Tag: foursquare

Meta just beat the FTC because TikTok is eating its lunch

admin — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 10:14:32 +0000

After five years, Meta has prevailed in a U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) lawsuit concerning its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.

U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg stated in an opinion released Tuesday that the FTC failed to demonstrate Meta violated antitrust law when it acquired Instagram for $1 billion in 2012 and WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014.

Evidence presented by the FTC showed that Meta, then Facebook, exhibited concerns regarding Instagram’s rapid growth and potential competitive threat. Mark Zuckerberg wrote in February 2012, according to internal Facebook emails, “One way of looking at this is that what we’re really buying is time. Even if some new competitors springs [sic] up, buying Instagram, Path, Foursquare, etc. now will give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get close to their scale again.”

Judge Boasberg’s ruling did not address Meta’s past actions regarding monopoly status, but focused on its current market position. Boasberg cited applications like TikTok as proof of Meta’s existing competition. He noted in his memorandum opinion, “The landscape that existed only five years ago when the Federal Trade Commission brought this antitrust suit has changed markedly. While it once might have made sense to partition apps into separate markets of social networking and social media, that wall has since broken down.”

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How Deductive AI saved DoorDash 1,000 engineering hours by automating software debugging

admin — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 14:00:00 +0000

As software systems grow more complex and AI tools generate code faster than ever, a fundamental problem is getting worse: Engineers are drowning in debugging work, spending up to half their time hunting down the causes of software failures instead of building new products. The challenge has become so acute that it's creating a new category of tooling — AI agents that can diagnose production failures in minutes instead of hours.

Deductive AI, a startup emerging from stealth mode Wednesday, believes it has found a solution by applying reinforcement learning — the same technology that powers game-playing AI systems — to the messy, high-stakes world of production software incidents. The company announced it has raised $7.5 million in seed funding led by CRV, with participation from Databricks Ventures, Thomvest Ventures, and PrimeSet, to commercialize what it calls "AI SRE agents" that can diagnose and help fix software failures at machine speed.

The pitch resonates with a growing frustration inside engineering organizations: Modern observability tools can show that something broke, but they rarely explain why. When a production system fails at 3 a.m., engineers still face hours of manual detective work, cross-referencing logs, metrics, deployment histories, and code changes across dozens of interconnected services to identify the root cause.

"The complexities and inter-dependencies of modern infrastructure means that investigating the root cause of an outage or incident can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack, except the haystack is the size of a football field, it's made of a million other needles, it's constantly reshuffling itself, and is on fire — and every second you don't find it equals lost revenue," said Sameer Agarwal, Deductive's co-founder and chief technology officer, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat.

Deductive's system builds what the company calls a "knowledge graph" that maps relationships across codebases, telemetry data, engineering discussions, and internal documentation. When an incident occurs, multiple AI agents work together to form hypotheses, test them against live system evidence, and converge on a root cause — mimicking the investigative workflow of experienced site reliability engineers, but completing the process in minutes rather than hours.

The technology has already shown measurable impact at some of the world's most demanding production environments. DoorDash's advertising platform, which runs real-time auctions that must complete in under 100 milliseconds, has integrated Deductive into its incident response workflow. The company has set an ambitious 2026 goal of resolving production incidents within 10 minutes.

"Our Ads Platform operates at a pace where manual, slow-moving investigations are no longer viable. Every minute of downtime directly affects company revenue," said Shahrooz Ansari, Senior Director of Engineering at DoorDash, in an interview with VentureBeat. "Deductive has become a critical extension of our team, rapidly synthesizing signals across dozens of services and surfacing the insights that matter—within minutes."

DoorDash estimates that Deductive has root-caused approximately 100 production incidents over the past few months, translating to more than 1,000 hours of annual engineering productivity and a revenue impact "in millions of dollars," according to Ansari. At location intelligence company Foursquare, Deductive reduced the time to diagnose Apache Spark job failures by 90% —t urning a process that previously took hours or days into one that completes in under 10 minutes — while generating over $275,000 in annual savings.

