Foursquare, has scored another win--this time with a nationwide deal with American Express. The deal will offer American Express cardholders discounts in some shops and restaurants.
A survey of more than 1,000 consumers conducted by digital agency Beyond shows that only 17% of the mobile users are taken with location-based apps such as Foursquare, Facebook Places and Instagram.
More than half of mobile users who do use checkin apps (54%) said they are motivated to share their location when discounts are involved. Just 21%, however, said badges and status rewards motivated them to check in.
As for consumers not using checkin apps, 99% said they do not consider badges or status an incentive for sharing their location.
Nearly 50% understandably cited privacy concerns as the main reason for not using the services. And let's not forget about the 50% of mobile users who don't own smartphones.
Location-based social network Foursquare has its own day! New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg has mandated that April 16, the fourth sixteenth of the year, is Foursquare Day in New York City. [via TechCrunch]
Foursquare, which now has more than 8 million users, is based in New York City, so it is a hometown favorite.
From the official proclamation:
New York City is proud to be the home of both the powerhouse companies and small startups that are thinking big, creating new jobs, and leading the global economy.
Foursquare is one such success story. Started by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai around Dennis’s kitchen table in the East Village, it now employs more than 60 people in New York and has more than eight million users worldwide. That is why we are proud to join Foursquare’s founders and fans in celebrating the first global social media holiday.
Today, April 16th—4/16, the fourth sixteenth of the year—is Foursquare Day in New York City and around the world.
Under the arrangement, AmEx customers can register their cards in the Foursquare system to get access to special offers from merchants who are also Foursquare participants. Customers who shop at those merchants with an AmEx card will receive credits and electronic notification that they have redeemed the offer. Merchants who participate in the program would potentially see more sales.
The partners will pilot the service next week in Austin, Texas, at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, a weeklong conference for technology start-ups. Sixty local merchants will honor the “spend $5, save $5″ promotion.
The NYC Big Apps competition is now in its second year, offering USD 20,000 of prizes encouraging developers to produce applications that "Help New York City become more transparent, accessible, and accountable." One recent entry caught Springwise's eye for its innovative concept and integration with Foursquare.
Max Stoller, a computer science student that developed the service called Don't eat at_____, notes that there are 1660 restaurants in the city that scored 28 points or more on their graded inspections without being closed.
These establishments are targeted by the Health Department for extra checks, but Stoller aims to give diners the information they need to avoid them altogether. To do so, users sign in to the website with their Foursquare login — giving the system access to their registered mobile phone number. They will then be sent a warning message if they check in to a poorly-rated restaurant.
USA TODAY Travel is getting more social, thanks to a new partnership with the popular location-based smart phone application Foursquare.[via USA Today]
For example, San Francisco visitors are advised to check out the Castro Theater's rollicking sing-along nights, while Vegas gamblers are informed the showgirl statues outside the Riviera Hotel & Casino might bring them a little luck. Travelers seeking peace and quiet, on the other hand, are encouraged to try the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, N.C. or the orchid conservatory in Atlanta's Botanical Garden.
According to Foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley on the stage of the LeWeb Conference in Paris, the company has 5 million users, increasing its user base by a factor of 10 in just nine months.
The BBC World Service has entered the location-service arena with a new trial on foursquare, posting links to relevant content at locations across the globe. Journalism.co.uk reports.
The broadcaster has currently posted around 20 to 30 items or 'tips' using the location service, most recently including history programmes on Tutankhamun's tomb in Egypt and the first man to cross from Britain to France, which can be picked up at Eurostar International. All the programmes are available to listen to for free when people 'check in' to those places.
As millions of travelers prepare for the US’s busiest travel weekend of the year, foursquare has released a new badge picking up on America’s latest punchline, the TSA. It’s called Baggage Handler.
To unlock the badge, all you need to do is check in at any airport and include something like “TSA,” “grope” or — my personal favorite — “Don’t touch my junk, bro!” in your shout. The unlock text reads:
Looks like you’ve had your baggage handled. Happy Holidays and have a safe flight!
In a very 21st-century spin on the old World War II adage "loose lips might sink ships," an Associated Press report Wednesday claims that the U.S. Air Force is concerned about troops' use of geolocation services like Foursquare and Facebook Places and the possibility that it could reveal the location of U.S. forces in war zones. News.com reports.
Military authorities in the U.S. and other countries have already made warnings about social networking in general, claiming that it's all too easy for sensitive information to be exposed inadvertently.
This sort of concern bubbles up to higher planes, too: a congressman blew his cover on a "secret" trip to Iraq last year when he tweeted about it.
An interesting read by Kevin Fitchard for connected planet on how Foursquare is evolving from a social location app into something much bigger.
