was hard for the company, so we came up with a better process this time.” ..... the company might be working on an additional round to cash out some early investors, to be closed at a later date.

ReadWriteWeb: Foursquare Lands $50 Million Round of Funding

The company has recently partnered with American Express and Groupon though it is unclear if either of those avenues will provide any substantial revenue bump to the company. ....... "Having our current investors double down on us is a tremendous gesture of support for Foursquare and for the direction we're headed," Foursquare wrote in a blog post..... The company is also working on trying to surface news ways to use its data, such utilizing the implicit connections that are made when users interact with businesses and each other..... In the last year, Foursquare has grown from 15 to 70 employees. ..... and try a ton of new things."

GigaOm: Foursquare checks in to $50M in fresh funding

hiring more engineers, developing more offerings for merchants, and expanding internationally

New York Times: Foursquare Checks Into $50 Million in Venture Cash

The fresh infusion of cash will go primarily towards hiring more employees, particularly overseas .... “We’re seeing huge international pick-up,” Mr. Crowley said in an interview. “We’re trying to figure out what that expansion looks like — do we set up an office, hire international engineers?” .... Foursquare said it decided to raise money to help support the company’s skyrocketing growth.

The last valuation was at 100 million at one to two million users, right? Going from that to 10 million users jacks up your valuation by 500 million dollars if you are in a sweet space. That check in space, that location space is special.

The merchant platform is about monetization. The San Francisco emphasis is like saying New York City still lags behind when it comes to top notch engineers, right?

I have been surprised FourSquare's emphasis on Bangalore has not matched its emphasis on San Francisco. Facebook does it. As do many others. Hyderabad is another good one. I have a team there that is part of my tech consulting network. Where has been the advantage of having had an Indian cofounder? For the longest time I thought Naveen was born in the US. I learned in one of his tweets after Bloomberg dropped by that was not the case. He was born in India, it ends up. The South.

FourSquare: Planning for the future of foursquare

Foursquare is not just about the check-in, or recommendations, or points, or badges. It’s about making the world easier to use. It’s about discovering new places, connecting with friends, and forging new relationships with the places you visit. It’s finding new ways to layer technology on the real world.

This should be enough money for FourSquare to hit 100 million users. How long would that take? Two years? One major area of growth might be what I hinted at the FoodSpotting blog earlier in the day in response to their Windows Phone app release. You do stuff through SMS, and you tidy it up later on the big screen web if you messed up any detail.

Next stop: SMS based @foodspotting. For phones with cameras but no other "smartness." http://t.co/XR4BNeG Go global, 90% of market.less than a minute ago via web Favorite Retweet ReplyParamendra Bhagat
paramendra

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

What's Up With Pictures?

(This post was rejected by Technorati with this comment: It's not news and the only links are to your own blog.)

Image representing Instagram as depicted in Cr...

Image via CrunchBasePictures are all the rage, and Instagram deserves much credit. True, Facebook already had billions of pictures before Instagram even showed but with Facebook people thought - with the exception of Fred Wilson - it was a social network rather than a photo sharing site. With Instagram the facade was gone.

There is just something about pictures. The old adage of a picture being worth a thousand words might be true. Something tells me that even after the world might have moved on to gigabit speeds, pictures will still rule. Because a picture is respectful. You know going in that it need not be more than a split second experience. But a 30 second video is a time commitment. And so the picture will hold its ground even as bandwidth goes up. Actually pictures might expand ground. As the bandwidth expands, people might share more and more pictures. Go figure.

Talking about pictures, one of the unnoticed pivots in the industry has been FourSquare going into pictures in a major way. But Instagram still has a leg up and is on schedule to overtake FourSquare because just like the check in is the starting point of the FourSquare experience, but that is not true of Facebook, with Instagram the picture is the be all end all. The picture is not FourSquare's starting point.

Twitter wanting to do pictures is Twitter being a little late to the game but, hey, better late than never.