Why AI-generated code is creating a debugging crisis

The timing of Deductive's launch reflects a brewing tension in software development: AI coding assistants are enabling engineers to generate code faster than ever, but the resulting software is often harder to understand and maintain.

"Vibe coding," a term popularized by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy, refers to using natural-language prompts to generate code through AI assistants. While these tools accelerate development, they can introduce what Agarwal describes as "redundancies, breaks in architectural boundaries, assumptions, or ignored design patterns" that accumulate over time.

"Most AI-generated code still introduces redundancies, breaks architectural boundaries, makes assumptions, or ignores established design patterns," Agarwal told Venturebeat. "In many ways, we now need AI to help clean up the mess that AI itself is creating."

The claim that engineers spend roughly half their time on debugging isn't hyperbole. The Association for Computing Machinery reports that developers spend 35% to 50% of their time validating and debugging software. More recently, Harness's State of Software Delivery 2025 report found that 67% of developers are spending more time debugging AI-generated code.

"We've seen world-class engineers spending half of their time debugging instead of building," said Rakesh Kothari, Deductive's co-founder and CEO. "And as vibe coding generates new code at a rate we've never seen, this problem is only going to get worse."

How Deductive's AI agents actually investigate production failures

Deductive's technical approach differs substantially from the AI features being added to existing observability platforms like Datadog or New Relic. Most of those systems use large language models to summarize data or identify correlations, but they lack what Agarwal calls "code-aware reasoning"—the ability to understand not just that something broke, but why the code behaves the way it does.

"Most enterprises use multiple observability tools across different teams and services, so no vendor has a single holistic view of how their systems behave, fail, and recover—nor are they able to pair that with an understanding of the code that defines system behavior," Agarwal explained. "These are key ingredients to resolving software incidents and it is exactly the gap Deductive fills."

The system connects to existing infrastructure using read-only API access to observability platforms, code repositories, incident management tools, and chat systems. It then continuously builds and updates its knowledge graph, mapping dependencies between services and tracking deployment histories.

When an alert fires, Deductive launches what the company describes as a multi-agent investigation. Different agents specialize in different aspects of the problem: one might analyze recent code changes, another examines trace data, while a third correlates the timing of the incident with recent deployments. The agents share findings and iteratively refine their hypotheses.

The critical difference from rule-based automation is Deductive's use of reinforcement learning. The system learns from every incident which investigative steps led to correct diagnoses and which were dead ends. When engineers provide feedback, the system incorporates that signal into its learning model.

"Each time it observes an investigation, it learns which steps, data sources, and decisions led to the right outcome," Agarwal said. "It learns how to think through problems, not just point them out."

At DoorDash, a recent latency spike in an API initially appeared to be an isolated service issue. Deductive's investigation revealed that the root cause was actually timeout errors from a downstream machine learning platform undergoing a deployment. The system connected these dots by analyzing log volumes, traces, and deployment metadata across multiple services.

"Without Deductive, our team would have had to manually correlate the latency spike across all logs, traces, and deployment histories," Ansari said. "Deductive was able to explain not just what changed, but how and why it impacted production behavior."

The company keeps humans in the loop—for now

While Deductive's technology could theoretically push fixes directly to production systems, the company has deliberately chosen to keep humans in the loop—at least for now.

"While our system is capable of deeper automation and could push fixes to production, currently, we recommend precise fixes and mitigations that engineers can review, validate, and apply," Agarwal said. "We believe maintaining a human in the loop is essential for trust, transparency and operational safety."

However, he acknowledged that "over time, we do think that deeper automation will come and how humans operate in the loop will evolve."

Databricks and ThoughtSpot veterans bet on reasoning over observability

The founding team brings deep expertise from building some of Silicon Valley's most successful data infrastructure platforms. Agarwal earned his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley, where he created BlinkDB, an influential system for approximate query processing. He was among the first engineers at Databricks, where he helped build Apache Spark. Kothari was an early engineer at ThoughtSpot, where he led teams focused on distributed query processing and large-scale system optimization.