At first glance, Foursquare strikes me as a silly little app that fulfills the social networking prophesy of no personal detail being private, but Foursquare has begun building new capabilities onto the platform.
First off, Foursquare is offering more information than just volumes of people. It’s allowing customers to add location-specific information. Those could come in the form of restaurant or club reviews, but could also include the highly detailed, such as which security line at O’Hare airport is fastest and how you locate it.
Second, Foursquare has built its own application programming interface (API) which allows other developers to build apps on its platform. The results have been silly in some cases: Assisted Serendipity alerts you to when the guy-to-girl ratio at a particular bar or club tips in your favor. But in many cases, they’re highly useful: a taxi share app helps you find people in your area heading to the same destination interested in sharing a cab.
Urban Ministries of Durham (UMD), a North Carolina non-profit organization providing food, shelter and clothing to the city’s homeless, is launching a Foursquare initiative to raise awareness around homelessness in Durham. Mashable reports.
UMD is spotlighting unusual venues such as abandoned warehouses, dumpsters and old construction sites. Application users in neighboring areas will discover the strange venues in the “nearby places” portion of the app.
The idea behind the campaign, engineered by the McKinney ad agency, is to inspire Foursquare users to check in to these locations to spread awareness about UMD and its mission of homelessness prevention.
Only 4% of online adults use a location-based service such as Foursquare or Gowalla that allows them to share their location with friends and to find others who are nearby, according to a report published Thursday by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. On any given day, 1% of internet users are using these services.
Key findings include:
-- 7% the adults who go online with their mobile phone use a location-based service.
-- 8% of online adults ages 18-29 use location-based services, significantly more than online adults in any other age group.
-- 10% of online Hispanics use these services – significantly more than online whites (3%) or online blacks (5%).
-- 6% of online men use a location-based service such as Foursquare or Gowalla, compared with 3% of online women.
Barack Obama is president of the United States, but Dustin Davis is Foursquare mayor of the Oval Office. Mr. Davis, 30, is also mayor of the Pentagon, where he works as an information technology specialist.
"When asked about Mr. Davis's claim to the Oval Office, White House Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton said in an email, "I think you'd be better off contacting a virtual spokesperson for this one."
Michael Arrington, the founder of the website TechCrunch (which AOL Inc. recently bought for about $30 million), was, until Tuesday, the mayor of Facebook's Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters. He lives in Seattle and hasn't been by Facebook's office in ages. He got a programmer to write code overriding Foursquare's proximity requirements.
To help while voting, Foursquare's unveiled a new function to help voters everywhere. While at first the "I Voted function" might just seem like a simple way to get a new badge and tell your friends you voted, the application - and several others like it - may change the face of the democratic process. Techland reports.
On top of easily navigating where the closest polling places are thanks to the Foursquare check-in locations, I Voted can tell you how many people have checked in a certain location. In the future, this could lead to valuable information such whether or not there were lines at certain polling places and if the machines were in working order.
Apps like these can potentially lead to faster exit polling results and a breakdown of the different demographics about voters quicker than ever before, on top of the fact that checking in can remind others of their civil duty and encourage them to vote.
PC Magazine reports that Commander Douglas H. Wheelock, NASA astronaut of Expedition 25, has become the first person to check-in to a social-networking service from space.
You are now 220 miles above Earth traveling at 17,500 mph and unlocked the NASA Explorer Badge," the badge notification said. "Show this badge and get a free scoop of astronaut ice cream.
“What does it take to help save the endangered pika? About 20 seconds,” read ads from Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law firm, that line San Francisco transit stations and feature the cute rabbitlike American pika in its Sierra Nevada mountain redoubt. “Check in now at Foursquare at ‘Earthjustice ad.’ Every time you check in, an Earthjustice donor will donate $10 to protect endangered species.” The New York Times reports.
The Earthjustice campaign appears to be among the first to let people check in at a physical billboard, a tactic that has proved successful for the firm and could be attractive to other advertisers, according to industry analysts and Foursquare executives.
Despite their intense hype, location-based applications like Foursquare are far from crossing over into the mainstream. In fact, the vast majority of mobile phone owners claim to have never used them. [via AdWeek]
And the buzz-heavy Foursquare isn’t even the most popular location app out there.
Those conclusions are based on a new study on the fast growing location-based application sector conducted by the mobile technology firm Myxer, which works with companies like Sony Music Entertainment to deliver music to mobile devices via ringtones and downloads.
...According to Myxer’s BoomBox "check-in" report, just 11 percent of its 1,500 respondents have used location-based social networks.
MTV is partnering with Foursquare to offer check-ins as part of its "GYT: Get Yourself Tested" campaign. Users can get badges by checking in to health clinics to get tested for sexually transmitted diseases.
