Twitter did it; now Foursquare is reportedly in discussions with Google, Yahoo and Bing to supply (or license) its check-in data as a search-enhancer. According to the UK's Telegraph: Our data generates hugely interesting trends which would enrich search," [Foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis] 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 [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Local | Foursquare | Google: Maps & Local | Microsoft: Bing

With lots of mapping news today, we're combining it all into a single round up, which focuses largely on Google. The company decided, after suspending, examining and "scrubbing" its Street View equipment in Europe and elsewhere, to resume collecting imagery and related data in several countries: Having spoken to the relevant regulators, we have decided to start Street View driving in  Ireland, Norway, South Africa and Sweden again starting next week. We expect to add more countries in time. Our cars will no longer collect any WiFi information at all, but will continue to collect photos and 3 [...]

Related Topics: AOL: Local | AOL: MapQuest | Channel: Local | Foursquare | Google: Maps & Local | Microsoft: Bing Maps & Local | Top News

If you're using Foursquare to search for local offers and deals, you may soon find a lot more of them -- especially if you live outside of major cities. Foursquare announced yesterday that it's going to expand the reach of deals/offers in rural areas: The current location range for offers "nearby" is approximately 200 yards, but will, in the future, be variable based on the user's location. In more densely populated areas, 200 yards will provide adequate variability. In areas outside of cities, we're going to increase that range to provide better results for users in less densely popula [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Retail | Foursquare | Search Engines: Shopping Search Engines

After a protracted set of M&A discussions with Yahoo and Facebook (and perhaps others), Foursquare announced that it had secured $20 million in funding from several VCs: Union Square Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. CEO Dennis Crowley discussed the funding and how it would be used in his blog post: With this new round of financing, our main priority will be to expand our organization to supplement the amazing core team we’ve assembled already (know any great engineers? send them our way!). We’re hoping to build a world-class engineering organization [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Local | Foursquare

I'm at TWTRCON today, where the "Right Time, Right Place" panel will look at location services and marketing. We've got both Foursquare and Gowalla taking part. Who's talking in all: Moderator: Adam Ostrow, Editor in Chief, Mashable Matt Galligan, CEO, SimpleGeo Brad Nelson, Product Manager, Online Strategy, Starbucks Dennis Crowley, Co-Founder, Foursquare Josh Williams, CEO, Gowalla I'll be curious to hear Starbucks explain how they apparently have purchased ads to show up next to virtually every place I seem to check into these days. And we're off. First question to Brad [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Local | Foursquare | Gowalla | Search Engines: Location / Checkin Services | Top News

Only 10% of businesses that are currently using Foursquare as a free marketing tool are willing to pay for the service; that's one of the interesting survey results presented last week during the "Location Services: The New Local Search?" session at the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle. Search marketers Will Scott (of Search Influence) and Mat Siltala (of Dream Systems Media) presented the results of what's believed to be the first survey of Foursquare advertisers -- a survey in May of 127 non-chain businesses across the U.S. Most of the respondents were from the restaurant and retail [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Local | Foursquare | Search Marketing: Local Search Marketing | Stats: General | Top News

At the Where 2.0 event in San Jose yesterday afternoon, Danny Sullivan moderated a panel entitled "The Big Picture from the Big Players." In addition to Danny it featured Blaise Agüera y Arcas (Microsoft), Tom Wailes (Yahoo!), John Hanke (Google, Inc.), Dylan Swift (Yelp). The session sought to cover a lot of ground in a very tight 35 minutes. Danny initiated the compressed session by asking the time-honored question about local online marketing and small business: "Why aren't local businesses getting it?" Interestingly most of the panelists disagreed with that chara [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Foursquare | Google: Maps & Local | Google: Mobile | Microsoft: Bing Maps & Local | Search Ads: Mobile Search | Search Engines: Deals & Coupon Search Engines | Search Engines: Maps & Local Search Engines | Search Engines: Mobile Search Engines | Top News | Yahoo: Maps & Local

Bing Maps is keeping busy at the Where 2.0 conference today, making several announcements and product rollouts. Here's a rundown of those announcements, and links to the Bing Maps blog posts will be at the end. First up is the Bing Maps World Tour, which shows all of the imagery updates that Bing Maps has pushed out going back to August 2009. At the same time, Bing Maps says it's just added two new imagery updates totaling more than 6.2 million square kilometers. (Or, as Wolfram Alpha would tell you, about 2.4 million square miles.) Second is news that Bing Maps has added a application c [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Local | Foursquare | Microsoft: Bing Maps & Local | Top News