The investor syndicate reflects both the technical credibility and market opportunity. Beyond CRV's Max Gazor, the round included participation from Ion Stoica, founder of Databricks and Anyscale; Ajeet Singh, founder of Nutanix and ThoughtSpot; and Ben Sigelman, founder of Lightstep.

Rather than competing with platforms like Datadog or PagerDuty, Deductive positions itself as a complementary layer that sits on top of existing tools. The pricing model reflects this: Instead of charging based on data volume, Deductive charges based on the number of incidents investigated, plus a base platform fee.

The company offers both cloud-hosted and self-hosted deployment options and emphasizes that it doesn't store customer data on its servers or use it to train models for other customers — a critical assurance given the proprietary nature of both code and production system behavior.

With fresh capital and early customer traction at companies like DoorDash, Foursquare, and Kumo AI, Deductive plans to expand its team and deepen the system's reasoning capabilities from reactive incident analysis to proactive prevention. The near-term vision: helping teams predict problems before they occur.

DoorDash's Ansari offers a pragmatic endorsement of where the technology stands today: "Investigations that were previously manual and time-consuming are now automated, allowing engineers to shift their energy toward prevention, business impact, and innovation."

In an industry where every second of downtime translates to lost revenue, that shift from firefighting to building increasingly looks less like a luxury and more like table stakes.

Foursquare’s founder launches a new app that talks to you about your neighborhood

admin — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 13:15:35 +0000

The BeeBot app is only available for iOS users in the US.

After teasing its development last year, Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley has now launched BeeBot: an AI-powered social app for iPhones that talks to you about what’s happening nearby. In his blog announcement, Crowley says BeeBot behaves like a “personalized radio DJ” that provides location-based audio updates through your headphones, telling you about what friends are up to, local news, and events occurring in the neighborhood as you walk around.

“Audio updates are meant to be short and sweet (a few sentences here and there), tailored to your interests and your social graph, and designed to both inspire and inform you,” Crowley says in the announcement. “The vibe we’re going for is more ‘Waze meets Gossip Girl,’ and less ‘Wikipedia in your ears.’”

While the app is called “BeeBot for AirPods,” Crowley says it supports any wired or wireless headphones or Bluetooth-based audio devices, including speakers, car stereos, and wearables like Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses. It’s always on, activates automatically when you put your headphones in, and turns off when you take them out. BeeBot will lower the volume and speak over any music you’re listening to and automatically pause and unpause podcasts when it wants to speak, but it won’t interrupt you during phone calls or video chats.

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This won’t be a frequent occurrence, however. Crowley says users may get updates from BeeBot a few times each day, “but not 10x/day” to prevent it from being too disruptive. Updates are pulled from various sources, including live locations and status updates from other BeeBot users, and uses “keywords” you give it about your interests to suggest local places and events for you to check out.

The app is “still very much in beta,” according to Crowley, and the news it provides is intended to be “more gossip’y than news’y.” In its current state, BeeBot provides the best experience in walkable US cities, as opposed to when users are driving, cycling, or using the subway. It’s only available for iOS users in the US for now, and Crowley says that a CarPlay version is in development.

Wall Street is finding ways to make money off your every move

admin — Mon, 21 Nov 2016 16:25:45 +0000

Wall Street is finding ways to make money off your every move

Investment firms like hedge funds are big buyers of so-called "alternative data." That's data that comes from the apps we use, the online shops we buy from, and the GPS tracking within our smartphones.

This info helps investors figure out where to put their money and gives insight into, for instance, how stocks will perform – which companies will continue to rake in cash, and which ones are likely to flop.

The market for this data is expected to double in the next five years in the US, from $200 million today to $400 million, according to a recent TABB Group report. The amount of data that can be packaged into investment insights is expected to increase as our devices and apps glean more info from us.

"The deployment of billions of sensors that can monitor any type of device, from fridges to gas tanks, will significantly increase the quantity and quality of data that is made available for analysis," the report said.

