Location Based Services and especially Foursquare are so hot right now!
Dennis Crowley was among the rockstars of Le Web’10 conference earlier this month in Paris.
We couldn’t miss the opportunity to have a chat with him about how Foursquare is evolving from a user service to also accommodate marketing and loyalty programs for brands.
Foursquare’s story is incredible: launched in March 2009, Foursquare recently hit over 5 million users and is at 2 million check-ins and 25K new users a day. Users are geographically split between 60% US and 40% international, with the average Foursquare user checking-in 3-4 times day.
Foursquare grew from 4 employees to +40 in only a year and managed to close some important venture fundings to help them manage and pursue the growth and evolution of the service.
If it was originally build for users, brands instantly took an interest in the service. There many examples of brands and retails using Foursquare already to increase customer traffic to points of sale or as a loyalty program.
Foursquare is now evolving to make it easier for businesses and partners to use the service.
But it is also adding features and tweaking the experience for users in order to become in some way a real life bookmarking service to recommend and help you discover more places and fun stuff!
Just today Foursquare announced the addition of new features that had been requested by their users: the possibility to attach photos to checkins, tips and venues, and to add comments to the checkins of friends!
Here’s our interview with Dennis, hope you enjoy the insights and apologies for the poor sound quality:
