Saturday, April 23, 2011

FourSquare Up To 500 Million Valuation?

Be There, Or Be Square: The FourSquare Day Party At Sidebar
FourSquare Day Tomorrow: Rad
A FourSquare Mayor?
FourSquare Has 6000000 Users

I think they were at two million users or less when they got their 100 million valuation. Moving from two to eight million jacks up your valuation by four hundred million dollars, looks like. That is really something.

FourSquare is not mainstream yet, although the tech insiders might not believe that to be the case. It is still early days of Twitter for FourSquare. Eight million is not a lot of people, but the trajectory of moving from two to eight million people is what you have to notice. The movement has happened fast.

FourSquare is in a sweet spot. Check in is a sweet spot to be in. The next five years, at least the next five years, belong to the mobile web. It is a fertile sector. The promise of the space is obvious to those who watch tech.
Image representing Naveen Selvadurai as depict...Image via CrunchBase
2015: A Mobile Tech Company Will Storm The Room
2011-2015: A Mobile Stretch

Fast Company: How Foursquare's Improved Photo Sharing Does Color One Better: Foursquare announced in a blog post today that it will add easy photo-sharing between friends, all tagged to check-ins. As described, this service will fill in the gaps where Color--which shows you photos from everyone around you, not just your friends--falls short. ...... "It works wonderfully for parties, elaborate brunches, and things like concerts," wrote Dave, in a description that sounded exactly like what Color was designed to capture. However, unlike Color, Foursquare now provides "more context and photos for your memories."

Capital New York: Keeping FourSquare Good: In 15 Months Foursquare's Grown From 250,000 to 8 Million Members; It's Chrysanthe Tenente's Job To Listen To All Of Them: one of New York’s most prominent and buzzed-about start-ups .... Foursquare's eight million users speak different languages and are spread out all over the world. ...... Now, businesses from restaurants to media companies to TV and movie studios are counting on Foursquare to help them collect information, woo loyal customers and, eventually, gather their own communities. ...... a bigger company with ambitious business plans. ..... the Community Manager's job is to act as a conduit between a new generation of consumers on social networks and giant, amorphous corporations. Sometimes the title is synonymous with the honcho salesperson whose main responsibility is to scale up the size of the user base ...... Tenentes’ job at Foursquare is to Not Be Evil, even as the company gets more serious. ...... Tenentes addresses users' privacy concerns, user-experience problems, and feature requests; there are all kinds of technical, emotional, and psychological issues among Foursquare’s users, who number roughtly the size of New York City's entire population ...... “When people hate on Foursquare and they direct it at me, it definitely feels like a personal attack” ...... “I’ve definitely had moments where I’ve melted down because of my inbox,” which is typically stacked with correspondence to Foursquare’s engineers for technical difficulties (“It won’t sign me in on my BlackBerry!”), the marketing manager for gameplans on Tweet language and blog posts explaining new partnerships (“Check-in to a "Real Housewives"-approved restaurant and get a Bravo badge!”) and the small team she has assembled during the past 15 months to communicate feature requests (Pictures! Comments! International phone number compliance!) and help answer users’ questions
Ashton Kutcher at Time 100 GalaImage via Wikipedia. ......... This past March at South by Southwest, the yearly part-conference, part-Burning Man for techies across the country, she gave actor and Foursquare investor Ashton Kutcher an in-person tutorial on the application’s new features, which were launched in time for the festival in Austin, Texas. “He gave me a high-five,” she said. ........ Sometimes it feels almost like she's their ‘elected representative’ and the community expresses their big asks through her ....... Tenentes voices the concerns of Foursquare’s 8 million users to its busy founders, engineers, and marketers. She is also a human core for to a technical platform that uses a bunch of bits and code to not only connect people to places, but connect people to people—in the real world, offline, away from screens. ...... food crawls for Brownstoners and Williamsburgers. ....... part of their goal with the breakfast meetup is to get tech entrepreneurs away from the glow of their laptops and be able to wave at peers as they walk down Bedford Avenue. ..... Foursquare is not at the 500-million-member Facebook or Twitter with its 200 million registerd accounts level ...... before the “community manager” title would become ubiquitous—the most trendy job for twentysomethings who grew up online and have plenty to teach aging companies about interacting with the next generation online. ....... She left Outside.in in November 2009 and began working on Brooklyn Based “pretty exclusively.” Meanwhile, “I kept running into Dennis and Naveen, like literally running into them while they were grabbing lunch, and I was in the city,” she said. In January of 2010, Crowley and co-founder Naveen Selvadurai sent out a message on Foursquare’s Twitter account that they needed customer service help. ....... Tenentes joined part time, planning to stay for “just a few weeks” ....... “Now we’ve scaled to having our own support site, our own Frequently Asked Questions, which I wrote," she said. "We have a support Twitter handle." ...... "We have a superuser forum. We have a Google Group for power superusers. We have a support staff for super users” ...... “The people who are really the early adopters, and not just the people who are in our small tech scenes in New York and San Fransisco but people who were in small towns all over the country” ...... “Like I remember a lot of our first superusers were people whose check-ins were at a grocery store, a convenience store and their home. But really it just made sense to them. So they were asking for photos, they were asking for comments, all these things that we ended up building.” ...... “We still hear from people who are just starting to set up their business or people who want to partner in Foursquare. We’ve noticed a major uptick in that since South by Southwest this year.” ..... “We jokingly call me chief grammar officer,” she said. “Usually I’m policing ‘check-ins’ versus ‘checkins’ with one word. That is never a word—looks like ‘chicken.’” ..... “She's really unpretentious, not a name-dropper," said her friend McGivney. "So refreshing in the startup scene in New York.”

Going Backwards: FoodSpotting, FourSquare, Twitter, Facebook
Twitter, FourSquare: Mobile Web Thingies
StartUp Anxiety For FourSquare?
FourSquare: $20 Million At $95 Million Valuation
Selling FourSquare Would Be A Mistake, Partnering Would Be Genius
Great To Meet Craig Newmark
4/16: I Found Myself A Party: Tonight's Gonna Be A Good Night
If The Tweet Is The Atom, What Is Location?
This Is Not Happening: King Dennis
Enhanced by Zemanta

1 comment:

Jimmy Ak said...

2 million users with each user spending $50. Valuation without considering future value potential is $100 million.

www.theboaconsulting.com