Below are some of the ways vendors are tracking your spending and tastes, according to the report.

Satellites are tracking cars in store parking lots

It's already common for satellites to track the number of cars in shops' parking lots. This helps investors figure out which stores are popular – or which companies may be having layoffs if fewer cars are showing up.

Investors used to track this kind of data manually, so satellite imagery is a big step up in terms of efficiency.

This imagery is also expected to get better, with better detail of objects on the ground. Drones and airplanes are expected to provide higher resolution images, too.

The photos can even help determine the health of the soil and agriculture on the ground. That's particularly valuable to commodities investors that bet on factors like crop yields.

Shopping receipts in your email inbox are being monitored

They say nothing in life is free. That goes for the apps that organize our emails, send us coupons and help process refunds. In turn, those free apps may sell the data that we produce.

One of the big sources in this category is receipts. Investors are already using anonymous data gleaned from credit card statements, but the rise of online shopping, and the digital receipts we get in our email, is a boon. That's because emailed receipts are usually itemized, giving investors greater detail into what people are buying.

This type of data sharing should increase, since online shopping is expected to grow. At the same time, brick and mortar stores are also increasingly sending digital receipts.

The data doesn't come without its challenges. For one, receipt data may be biased to a particular demographic or age group – i.e. those that are most likely to shop online. This type of tracking is also harder to implement in Europe, which has stricter privacy rules than the US.

Your phone is tracking the shops you're going to

More than 90% of purchases are still made in brick and mortar stores.

Cell phones, and the location tracking within them, can help investors figure out who is shopping where.

Social media apps like FourSquare have already predicted earnings results, by tracking how many people were going in to a store.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

88 Local APIs: Yahoo Local, Yelp and Zvents

maintainer — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 14:00:27 +0000

Our API directory now includes 88 local APIs. The newest is the WebReserv API. The most popular, in terms of mashups, is the Yahoo Local Search API. We list 55 Yahoo Local Search mashups. Below you’ll find some more stats from the directory, including the entire list of local APIs.

In terms of the technical details, REST and JSON lead the way. There are 64 local REST APIs and 7 local SOAP APIs. Our directory lists 54 local JSON APIs and 49 local XML APIs.

The most common tags within local are 26 shopping local APIs, 22 places local APIs and 19 mapping local APIs.

On the mashup side, we list 111 local mashups. We named MapSavings.com as mashup of the day two weeks ago.

For reference, here is a list of all 88 local APIs.

