User:MaryGaulke/sandbox/Foursquare mockup

Foursquare Labs Inc., commonly known as Foursquare, is a location technology company. Foursquare's platform is the foundation of several business and consumer products, including the Foursquare City Guide app.

Foursquare launched in 2009 as a local search-and-discovery mobile app intended to help users discover and learn about new places. The app, now known as Foursquare City Guide, provides personalized recommendations of places to go near a user's current location based on users' previous visits or check-in history. The company has since evolved to offer business products, including developer tools that enable location services for companies, including Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, and Tencent, and media and measurement tools that allow advertisers to reach people based on where they go and measure results.

The company was created in late 2008 and launched in 2009 by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai. Until late July 2014, Foursquare featured a social networking layer that enabled a user to share their location with friends, via the "check in" – a user would manually tell the application when they were at a particular location using a mobile website, text messaging, or a device-specific application by selecting from a list of venues the application locates nearby. In May 2014, the company launched Swarm, a companion app to Foursquare, that reimagined the social networking and location sharing aspects of the service as a separate application.

Alongside the changes to the consumer apps, the company began creating products that leverage the location data collected via billions of check-ins. From 2014 to 2016, the company rolled out a series of enterprise offerings, including Pinpoint by Foursquare and Attribution by Foursquare.

Launch and early years
Co-founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai launched Foursquare in 2009 at SXSW. Crowley had previously founded the similar project Dodgeball as his graduate thesis project in the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University, and later sold it to Google in 2005. Dodgeball user interactions were based on SMS technology, rather than an application. Foursquare was the second iteration of the idea that people can use mobile devices to interact with their environment.

In November 2009, Foursquare opened up access to its API, enabling developers to access data generated by the Foursquare app and build applications on top of that data. Later that year, Foursquare launched in 50 new cities, making the service available in 100 worldwide metro areas. In January 2010, Foursquare changed their location model to allow check-ins from any location worldwide. Later that year, shortly after reaching one million users, Foursquare opened its second office, in San Francisco.

On February 21, 2011, Foursquare reached 7 million users IDs. On August 8, 2011, President Barack Obama joined Foursquare, with the intention that the staff at the White House would use the service to post tips from places the president had visited.

Later in 2011, Foursquare began working on Pilgrim, the core technology that combines stop-detection and snap-to-place functions in order to provide contextual awareness to Foursquare's apps, so they can proactively engage with users in real time.

Swarm release
In May 2014, the company launched Swarm, a companion app to Foursquare, that moved the social networking and location sharing aspects of the service to a separate application. On August 7, 2014, the company launched Foursquare 8.0, the completely new version of the service that shifted the focus from check ins to focus on local search and recommendations.

2015 to present
In April 2015, Foursquare began offering location-based enterprise products for marketers and advertisers with the launch of its Pinpoint platform. Ten months later, the company launched Attribution, a tool for measuring media performance. Then, in March 2017, Foursquare released the Pilgrim software development kit to let developers leverage Foursquare’s core Pilgrim technology to add context into their own apps and services. It has been used by brands such as Tinder, SnipSnap and Capital One. Each of these tools can be used independently, or they can be bundled together.

On January 14, 2016, co-founder Dennis Crowley stepped down from his position as CEO. He moved to an Executive Chairman position while Jeff Glueck, the company's COO, succeeded Crowley as the new CEO.

In 2017, Foursquare added more than 50 new roles in areas of engineering, sales, creative, business development, marketing, and operations. Foursquare also announced its expansion in the Asia-Pacific region with partners like Tencent, Samsung, LG, and Carousell, and a new office in Singapore.

Over the course of the three-year period from 2015 through 2017, the company's revenue grew by more than 50% each year. In early 2018, Foursquare opened a new engineering office in Chicago. The company has a goal of growing the team by 30 percent over the course of the year.

Foursquare City Guide
Launched in March 2009, Foursquare City Guide is a local search and discovery mobile app that helps users discover new places from a community of peers. The app provides personalized recommendations of places to go near a user's current location based on the user’s previous visits, likes and check-in history.

