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Posts Tagged ‘Foursquare’

Check out the Ultralight Startup for free from Onstartups co-author Jason L. Baptiste!

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Economy, Entrepreneurship, internet, Investments, LinkedIn, Market research, tagged , , , , , , , , on April 11, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Article from On Startups – The Community For Entrepreneurs.

Hey Everyone,

As you might know, besides writing as a co-author for Onstartups, I’ve been writing a book over the past year. It’s basically the book every entrepreneur should have starting out to find cofounders, get press, acquire customers, and raise funding. It’s based upon case studies from companies like Twitter, Dropbox, and Foursquare. The book comes out tomorrow, but I’m giving the book away for free today to read online at http://www.theultralightstartup.com (you can read it just like a blog or from your iPad like an app). If you don’t get a chance to finish it today or want to support the book, you can always keep it forever by buying it at https://bitly.com/theultralightstartup . Thank you again for being a great community to inspire my writing and the book.

Posted By Jason L. Baptiste

 

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Social network Path announces more ways to share

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, FaceBook, internet, Investments, Market research, mobile 2.0, Social Networks, Strategy, Technology, Twitter, Web 2.0, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on November 30, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from SFGate.

“If Facebook is like hanging out at a banquet with a large buffet to feast on, then social network Path is an intimate dinner with close friends. Path is now getting new silverware and table decorations, so to speak, with the release of updated software.

CEO Dave Morin, a Facebook alum, says the dinner-party philosophy remains but users can now share their comings and goings with up to 150 friends, up from the original 50.

With the new version available this week, a year after its debut, Path aims to be more than a sharing application. It wants to be a digital journal that documents your days with a push of a button.

Morin describes it as “a slightly social experience.” You’re not just updating it to share your day with others; you’re recording your life for yourself.

“The idea has always been to give you a trusted place to share with your close friends and family,” Morin said. “Now that the (mobile phone) is the accessory you have in your hand all the time, it’s become a journal.”

Path began as an iPhone application for sharing photos and videos. Users later got the ability to add one of five emoticons to their friends’ photos.

The new version lets users post music and tell everyone where they are, with whom and whether they are awake or asleep. It’s also compatible with Android-running phones for the first time. And, it includes technology that allows the application to make updates on its own, as long as the user agrees to it, or opts in.

For example, if you fly to Minneapolis, the application can track you with GPS and post this when you land: “Arrived in Minneapolis, it’s 6:06 p.m. Mostly cloudy and 50 degrees.” The location updates are neighborhood and city specific but will not pin an actual location.

Morin says the auto-updates make it easier for users to share richer content without much effort. And, while the details may seem personal, your network is only of close friends and family.

The update retains strict privacy controls, which Morin says is key to making people comfortable with sharing, especially in the wake of high-profile debates over privacy issues at Facebook.

On Tuesday, the government announced a proposed settlement with Facebook over “unfair and deceptive” business practices. The pact requires the company to get people’s approval before changing how it shares their data.

The new version of Path integrates larger social networks Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, allowing status updates to those sites from the Path application.

Morin says the San Francisco-based startup has enough funding for its next stage and just hired its 20th employee. Path has more than 1 million users.”

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Pew: More Than A Quarter Of U.S. Adults Use Mobile And Social Location-Based Services

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 6, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from Techcrunch.

“There’s no doubt that as smartphone usage increases, geo-location is becoming an increasingly important technology in consumers’ day to day lives. The Pew Internet Research Project has come out with a new report showing the growing number of U.S. adults that are leveraging location-based technologies in social and mobile apps. According to Pew, 28% of adults use at least one of location-based service that exist in mobile and social media spaces. The report shows the most popular use case of location-based technology is using mobile phones for maps, directions, or recommendations.

Pew reports that 28% of cell owners use phones to get directions or recommendations based on their current location (that works out to 23% of all U.S. adults). Only 5 percent of cell phone owners user their phone to check-in to locations using apps like Foursquare or Gowalla.

And 9% of internet users incorporate their location into Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn (7% of all adults). And 28% of U.S. adults do at least one of these activities either on a computer or using their mobile phones.