8coupons API: Local deals aggregator

Adility API: Local coupon service

AlterGeo API: Local recommendation service

BiteHunter API: Dining Deals Search Service

BlockChalk API: Local community social space

Boomloop API: Local events and community

Bullseye Store Locator API: Store location search service

Bview Content API: Local business info service

Bview Local Search API: Local retail search service

Cing API: Deal and coupon service

CityGrid API: Local business directory search service

CityGrid Advertising API: Local advertising service

CityGroups API: Local public directory

DealsGoRound API: Online marketplace for daily deals

DealSurf API: Daily deal aggregator service

deCarta MapSearch Engine API: Local search services

Dokiru API: Social location based service

EveryBlock API: Hyperlocal data and news aggregator

Florist One API: Flower sales and delivery

Food Genius API: Restaurant and food data

foursquare Merchant API: foursquare merchant platform

Fwix Location API: Business listing service

Fwix Wire API: Local news gathering service

GeoReach Neighborhood API: Location based adversting service

GigPark API: Local recommendations service

Google Places API: Local business and point of interest service

Groups Near You API: Local groups search service

HAMweather Aeris API: Weather data service

Happenr API: Events database

Happenstand API: Bay area events listing service

HomeCook API: Local food businesses community

HotUKDeals API: UK local deals service

Hyperpublic API: Geographic data collection service

Jotly API: Rating application

KidsEatFor API: Restaurant deal search service

Lemonade Stand API: Community Sales Service

Localmind API: Location based Q&A

MashSpots API: Local search and mapping

Mates API: Location-based networking service

MerchantCircle.com API: Online marketing service for local businesses

Meteostone Weather API: Weather data service

Metro Traffic API: Real-time traffic data service

Milo API: Local shopping service

Mycitymate Location API: Local user reviews and city guides

MyDealBag API: Local deals aggregation service

NAVTEQ Traffic API: Local traffic information service

Nokia Ovi Places API: Online mapping service

Onboard Points of Interest API: Real estate listings and search service

OneSearchAway API: Social search service

OpenGovernment API: State and local government data

Outside.in API: Hyperlocal news and information aggregator

Patch API: Community-specific news and information service

PeekaCity API: Location-based services

Peixe Urbano API: Brazilian daily deals service

PlaceIQ API: Location data and mapping service

Postcode Anywhere Store Finder API: UK business listings service

Praized API: Local user reviews and search service

Qype API: Local reviews service

Retailigence API: Location-based retail inventory

Rvolve Hyperlocal Ads API: Hyperlocal advertising platform

Safe2pee API: Gender neutral bathroom search

Sensis Business Search API: Australian business directory search service

ShreveSearch Search API: Shreveport-Bossier LA area search services

SinglePlatform API: Restaurant Menu and Local Business Storefront API

SmartPea Grocery API: Grocery store deal and shopping list service

SoGeo API: Location aware business platform

Sqoot API: Local deals aggregation service

TelVue PEG.TV API: Cloud-based streaming video service

Tippr API: Daily deals aggregation service

TrustedPlaces API: Local user reviews and city guides

Urban Mapping Neighborhoods API: Urban geo-spatial data services

VodoModo API: Geolocation video provider

WebReserv API: Online business search and booking service

welovelocal API: Local business search and recommendation service

Wishpond API: Local retail search service

World Weather Online API: Global weather information services

World Weather Online City Search API: City lookup service

World Weather Online Time Zone API: Time zone data service

xAd API: Mobile advertising service

Yahoo Local Search API: Local search service

Yellow API: Canadian business listings service

YellowBot Location API: Local business search service

YellowBot Reputation Management API: Local business search service

Yelp API: Local user reviews and city guides

YouPage API: Business and local events directory

YourStreet API: Geocoding news article service

Zomato API: India Restaurant and lifestyle guide

Zvents API: Local events search and community

HootSuite Now Ties in Digg, InboxQ and Trendspottr

admin — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 15:00:44 +0000

Fresh off reaching 3 million users in January, social media management dashboard HootSuite is adding three apps to its App Directory and releasing its Engagement API.

Users can now integrate Digg, InboxQ and Trendspottr into their dashboards starting Wednesday by installing them via the App Directory, which until today allowed users to share content only to Constant Contact, Flickr, Formulists, Get Satisfaction, Summify, Tumblr and YouTube.

Before the directory’s debut in November, users already had the ability to distribute content on Facebook (and FB Pages), Foursquare, LinkedIn, Mixi, MySpace, Ping.fm, Twitter, and WordPress. HootSuite then added more social networks such as Facebook groups, Google+ pages and LinkedIn company pages and groups.

Digg, InboxQ and Trendspottr integration is available to HootSuite Basic, Pro and Enterprise users.

Here’s what users will be able to do with the new apps, according to HootSuite:

Digg: Users can view current Top News stories, search stories, Digg stories, discover and share content from the web using the dashboard and more.
InboxQ: Users can find questions on Twitter based on keyword and phrase searches, fine tune search results and engage directly with those asking questions.
Trendspottr: Users can search for trending content by topic, keyword or phrase, select from a list of popular searches, share trending stories, videos and more via the social networks they’ve added to the HootSuite dashboard.

“Developers and partners will highly benefit from the functional and promotional exposure to our influential users with the apps they develop,” says HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes. “Brands and businesses want to meet their audiences where they are, and that means engaging across multiple channels and networks.”

HootSuite also exposed its Engagement API today, which gives outside developers and partners an inside look at its management, publishing and scheduling systems. HootSuite already plans to enhance the Engagement API and publish more application programming interfaces in the “near future.”