TechCrunch: Twitter Is Launching Its Own Photosharing Service: the Twitpics and Yfrogs of the world can just give it up now

Image via CrunchBase

Monday, May 30, 2011

Brett Martin Of Sonar

So there is this guy called Brett Martin.

He looks like the actor Matthew McConaughey.

He presented his app Sonar at the TechCrunch Disrupt. We exchanged a few tweets and a few emails. The guy is buying me lunch during Internet Week.

I am so looking forward to Internet Week but I have not had the time to go down the schedule to pick the events I want to go to. I'd like to believe I have some time. Hope they don't all get filled up. Or maybe I should do that today, go down the list and RSVP to all the events I wish to go to.

Sonar: How Whales Roll: Mike Arrington My Sonar Friend

Brett: Let's grab breakfast during internet week. How about 9am on weds the 8th at the grey dog cafe on carmine in the wet village? Open to other ideas, unfortunately I haven't made my schedule for that week yet.

Me: we will do something one on one during internet week
right now i don't know what

Brett: OK, you LMK. I really liked your analysis and would like to treat you out to lunch.

Me: u want to buy me lunch?
:-)
ha ha
i blogged about sonar b/c it is an exciting proposition

Image via Wikipediait has the potential to be the leader in that hyperlocal space

i will let you buy me lunch if you will keep it to around 5 bucks, not more
dumplings at Joe's Shanghai in Chinatown ----- 6 bucks

i have not looked at the internet week schedule yet, but i am in mind to do as many events as possible
so once i have my to do list ready ----- then i'd like to fit in lunch ---- hope i am not sounding "difficult"
i mean, i'd love to meet and u know that already

:-)

Brett: ha, 5 dollars for 60 minutes of you thinking on my problems is a great deal.

Looking forward to soup dumplings- they are amazing.

Me: 60 minutes (or more) to get to know and become friends with an
interesting dude who just might be on to the next big thing, and HE is
buying lunch?
great deal :-)
i'd love to blog about sonar again -------

@paramendra thanks for the kind words about @sonarme . swing by our booth , i'd love to meet you in person.less than a minute ago via TweetDeck Favorite Retweet ReplyBrett Martin
brett1211

Sunday, May 1, 2011

Is Location The Fifth Dimension?

Cover of A Brief History of TimeThe SimpleGeo Promise

I put out this blog post earlier. And I have been thinking. Your laptop screen is 2D. Your smartphone screen is 2D. But Twitter and Facebook happened before FourSquare happened. The time dimension got added before location ever became a factor. Length and width were the first two dimensions. The third dimension was not spatial, it was time, chronologically speaking, pun intended.

But if you go into 3D computing, the third dimension is not location. Easy math, that would make location the fifth dimension of web tech.

That makes it really, really interesting to me. Location has several sub dimensions. Location can be local, it can be global. Local can be hyperlocal with all its associated richness. When you move from local to hyperlocal, that starts feeling like fractal territory all over again. Blows my mind.

And social is not one of the five dimensions. Social is a reality on its own. Social can inhabit any of those five dimensions. Now you know why Mark Zuckerberg is smiling.