The goal of the campaign, MTV has said, is to make STD testing as common as going to the dentist or getting a check-up. Users who unlock the GYT badge-it is Foursquare's first cause-related badge-will be eligible to win backstage passes and a trip to New York.
Big companies and start-ups alike — including Google, Foursquare, Gowalla, Shopkick and most recently Facebook — offer services that let people report their physical location online, so they can connect with friends or receive coupons. The New York Times reports.
... But for all the attention and money these apps and Web sites are getting, adoption has so far been largely confined to pockets of young, technically adept urbanites.
Just 4 percent of Americans have tried location-based services, and 1 percent use them weekly, according to Forrester Research. Eighty percent of those who have tried them are men, and 70 percent are between 19 and 35.
Facebook has finally announced its long-rumored location feature, called "Places." Available to iPhone users and mobile devices that have HTML5 and geolocation capabilities, the feature is similar to other location-based services, but privacy groups still have complaints.
While many insiders think that the geolocation revolution might be just around the corner, I think it's still many years away. It's not a question of if, but when.
For one thing, while smartphone adoption has revved up in recent years, they still represent a minority of mobile phones. And even among people who have them, the use of so-called geolocation services is low, as the Forrester report noted. Just because people are able to share their location, there are still plenty of cultural fears over doing so. I think that as notions of privacy evolve, that will change. But it will take time.
And it's not clear just how much time any of these companies will have. Facebook is rumored to be on the verge of launching its own check-in service. And with a 500-million user head start, Facebook could be a rather formidable competitor.
Foursquare passed a big milestone Monday: 100 million checkins. Mashable reports.
Foursquare has experienced massive growth in the last twelve months, with nearly 1 million checkins taking place each day. In fact, it was just over two months ago that the company passed 40 million checkins.
According to The Telegraph, Foursquare is in talks with Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! about a search partnership which could let people look up the most popular bar or restaurant in their area in real-time.
More than half of people with geolocation-capable mobile devices worry about "loss of privacy" from using their location-sharing features, a survey has found - even though location-sharing apps such as FourSquare and Gowalla have millions of users checking in every day, writes The Guardian.
Related:
- Foursquare partners with Huffington Post and Independent Film Channel - By friending Huffington Post or the IFC, Foursquare users will be tipped-off about recommended haunts when checking-in to the near vicinity, steadily building a virtual community around physical locations.
Foursquare has just crossed the 2 million users mark yesterday. The location based social network has been growing fast, adding 100,000 users per week. Only three months ago, Foursquare passed one million users after taking a year to accumulate one million members.
Connected Planet on what Foursquare means for mobile operators – and why we’ll all eventually be the ‘mayor’ of somewhere.
Like Facebook and Twitter before it, location-based service Foursquare looks to have broken through the backlash phase — “What the heck is this thing?” — to be poised both for significant growth and to introduce new concepts the telecom industry would do well to understand — and fast.
Foursquare’s main innovation — the location check-in — seems rudimentary compared to tracking a user’s location via GPS, Wi-Fi triangulation or other more technical means. But early users — and increasingly mainstream users — seem to like the idea of manually broadcasting their location to their friends and the world, not to mention winning badges and being named “mayor” for showing up. ... “Add to Foursquare” buttons are starting to show up on sites like The Wall Street Journal, which should only further drive its popularity.
For the first time Foursquare has teamed up with a media company for a multi-country initiative, with this one stretching across all 32 countries represented in the World Cup. Memburn reports.
Starting Friday, World Cup fans who follow CNN at www.foursquare.com/cnn can check in at more than 100 venues to unlock special CNN badges. In order to unlock these badges, fans must check in at least three times at any of these CNN-tagged locations between June 11 and July 11.
Fans in South Africa can check in on Foursquare from stadiums and landmarks to earn the South Africa Explorer badge, while fans in the other 31 competing countries can check in at viewing venues to earn the Super Fan badge.
This was published in April, but it just crossed my radar. From VS Ellis.
Foursquare, a location based social media service you might argue, is about location, but it isn’t. Location is the McGuffin of social media right now, but it’s still about people.
When it comes to Foursquare you probably love it or think it’s ridiculous. But like it or not, location based services are going to pick up and the business models that will evolve from them, like the early days of Twitter, are yet to be determined. While the use of location based technologies is nascent at best, it’ll be fun to see how they evolve.
We don’t know exactly what will become of services like Foursquare but there is one thing they have done with ruthless brilliance that should serve as a business lesson for us all: They’re turning us into Pavlov’s dogs... By creating an environment where telling people where we are has become a rewarding experience so that we keep doing it.
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