Features

 * Local search and recommendations: Foursquare lets users search for restaurants, nightlife spots, shops and other places of interest in their surrounding area. It is also possible to search other areas by entering the name of a remote location. The app displays personalized recommendations based on the time of day, displaying breakfast places in the morning, dinner places in the evening, et al. Recommendations are personalized based on factors that include a user's check-in history, their "Tastes", and venue ratings.
 * Tips and expertise: Foursquare eschews the traditional concept of letting users leave long-form reviews, and instead encourages the writing of "Tips" – short messages about a location that let other users know what is good (or bad) there. As a reward for leaving quality tips, a user can also earn "expertise" in a particular location (e.g. a neighborhood or city) or category (e.g. Italian restaurants).


 * Tastes: Foursquare has a defined list of "tastes" for particular food items, styles of cuisine or environmental aspects, which users may add to their profiles to let the service know what they like. Foursquare uses natural language processing to match a user's tastes with the tips at nearby venues that mention them. It is then able to recommend nearby places to the user that match their tastes.
 * Ratings: Foursquare gives each venue a numeric score between 0.1 and 10 to indicate its general popularity when compared to other venues. Scores are calculated automatically factoring in check-in data, explicit user ratings, tip sentiment, foot traffic behavior and other signals.
 * Lists: Users can add venues to a personal "to do" list, and to curated lists in order to keep track of neighborhood hot-spots or things to do while traveling.

Availability
Foursquare City Guide is available for Android, iOS & Windows Phone devices. Versions of Foursquare were previously available for Symbian, Series 40, MeeGo, WebOS, Maemo, Windows Phone, Bada, BlackBerry, PlayStation Vita, and Windows 8. Users may also use their mobile browsers to access Foursquare mobile, but feature phone users must search for venues manually instead of using GPS that most smartphone applications can use.

Location detection
Foursquare uses its Pilgrim technology to detect a user's location. When users opt-in to always-on location sharing, Pilgrim is able to understand a user's current location by comparing historical check-in data (previous users tacitly stating "I am here") with a combination of signals such as a user‘s current GPS signal, cell tower triangulation, cellular signal strength, bluetooth, beacons, surrounding wifi signals, and others. In this way Foursquare can know a user's location without them needing to "check in".

Pilgrim enables background location awareness in the Foursquare City Guide app (and in the Foursquare Swarm app). This allows the app to send the user push notifications of things that they might find interesting around their current location. It also uses this ability to learn about the kinds of places a user likes, based on when and how often they visit different venues. It then uses this data to improve a user's recommendations, and to gauge the popularity of a venue. In 2017, Foursquare launched Pilgrim publicly, allowing other developers to use Foursquare’s technology to create contextual, location-based experiences within their own apps and services.

Superusers
From the company's inception, Foursquare's "Superusers" have played a major role in editing and maintaining its database of information. In 2013, the company claimed it had 40,000 Superusers in 147 countries who contributed more than one million monthly edits. Only Superusers have the ability to edit venue information.

The service provides ten levels of Superuser. Superuser status is awarded to users after they apply and perform a special test where users should meet quality and quantity criteria. Superusers can attain different levels as they contribute more high-quality edits over time.

2012 redesign
On June 7, 2012, Foursquare launched a major redesign, which the company described as a "whole new app". The app's "explore" function now allows users to browse locations by category or conduct a specific search like "free wi-fi" or "dumplings". The app also incorporated features from social discovery and local search applications.

Former features
Earlier versions of Foursquare supported check-ins and location sharing, but as of Foursquare 8.0, these were moved to the service's sibling app, Swarm. Foursquare 8.0 never shares a user's location with their followers.

In previous versions of Foursquare, if a user had checked into a venue on more days than anyone else in the past 60 days, then they would be crowned "Mayor" of that venue. Someone else could then earn the title by checking in more times than the previous mayor. This way users could vie for mayorships at particular venues by checking in more often than other users in the area, and businesses could also offer rewards for users who were the Mayor (such as food and drink discounts). As the services grew it became increasingly difficult to compete for mayorships in high-density areas where the service was popular. The mayorship feature was retired from Foursquare in version 8.0 and reimplemented in Swarm.

Badges were earned by checking into venues. There were a handful of introductory badges that were earned as milestones in usage. Some badges were tied to venue "tags" and the badge earned depends on the tags applied to the venue. Other badges were specific to a city, venue, event, or date. In September 2010 badges began to be awarded for completing tasks as well as checking in. On October 22, 2010, astronaut Douglas H. Wheelock unlocked the NASA Explorer badge by checking into Foursquare from the International Space Station. In Foursquare 8.0, badges were retired, which upset some existing users. This feature now exists in the Swarm app, where users unlock stickers for reaching certain milestones.