Sunday, April 24, 2011

The Cloud Outage

O'Reilly Community: The AWS Outage: The Cloud's Shining Moment: if your systems failed in the Amazon cloud this week, it wasn't Amazon's fault. You either deemed an outage of this nature an acceptable risk or you failed to design for Amazon's cloud computing model....... two dueling architectural models of cloud computing applications: "design for failure" and traditional. ..... The Amazon model is the "design for failure" model. Under the "design for failure" model, combinations of your software and management tools take responsibility for application availability. The actual infrastructure availability is entirely irrelevant to your application availability. 100% uptime should be achievable even when your cloud provider has a massive, data-center-wide outage. ...... The advantage of the "design for failure" model is that the application developer has total control of their availability with only their data model and volume imposing geographical limitations. The downside of the "design for failure" model is that you must "design for failure" up front. ...... Physical redundancy encompasses all traditional "n+1" concepts: redundant hardware, data center redundancy, the ability to do vMotion or equivalents, and the ability to replicate an entire network topology in the face of massive infrastructural failure. ...... If you had redundancy across availability zones, you would have survived every outage suffered to date in the Amazon cloud. ...... If you had regional redundancy in place, you would have come through the recent outage without any problems except maybe an increased workload for your surviving virtual resources. ...... Cloud redundancy enables you to survive the complete loss of a cloud provider. ....... Being home to the world’s reserve currency confers great advantages on the U.S. economy. Because of it, our government, companies and households can borrow money more easily and cheaply. And because all that demand for dollars artificially raises its value, we can import goods at a cheaper price than other countries. ...... Applications built with "design for failure" in mind ..... will achieve uptimes you can't dream of with other architectures and survive extreme failures in the cloud infrastructure. ...... no humans, no 2am calls, and no outage! ..... Netflix, an AWS customer that kept on going because they had proper "design for failure" .. ? Try doing that in your private IT infrastructure with the complete loss of a data center.

I should have, but I did not expect this to happen. Servers are known to go down. Heck, PCs crash. The browser freezes. The cloud went down. In a big way. What's next? Datacenters? I think it did happen once. One Google datacenter went down. Correct me if I am not remembering it right. What if Facebook's datacenter in Oregon went down for an hour?

So the cloud went down. And there has been much talk. The Amazon Web Services is pretty much the cloud that most of us are privy to. And you thought Jeff Bezos was in the business of selling books.

The cloud should not go down. The cloud can not go down. It is like when there is a power cut the generator turns on on its own immediately, and so although there was a power cut, you did not feel it. The cloud needs that mechanism. Otherwise it is not a proper cloud. The cloud is not like the rest of us. The cloud is not supposed to go down.

New York Times: Amazon’s Trouble Raises Cloud Computing Doubts: the companies that were apparently hit hardest by the Amazon interruption were start-ups that, analysts said, are focused on moving fast in pursuit of growth, and less apt to pay for extensive backup and recovery services..... Amazon set up a side business five years ago offering computing resources to businesses from its network of sophisticated data centers. Today, the company is the early leader in the fast-growing business of cloud computing. ...... to avoid the costs and headaches of running their own data centers — simply tap in, over the Web, to computer processing and storage without owning the machines or operating software. ...... Amazon has thousands of corporate customers, from Pfizer and Netflix to legions of start-ups, whose businesses often live on Amazon Web Services. Those reporting service troubles included Foursquare, a location-based social networking site; Quora, a question-and-answer service; Reddit, a news-sharing site; and BigDoor, which makes game tools for Web publishers. ...... Amazon has data centers around the world, but the current problems have come from its big center in Northern Virginia, near Dulles airport. ....... Corporate cloud computing is expected to grow rapidly, by more than 25 percent a year, to $55.5 billion by 2014 ..... the computing equivalent of an airplane crash. It is a major episode with widespread damage. But airline travel, he noted, is still safer than traveling in a car — analogous to cloud computing being safer than data centers run by individual companies.

ReadWriteWeb: How Shoddy DNS Management Can Kill Your Small Business: Whether it's caused by a service provider going down, a DDoS attack or a sudden surge in traffic, having your Website go down can knock the wind out of your business. Most bigger organizations can recover from an outage, but for small and medium-sized businesses, even an hour of downtime can cost you in terms of revenue, not to mention customer patience and loyalty. For smaller operations, a major outage could spell the end of the business.

