Foursquare Checks In To B2B

Smartphone users love to “check-in” to various places and events and share their experiences over the mobile app Foursquare – the private company which has attracted 55 million users in just six years of operation.

But the value of Foursquare is more than just a platform for users to broadcast their social life. The company is a gold mine of data – big data – and other companies want in on the information Foursquare has aggregated. While Foursquare has partnered with other conglomerates in the past, including Twitter and Microsoft, reports said that the firm is strengthening its B2B operations in response to the Big Data demand.

TechCrunch reported that Foursquare revealed two new services on Wednesday (May 6), the Foursquare Location Cloud and Places by Foursquare. According to co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley, the Location Cloud will act as a virtual warehouse of all of the check-in, geo-location information collected through the app, and not only will Foursquare be able to access the information, so will other business partners including Twitter and Pinterest.

According to its website, the Location Cloud both aggregates and analyzes smartphone sensor data, allowing other companies to “bring local context to global markets.”

Foursquare Places, meanwhile, is a database of the current 65 million locations users can check-in to, allowing businesses to use the information as an end-to-end solutions. According to the company, the database includes location information from the Foursquare and Swarm apps, as well as companies using Foursquare’s interface, which include Microsoft and Citymaps.

According to Crowley, the firm took so long to capitalize on all of the information they hold because they decided to build their own detection algorithms, something the company first began doing in 2011.

Reports said that Crowley did not reveal any information about the rumored merger with Yahoo, which some unnamed sources said last month was in the works, though various sources reported conflicting information about a deal.