Unsurprisingly, smartphone owners are more likely to use location-based social networks on their phones. One in ten smartphone owners (12%) have used Foursquare, Gowalla, or a similar application and 55% of smartphone owners have used a location-based information service. Almost six in ten smartphone owners (58%) use at least one of these services.

Pew says that younger smartphone owners are more likely to use location-based services in their phone. And Pew says that geosocial services and automatic location-tagging are most popular with minorities. A quarter (25%) of Latino smartphone owners using geosocial services and almost a third (31%) of Latino social media users enabling automatic location-tagging. Pew says that only 7% of white smartphone owners use geosocial services, byt 59% get location-based information on their phones, compared with 53% of blacks and only 44% of Hispanics.

Pew reported nearly a year ago that only 4% of online American adults use location-based services. My guess is that number has increased since last Novemeber.”

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Free apps, mobile ad market aren’t adding up

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 27, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from SFGate.

“Many of today’s hot startups are banking on mobile ad dollars to make their business work, but it’s an incredibly small market that’s only likely to support a handful of breakaway winners.

The constraint was underscored late last week, when Pandora Media’s CEO told Bloomberg that the online radio service can’t find enough marketers to fill all the ad slots created by its many mobile users.

Pandora boasts around 35 million dedicated users, who do 60 percent of their listening over smart phones and tablets. The obvious question is: If the 11-year-old Oakland company can’t find enough marketers to make use of its ad inventory, who can?

Other popular companies like Foursquare, Instagram, Twitter and Flipboard are mostly or exclusively free mobile apps that will mostly or exclusively depend on advertising.

So just how much is there to go around?

Research firm eMarketer estimates that mobile advertising will reach only $1.1 billion this year. By way of comparison, Google reported $9 billion in revenue last quarter alone, almost entirely derived from the broader online advertising market.

Will more money move to mobile and will some of these companies emerge as big winners? Sure.

Shifting ad dollars

But new media don’t create new marketing dollars, they just draw them from somewhere else. Advertisers are famously reluctant to shift money from something that’s been proven to work, to an area that’s untested.

The truth is, it’s still unclear to many what ad types and formats will be most effective on small mobile devices – general brand builders, discounts as you walk by a restaurant, ads for other apps?

The one thing that does seem clear is that mobile users are incredibly touchy about ads, resenting anything that appropriates the limited real estate of their screen, arrives as a text that counts against their allotment or interrupts what they’re doing. So marketers are rightfully treading carefully.

Jack Gold, a technology analyst with J. Gold Associates, says mobile advertising is a promising sector that, for now, is just that: promising.

The other thing to keep in mind is that, whether it’s TV or tablets, the biggest outlets with the best return on ad dollars grab the lion’s share of marketing. Everyone else is left fighting for the scraps.

Gold said the phenomenon unfolding now is strikingly similar to the late 1990s, as hordes of companies marched onto the Internet, confident they could garner the traffic (back then they called it eyeballs) necessary to build businesses on ads alone. History demonstrated in brutal fashion that the vast majority could not.

“It’s almost certain that you’re going to see another shakeout,” Gold said. “That always happens. Always.”

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Foursquare checks in to $50M in fresh funding

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Investments, Market research, Social Networks, Technology, tagged , , , , , , , on June 27, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from GigaOM

“Foursquare has raised $50 million in a new funding round led by venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz, the company announced Friday. This latest batch of funding brings Foursquare’s total venture capital investment to just over $70 million.

The New York City-based startup, which provides a service that allows users to share their current location with friends, plans to put the money toward hiring more engineers, developing more offerings for merchants, and expanding internationally, co-founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai wrote in a company blog post announcing the new funding. The blog post reads: “The opportunity to build something meaningful in the location space is HUGE [emphasis theirs], and we feel well-positioned to capitalize on it.”

Foursquare has grown by leaps and bounds since its launch in March 2009. The company, which is set to open a new San Francisco office this month, says it currently has more than 10 million users and more than 70 employees. With a growing list of solid competitors in the location-based social networking space — think Facebook and Google, as well as an ever-expanding list of smaller apps such as Trover — the new backing will certainly come in handy as Foursquare works to keep its edge.”

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