VentureBeat: Amazon’s outage in third day: debate over cloud computing’s future begins: The outage is costing web sites such as Reddit and Quora considerable losses as users turn elsewhere to get their social media needs met..... a big hiccup for an industry that is supposed to grow to $55 billion by 2014 ...... The duration of the outage has surprised many, since Amazon has a lot of backup computing infrastructure. ...... Corporations will have to decide what computer operations to put on a cloud operated by external vendors and how much they should keep inside their own internal data centers. They will also have to figure out the right policies for backup and recovery services. And they will have to decide whether to allocate more money to backup data centers in multiple locations. ....... Netflix uses Amazon but it hasn’t gone offline because it fully uses Amazon’s redundant cloud backup infrastructure. For most startups, those are luxuries that are too expensive ...... the web site developers should have planned for this kind of outage and taken advantage of Amazon’s full backup capabilities ..... Eventually, the cloud will become like a utility. You can get as much computing power as you want with the flip of a switch and you won’t have to worry about outages as much over time. But we’re clearly not there yet

Saturday, April 23, 2011

FourSquare Up To 500 Million Valuation?

Be There, Or Be Square: The FourSquare Day Party At Sidebar
FourSquare Day Tomorrow: Rad
A FourSquare Mayor?
FourSquare Has 6000000 Users

I think they were at two million users or less when they got their 100 million valuation. Moving from two to eight million jacks up your valuation by four hundred million dollars, looks like. That is really something.

FourSquare is not mainstream yet, although the tech insiders might not believe that to be the case. It is still early days of Twitter for FourSquare. Eight million is not a lot of people, but the trajectory of moving from two to eight million people is what you have to notice. The movement has happened fast.

FourSquare is in a sweet spot. Check in is a sweet spot to be in. The next five years, at least the next five years, belong to the mobile web. It is a fertile sector. The promise of the space is obvious to those who watch tech.

Image representing Naveen Selvadurai as depict...

Image via CrunchBase
2015: A Mobile Tech Company Will Storm The Room
2011-2015: A Mobile Stretch

Fast Company: How Foursquare's Improved Photo Sharing Does Color One Better: Foursquare announced in a blog post today that it will add easy photo-sharing between friends, all tagged to check-ins. As described, this service will fill in the gaps where Color--which shows you photos from everyone around you, not just your friends--falls short. ...... "It works wonderfully for parties, elaborate brunches, and things like concerts," wrote Dave, in a description that sounded exactly like what Color was designed to capture. However, unlike Color, Foursquare now provides "more context and photos for your memories."

Capital New York: Keeping FourSquare Good: In 15 Months Foursquare's Grown From 250,000 to 8 Million Members; It's Chrysanthe Tenente's Job To Listen To All Of Them: one of New York’s most prominent and buzzed-about start-ups .... Foursquare's eight million users speak different languages and are spread out all over the world. ...... Now, businesses from restaurants to media companies to TV and movie studios are counting on Foursquare to help them collect information, woo loyal customers and, eventually, gather their own communities. ...... a bigger company with ambitious business plans. ..... the Community Manager's job is to act as a conduit between a new generation of consumers on social networks and giant, amorphous corporations. Sometimes the title is synonymous with the honcho salesperson whose main responsibility is to scale up the size of the user base ...... Tenentes’ job at Foursquare is to Not Be Evil, even as the company gets more serious. ...... Tenentes addresses users' privacy concerns, user-experience problems, and feature requests; there are all kinds of technical, emotional, and psychological issues among Foursquare’s users, who number roughtly the size of New York City's entire population ...... “When people hate on Foursquare and they direct it at me, it definitely feels like a personal attack” ...... “I’ve definitely had moments where I’ve melted down because of my inbox,” which is typically stacked with correspondence to Foursquare’s engineers for technical difficulties (“It won’t sign me in on my BlackBerry!”), the marketing manager for gameplans on Tweet language and blog posts explaining new partnerships (“Check-in to a "Real Housewives"-approved restaurant and get a Bravo badge!”) and the small team she has assembled during the past 15 months to communicate feature requests (Pictures! Comments! International phone number compliance!) and help answer users’ questions