Earlier versions of the app also used a "points" system, users receiving a numerical score for each check-in, with over 100 bonuses, such as being first among friends to check into a place, or becoming the venue's mayor. Users could check their standing against friends on a leaderboard within the app. In Foursquare 8.0 points and leaderboards were retired, but were reimplemented in Swarm.

In its early years, the company entered into commercial partnerships with Zagat, Bravo, Conde Nast, The New York Times and several other brands to offer tips, specials and new badges to followers.

"Specials" were an incentive for Foursquare users to check-in at a new spot or revisit their favorite hangout. There were over 750,000 businesses that offered "Specials" that included discounts and freebies when users checked-in. Foursquare specials were intended for businesses to use to persuade new customers and regular customers to visit their venue. With the launch of Swarm, Foursquare retired Specials in its City Guide app.

Foursquare Swarm
In May 2014, the company launched Swarm, a companion app to Foursquare, that migrated the social networking and location sharing aspects of the service into a separate application. Swarm acts as a lifelogging tool for users to keep a record of the places they have been, featuring statistics on the places they have been, and a search capability to recall places they have visited. Swarm also lets users share where they have been with their friends, and see where their friends have been. Swarm check-ins are rewarded with points, in the form of virtual coins, and friends can challenge each other in a weekly leaderboard. Checking in to different categories of venue also unlocks virtual stickers. Though it is not necessary to use both apps, Swarm works together with Foursquare City Guide to improve a user's recommendations – a user's Swarm check-ins help Foursquare understand the kinds of places they like to go.

Foursquare Marsbot
In May 2016, Foursquare launched Marsbot, a tool that helps users discover new places by learning what they like and then sending recommendations via text. Unlike a chatbot or virtual personal assistant, Marsbot does not answer questions; instead, Marsbot passively learns about the places users go and then sends context-based suggestions about places to eat and drink nearby. Crowley has claimed that Marsbot is part of a larger vision of the future of location-based experiences for consumers.

Places by Foursquare
Launched in November 2009, Places by Foursquare is a database of more than 105 million places worldwide and an API that enables location data for Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, Tencent, Snapchat, Twitter, Uber, and others. As of August 2017, more than 100,000 brands and developers have registered for the technology.

Pinpoint by Foursquare
Pinpoint is a media platform that targets audiences based on where they go in the real world. It was launched in April 2015, and as of 2018, it reaches 150 million devices – both Foursquare users and non-users – in the U.S. It targets audiences based on key factors like taste preferences, demographics, and visit history. More than half of the Ad Age top 100 leading advertisers use Pinpoint.

Attribution by Foursquare
Attribution is a media performance measurement tool released in February 2016. It can measure any multi-channel ad campaign's effectiveness at driving people into stores and other offline locations. According to Foursquare, Attribution measures locations against Foursquare’s always-on panel of 25 million people. In June 2018, Foursquare announced an updated methodology for its Attribution product using machine learning and more than 500 attributes to understand the impact of ads on in-store visits. At the same time, the company announced partnerships with Spotify, T.G.I. Friday's and Panera Bread.

Pilgrim SDK by Foursquare
Launched in March 2017, Pilgrim SDK is a software development kit that can be incorporated into mobile apps for brands to understand precisely where phones go in the real world, allowing them to engage with users at the right time and place. Pilgrim SDK is used by Tinder, Capital One, TouchTunes and other brands.

Sixteen by Foursquare
Sixteen is Foursquare’s in-house creative agency. It was formed in April 2018 and is focused on creating ads based on location technology. The agency specializes in “deep media units”, which are dynamic ads tied to a person’s real-world location signals.

Funding
Foursquare is principally funded by Union Square Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, DFJ Growth, Morgan Stanley Alternative Investment Partners, Spark Capital, and more. The company raised $1.35 million in its Series A round and $20 million in its Series B round. On June 24, 2011, Foursquare raised $50 million on a $600 million valuation. Their Series D round funding of $41 million was announced on April 11, 2013 and led by Silver Lake Partners. Unlike prior funding rounds that had been financed via equity, a good portion of Series D came in the form of convertible debt from existing investors.

