Telegraph U.K.
Speaking exclusively to The Telegraph, Dennis Crowley, Foursquare’s co-founder, said that his company was in talks with “everyone” in the search space – including all three major players: Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft about a data partnership.
“Our data generates hugely interesting trends which would enrich search,” Crowley said.
“We can anonymise data and use it to show venues which are trending at that moment. Twitter helped the world and the search engines know what people are talking about. Foursquare would allow people to search for the types of place people are going to – and where is trending – not what.”
All three search engines failed to deny the talks were happening, but refused to comment or divulge any more detail when approached for statements.
Twitter’s first commercial deals were with each of the three major search engines, licensing its real-time feed of information and allowing the engines to index every tweet helping the search experience to become more ‘real-time’.
Crowley did not give a timeframe as to when the search deals could be signed off, but said it was an exciting time and the company was talking to “a lot of different potential partners” which were interested in Foursquare’s data.
Crowley is no stranger to Google’s executive team, having sold Dodgeball, the first text message-based version of Foursquare, to the search giant in 2005. It was later shut down by Google in 2009. He told The Telegraph that he remains close with “the guys at Google”, even employing a few “former Googlers”.
Foursquare has been pitted against Gowalla, a separate social network based on geo-tagging, which launched at same time during May 2009. When asked if there was any chance of Foursquare ever joining forces with Gowalla to grow its impact, Crowley replied diplomatically: “We are more social than Gowalla and ultimately have different visions moving forward. They are excited about different things.”
The location-based social network signed up it two millionth member last week, three months after acquiring its first million users. Foursquare is now valued at $95 million, post a recent $20 million cash investment led the major Silicon Valley venture capital company, Andreessen Horowitz. The VC is headed up by high profile technology investors Marc Andreessen (co-founder of Ning, Twitter investor and Facebook board member) and Ben Horowitz (Fluther investor and a former HP vice president).
“Our data generates hugely interesting trends which would enrich search,” Crowley said.
“We can anonymise data and use it to show venues which are trending at that moment. Twitter helped the world and the search engines know what people are talking about. Foursquare would allow people to search for the types of place people are going to – and where is trending – not what.”
All three search engines failed to deny the talks were happening, but refused to comment or divulge any more detail when approached for statements.
Twitter’s first commercial deals were with each of the three major search engines, licensing its real-time feed of information and allowing the engines to index every tweet helping the search experience to become more ‘real-time’.
Crowley did not give a timeframe as to when the search deals could be signed off, but said it was an exciting time and the company was talking to “a lot of different potential partners” which were interested in Foursquare’s data.
Crowley is no stranger to Google’s executive team, having sold Dodgeball, the first text message-based version of Foursquare, to the search giant in 2005. It was later shut down by Google in 2009. He told The Telegraph that he remains close with “the guys at Google”, even employing a few “former Googlers”.
Foursquare has been pitted against Gowalla, a separate social network based on geo-tagging, which launched at same time during May 2009. When asked if there was any chance of Foursquare ever joining forces with Gowalla to grow its impact, Crowley replied diplomatically: “We are more social than Gowalla and ultimately have different visions moving forward. They are excited about different things.”
The location-based social network signed up it two millionth member last week, three months after acquiring its first million users. Foursquare is now valued at $95 million, post a recent $20 million cash investment led the major Silicon Valley venture capital company, Andreessen Horowitz. The VC is headed up by high profile technology investors Marc Andreessen (co-founder of Ning, Twitter investor and Facebook board member) and Ben Horowitz (Fluther investor and a former HP vice president).