Image via Wikipedia. ......... This past March at South by Southwest, the yearly part-conference, part-Burning Man for techies across the country, she gave actor and Foursquare investor Ashton Kutcher an in-person tutorial on the application’s new features, which were launched in time for the festival in Austin, Texas. “He gave me a high-five,” she said. ........ Sometimes it feels almost like she's their ‘elected representative’ and the community expresses their big asks through her ....... Tenentes voices the concerns of Foursquare’s 8 million users to its busy founders, engineers, and marketers. She is also a human core for to a technical platform that uses a bunch of bits and code to not only connect people to places, but connect people to people—in the real world, offline, away from screens. ...... food crawls for Brownstoners and Williamsburgers. ....... part of their goal with the breakfast meetup is to get tech entrepreneurs away from the glow of their laptops and be able to wave at peers as they walk down Bedford Avenue. ..... Foursquare is not at the 500-million-member Facebook or Twitter with its 200 million registerd accounts level ...... before the “community manager” title would become ubiquitous—the most trendy job for twentysomethings who grew up online and have plenty to teach aging companies about interacting with the next generation online. ....... She left Outside.in in November 2009 and began working on Brooklyn Based “pretty exclusively.” Meanwhile, “I kept running into Dennis and Naveen, like literally running into them while they were grabbing lunch, and I was in the city,” she said. In January of 2010, Crowley and co-founder Naveen Selvadurai sent out a message on Foursquare’s Twitter account that they needed customer service help. ....... Tenentes joined part time, planning to stay for “just a few weeks” ....... “Now we’ve scaled to having our own support site, our own Frequently Asked Questions, which I wrote," she said. "We have a support Twitter handle." ...... "We have a superuser forum. We have a Google Group for power superusers. We have a support staff for super users” ...... “The people who are really the early adopters, and not just the people who are in our small tech scenes in New York and San Fransisco but people who were in small towns all over the country” ...... “Like I remember a lot of our first superusers were people whose check-ins were at a grocery store, a convenience store and their home. But really it just made sense to them. So they were asking for photos, they were asking for comments, all these things that we ended up building.” ...... “We still hear from people who are just starting to set up their business or people who want to partner in Foursquare. We’ve noticed a major uptick in that since South by Southwest this year.” ..... “We jokingly call me chief grammar officer,” she said. “Usually I’m policing ‘check-ins’ versus ‘checkins’ with one word. That is never a word—looks like ‘chicken.’” ..... “She's really unpretentious, not a name-dropper," said her friend McGivney. "So refreshing in the startup scene in New York.”

Going Backwards: FoodSpotting, FourSquare, Twitter, Facebook
Twitter, FourSquare: Mobile Web Thingies
StartUp Anxiety For FourSquare?
FourSquare: $20 Million At $95 Million Valuation
Selling FourSquare Would Be A Mistake, Partnering Would Be Genius
Great To Meet Craig Newmark
4/16: I Found Myself A Party: Tonight's Gonna Be A Good Night
If The Tweet Is The Atom, What Is Location?
This Is Not Happening: King Dennis

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Local Response: Monetizing On "Their" Behalf

Image representing Nihal Mehta as depicted in ...

Image via CrunchBaseNihal Mehta: Being Mysterious About Local Response

My response is based on this TechCrunch post. Looks like in one sweep Nihal Mehta is about to monetize on behalf of all players in the local space. It is quite an audacious move.