In January 2016, the company raised $45 million in a series E funding round led by Union Square Ventures. Morgan Stanley participated along with previous investors: DFJ Growth, Andreessen Horowitz and Spark Capital. In October 2018, the company announced that it raised an additional $33 million in a series F funding round co-led by strategic investors Simon Ventures and Naver, and longtime investor Union Square Ventures. This funding will be used to expand the company's engineering team and create a more connected product suite.

Recognition

 * In April 2010, Foursquare received a Webby Award as one of the best mobile social networks.
 * Foursquare was named a 2011 Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum in the Information Technologies and New Media category.
 * In January 2011, Foursquare was named Best Location-Based Service in the TechCrunch Crunchies 2010.
 * In 2016 and 2017, AdAge named Foursquare one of the best places to work.
 * In February 2017, Fast Company named Foursquare one of the Most Innovative Companies in Data Science.
 * In May 2017, Foursquare was named one of CNBC’s Disruptor 50 companies.
 * In November 2017, Foursquare was named to Deloitte’s Fast 500 list of the fastest-growing technology companies.

Foursquare Day
Foursquare acknowledged a grass-roots effort that started in Tampa, Florida in 2010 by declaring April 16 "Foursquare Day", April being the 4th month and the 16th being equal to four squared. Some cities have made official proclamations of April 16 being Foursquare Day (Istanbul, Turkey; Atlanta, Georgia; Austin, Texas; Cincinnati, Ohio; Corpus Christi, Texas; Gaithersburg, Maryland; Indianapolis, Indiana; Kalamazoo, Michigan; Kennesaw, Georgia; Manchester, New Hampshire; New York City; Portsmouth, New Hampshire; Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; Seattle, Washington; Miami, Florida; Victoria, British Columbia, Canada; Toronto, Ontario, Canada; Ramat Hasharon, Israel; Singapore).

Foursquare Day was coined by Nate Bonilla-Warford, an optometrist from Tampa, Florida on March 12, 2010. The idea came to him while "thinking about new ways to promote his business".

In 2010 McDonald's launched a spring pilot program that took advantage of Foursquare Day. Foursquare users who checked into McDonald's restaurants on Foursquare Day were given the chance to win gift cards in 5 and 10 dollar increments. Mashable reported that there was a "33% increase in foot traffic" to McDonald's venues, as apparent in the increase in Foursquare check-ins.

Privacy
In February 2010, a site known as Please Rob Me was launched, a site which scraped data from public Twitter messages that had been pushed through Foursquare, to list people who were not at home. The purpose of the site was to raise awareness about the potential thoughtlessness of location sharing, the site's founder saying "On one end we're leaving lights on when we're going on a holiday, and on the other we're telling everybody on the internet we're not home."

A privacy issue was also observed for those who connected their Twitter account to Foursquare. If such a user was joined at a location by one of their Foursquare contacts who was also using Twitter, that user would have the option to have Foursquare post a message such as "I am at Starbucks – Santa Clara (link to map) w/@mediaphyter" to their own Twitter feed. Similarly, if a user had agreed for their location to be shared with other Foursquare users, that user's Foursquare contacts would be able to easily share their location publicly on Twitter.

Later in 2010, white hat hacker Jesper Andersen discovered a vulnerability on Foursquare that raised privacy concerns. Foursquare's location pages display a grid of 50 pictures that is generated randomly, regardless of their privacy settings. Whenever a user "checks-in" at that location, their picture is generated on that location page, even if they only want their friends to know where they are. Andersen then crafted a script that collected check-in information. It is estimated that Andersen collected around 875,000 check-ins. Andersen contacted Foursquare about the vulnerability, and Foursquare responded by fixing their privacy settings.

In 2011, in response to privacy issues regarding social networking sites, Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai states that "Users decide if they want to push to Twitter or Facebook, over what information they want to share and send" and "There is a lot of misunderstanding about location-based services. On Foursquare, if you don't want people to know you are on a date or with a friend at a certain place, then you don't have to let people know. You don't check in." Selvadurai also states that Foursquare does not passively track users, which means a user has to actively check in to let people know where they are.

On May 8, 2012, Foursquare developers announced a change to the API in response to a number of so-called "stalker" applications which had been making the locations of e.g. all female users within a specific area available to the public.

In late December 2012, Foursquare updated its privacy policy. The service will now display users' full names, as opposed to an initial for a surname. In addition, companies will now be able to view a more detailed overview of visitors who have checked into their businesses throughout the day.

Foursquare has since updated both its privacy policy and cookies policy to explain clearly how it uses location data in new features and products.