Foursquare just raised a bunch of money, again. This time it’s a Series D round of $35M, back in April of this year it was $41M in debt financing. The company seems to keep being able to convince people there’s something of value in its global location service.
Over the past couple of years Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley has been stumping for the company’s shift in focus from a check-in service to recommendation service. On a visit to Harvard last year, he noted the following:
“We have three billion check-ins and an army of people crawling the real world like a web crawler would crawl the internet,” Crowley said. “We have ‘Big Data’ about where people go, where they go after they go there, where they went before, where they don’t go anymore—there is tremendous value in all that check-in data. It is our job to harvest that.”
But once it’s mastered harvesting it — and Foursquare has become one of the best at this, collecting 40M tips at 70M venues so far— what does it do with it?
TechCrunch spoke with Crowley about the funding round and some plans that it has for the future.
“What we’re most passionate about building is software that understands your relationship with the world,” Crowley tells us. By that, he means software that recognizes the patterns in the locations that you visit and the things that you do there — the places that you love to eat or those events you attend that end up being fantastic. A guiding question, he says, is “how can we make more of that stuff happen to you?”
I’ve been thinking about this stuff for a while and it seems that Foursquare is part of an over-arching trend towards ‘proactive personal computing’. Specifically, the recent addition of push recommendations that tell you places you might want to be when you arrive in an area taps into this.
The smartphone is heading towards being the center of all of our computing. It seems likely that components like the connected home, wearables and even our desktops will someday simply be thin clients for our ‘most personal’ computer. If that comes to pass, a layer of push-centric data will have to act as the connective tissue between the hub in our pockets and those outlying components.
That push data, of course, will depend incredibly heavily on context like location. And the locations can’t simply be physical spots, they have to be fleshed out with their own descriptive details — who else has been here, when, why and how often. Context.
Part of this shift will be a move to ‘proactive’ information delivered to users without the cognitive load that it takes remember to open an app, figure out what to ask it and sift through the answers it gives back.
Foursquare, says Crowley, has a team of great data scientists and ‘mountains of data’ that it’s using to work on these problems. He notes that Google has thousands more employees to Foursquare’s roughly 100 and yet, he says, “we’re doing it better than them.”
The latest releases of Foursquare now understand where a phone and its user are, but also collect and parse signals like how long it’s been in that location down to the specific room if that info is available. It also includes signals like weather and regular habits to determine what kind of notifications to send out. Initially, Foursquare’s new push recommendations center on ‘arriving’ at a location, but it’s not too hard to pull the thread to figure out that it could eventually offer much, much more prescience.
Using pattern recognition and contextual relevance, the service could easily figure out that you’re ’60% likely to get coffee on weekday mornings’ and note the best places nearby. Or use the overall temperature to note places that people like to go when it’s under 10 degrees or rainy, vs 82 and blue.
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