TechCrunch: Buzzd Rebrands As Local Response; Debuts Social Customer Management Tool For Businesses: combine the element of the check-in he found intriguing with Buzzd and advertising and marketing elements ..... he calls “a culmination of everything he’s done,” of this is Local Response, a new web-based tool that allows local businesses to respond to the “check-in” on social media sites with marketing campaigns to promote transactions. ...... LocalResponse aggregates real-‐time social media check-‐ins from Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, Instagram and dozens of other services to provide a simple interface for local businesses to directly respond to their most influential and valuable customers. What’s compelling about the platform compared to competitors is that it analyzes massive amounts of data in addition to check-ins from the Twitter firehose, photo sharing sites and more to find other forms of check-ins. These could be posting a picture on Instagram of a dish from a restaurant or Tweeting that you are visiting a particular bar. ...... explicitly (i.e. check-ins on Foursquare) and implicitly (by analyzing natural language on Facebook, Twitter, etc.; e.g. “I’m headed to ShakeShack”). Mehta says most check-ins are actual implicit and many social media platforms catered to helping businesses track check-ins miss this key data. ...... Not only does Local Response track all of this data but it allows businesses to respond to these Tweets and messages with a marketing campaign, coupon or advertisement. ...... So Shake Shack could send a Tweet back to someone who had just snapped a photo of a burger with a link to a 10 percent off coupon on the next visit. ...... Local Response has actually creates a number of canned responses which businesses can automatically send. ..... For the past six months, LocalResponse has been running a private beta, with over 2,000 campaigns for local businesses in New York City. The links in the Tweets and messages sent by these local businesses to consumers who “checked-in” to their establishment are averaging a 60 percent click-‐through rate and 15-‐20 percent redemption rates. That’s high and impressive. ...... Mehta says that the platform is so highly-focused in its data collection, that it can send highly targeted Tweets to consumers who are interested in the promotions or campaigns. For example he says that Local Response will run two to three hundred search terms across its data for a particular business. Also, the aim of Local Response is not to overwhelm consumers’ stream with advertisements. Users will never receive more than one message in 7 days ...... a platform for brands and agencies is in the works. ...... closed a $1.5 million in funding this past December from Verizon Ventures, Charles River Ventures, and Metamorphic. ...... plans to raise a new, larger round of funding this Summer ..... For now, Local Response is free for businesses. Eventually the startup plans to go the freemium route and will also charge for the brand-focused application. And Local Response is launching with half a million businesses that are already pre-indexed (with search terms). All they have to do is type in the business name, and they can get started using the platform.

A second natural move might be to partner up with the willing players to help them monetize their particular services for cuts, like Google ads help you monetize your particular media site. Because Local Response is not going to have access to the detailed data that those individual services might have.

It would be interesting to watch how this drama unfolds. Local and hyperlocal are not the same thing. Local is the solar system. Hyperlocal is planet Earth.

The tech entrepreneurship angle is that this is a pivot. Buzzd was not going anywhere, or at least anywhere big, but those flounderings lay the ground for this bold move. It is looking impressive.

I am not privy to any internal information, although it is public knowledge Local Response has offers. My thing to say is do not sell. Instead build and expand.

As a social media enthusiast my dissatisfaction with the social media landscape has been that social media has done a much better job of helping us broadcast ourselves than it has helped us listen. Local Response has innovated in that listening department. This is pretty cool. It is trailblazing.

Sunday, April 17, 2011

What A Party

Be There, Or Be Square: The FourSquare Day Party At Sidebar

I have been to the Sidebar for quite a few political events before. It was raining when I emerged in Union Square from the underworld. And I am thinking, to have to get in line outside in this rain for someone like me who does not believe in umbrellas. But there was no line. I was able to get in right away. For a minute I thought I was at the wrong venue. How can there be no line into a FourSquare party?

I got to talk to a whole bunch of FourSquare team members. One of the first was this dude who did "server software" for the company. He was actively thinking in terms of a datacenter for FourSquare. I was impressed. I met another guy on that same server software team. We talked some tech. I got to meet Eric again. I told him Union Square Ventures has officially been declared the top VC firm.

Then I found myself talking to this Japanese woman who had never heard of FourSquare. She was not on Twitter either. She said she had a Facebook account, but she hardly ever used it. She was at the party because a friend on Facebook had mentioned it and she decided to show up to see what the fuss was all about. She was a Google fan. I am a Google fanboy myself.

She said she liked blonde men, "but not American, European." She said she was not into Asian.

"I tried," she said.

"Oh, you don't try such things, if you are not attracted, you are not attracted," I said to her.

She asked what I did. I talked about my microfinance startup.

"Who will you raise the money from? Big funds?"

"Oh no, the idea is to raise hundred, two hundred dollars from ordinary Americans," I said.

"Your story reminds me of the story of President Obama," she said hinting at how Obama had raised most of his money.

Image representing Dennis Crowley as depicted ...

Image by DennisCrowley.com via CrunchBase
"It is so flattering you should say that," I said.

Jenny and I follow each other on Tumblr. It was great to meet her.

Just then I spotted Chrysanthe who does community relations for FourSquare. She is one of those people who you know before you actually meet in person. This was my first time seeing her in person I believe.

"We think we saw you in a video," I shouted out to her, a hand waving, across a few people between us.

Then I met the person of the day, this new engineer who joined FourSquare only a few weeks back. Holden is Canadian - "from Ottawa" - and was with Amazon before he joined FourSquare. Seattle to New York City is quite a ride. He said he lived in Chinatown. My favorite part of Manhattan, I said.

"The Amazon people want you to get their permission before you can work on any software outside of work, so I left," he said.

That cracked me up.

When he told me he was doing search for FourSquare, that got me excited, because months back I blogged saying I don't see how FourSquare can skip doing search. It was an animated conversation about search.

Then I noticed the dude is wearing a skirt.

"I am half Scottish," he said.

Everything I know about Scotland comes from one movie.

Just then I noticed Jill Hanner was beaming at him from across the room. I had to turn my head around to notice that.

"Do you know her? How do you know her?"

"No, I don't. Who is she?"

"She is Jill Hanner. She is the most famous person in the room."

Dennis Crowley had not showed up yet, and when he did much later I got a "Hi, I am Dennis" from him.

I moved around the room. I talked to a few more people. I got photographed a few times. Wait, am I looking good, I thought.

I did not go to the after party. It was pouring by then. I still did not believe in umbrellas.

I think I left around nine. That had been a two hour run. Amazing party. They should do this every month. Four squared is the 16th of each month. That is easy math if you ask me.

Did not spot Naveen though. Spotted Chelsa. We are Facebook friends because we both moved to New York City from Indiana, not to be confused with India. Recently I posted this to her Facebook wall: there are a whole bunch of smart people in Indiana.

Not long before I left, I got to meet the two people who had organized the party. And I got to meet a Brooklyn College student. She said her name was Sophie.

"There is a Meryl Streep movie called Sophie's Choice."

"It's a World War II movie, it is depressing," she said.

Friday, April 15, 2011

FourSquare Day Tomorrow: Rad

Let's see. I don't drink but I like meeting people. Oh hey, this year they are doing it three different venues. I like that. What are the chances I can go to all three? Or maybe I will pick two. Or just one.

Last year on my way out of the party I saw Vin Vacanti still in line.

"I am leaving so you can get in," I said only half jokingly. They were down to only letting people in after someone left.

I just got this info below from Dennis Crowley's tumblog.

5-8pm @ Agave (8th Ave @ Charles Street) 140 7th Ave
7-10 @ Sidebar (15th Street @ Irving) 120 East 15th Street
9-11 @ Village Pourhouse (3rd Ave & 11th St) 64 3rd Avenue

Three is better than one. I am a big believer of letting people in.

5-7 Agave, 7-9 Sidebar, 9-11 Village Pourhouse is one combo.

And, by the way, I think the video above is really well done. It is crisp.

A FourSquare Mayor?
Twitter, FourSquare: Mobile Web Thingies
FourSquare: $20 Million At $95 Million Valuation
Selling FourSquare Would Be A Mistake, Partnering Would Be Genius
Dennis Crowley, Facebook, And The Location Ecosystem
4/16: I Found Myself A Party: Tonight's Gonna Be A Good Night
I Have Been Quoted In Fast Company
If The Tweet Is The Atom, What Is Location?

This Is Not Happening: King Dennis
Dennis Crowley: Mayor Of Mars?
You Have To Be A Little Wild
Craig Newmark, Dennis Crowley, Jennifer 8 Lee: Koreatown
Dennis Crowley: I Underestimated Him
Dennis, Fred, Scott: Tweet Boom Tweet Boom

Monday, June 27, 2011

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