HootSuite, which launched in 2008 and unleashed Social Analytics in March, also estimates it will grow to 6 million users by the end of 2012.

More About: digg, hootsuite, inboxq, Social Media, social media management, Trendspottr

Top 10 Feed & RSS Technologies of 2011

admin — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 21:02:07 +0000

News and activity feeds are more alive today than ever before, even as engagement with their simplest format, Really Simple Syndication (RSS), appears to be waning. What were the Top 10 Most Awesome RSS & Feed Products of 2011? We offer our list below. Though some of these weren't born in the past year, all of them have made a big impact and are thoroughly awesome.

Anyone with an interest in competitive knowledge work should be aware of and give some thought to these applications. We'd love to hear your thoughts on others in comments below, too, readers. I've put the following 10 in a particular order: from the most geeky to the most mainstream.

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10. AppNotifications

Fabien Penso's fabulous iPhone push notification app released a 3.0 version this year, but it's just the nice clean basics that make this one a winner. Input any feed, or many other sources of information, and Penso's app will push it to your phone in real time. It works really, really well and is better than ever with the introduction of the Apple Notification Center in iOS5. A double digit percentage of the stories I reported on this year came from feeds I consumed in this app. See also: BoxCar and Notifo.

9. iftt

If This Then That is a point and click mashup maker that lets you do all kinds of things with feeds of information and multiple applications. It's loads of fun, though some high-volume RSS feeds seem to overwhelm it. I wish it worked with AppNotifications above, or UrbanAirship. The ifttt recipe that pushes my Foursquare check-ins into my Google Calendar like a diary entry? That's awesome. Ifttt was recently funded by Betaworks, a story I was able to break because of another awesome feed bot - the Neubot VC portfolio tracker.

8. Flipboard

The feed reader your parents always wished you'd bring home, Flipboard finally released its iPhone version this Fall after more than a year of dominating the iPad magazine reader app market. Competitor Zite is nice and was acquired by CNN, Google's new Currents is ok, Yahoo's competitor is not so great and others are floating around too. Flipboard puts a premium on design though and wins as a result. Adoption of its new iPhone app has been breathtaking. The best way to enjoy Flipboard, though, is to populate it with a great Twitter list.

7. Summify

The computer science nerds behind iPhone app Summify have done a great job combining social engineering, smart algorithms and nice design to solve the information overload problem. If you haven't seen Summify, you should check it out. It feels related to the iPad's News.me, which is a strong contender for this spot in the list as well.

6. Path

The story behind Path seems downright smug - the company's founders reportedly turned down $100 million from Google before even launching and they walk through the wasteland of social networking healing the sick with their mere touch, but the latest version of the app is undeniably fantastic. It's like Facebook Mobile meets Instagram meets Foursquare meets Gowalla meets better design than any of the above. Expect to see a giant pile of apps try to model their design after Path's in the next year. It's a great presentation of an activity feed. It's the kind of thing that nerds and noobs can all love, too.

5. Percolate

"Percolate turns brands into curators," this new startup says. Marketers love this service and it seems to have done a great job of discovering feeds full of content and making them easy for Percolate users to add to and capture value from.

4. Feedly

Feedly rides on top of your Google Reader subscriptions and provides a great cross-platform feed reading experience on web, mobile and tablets. When you're ready to stop messing around with filters, social, recommendations, etc. and you just want to stand in front of a pipe of feeds you subscribed to yourself, Feedly is a great way to do it. (Disclosure: The author did a small amount of consulting for Feedly on launch strategy but has no ongoing financial interest in the company, beyond a glowing endorsement of said consulting services. Sorry, but it's still a feed app that lots of people love.)

3. New Twitter Interactions

Love or hate the #newnewTwitter just launched at the end of this year, the new Interactions tab on web and mobile is a great big nod to activity feeds. It's very cool to see all the relevant activity surfaced with regard to your content: you've been replied to, favorited, added to a list, retweeted. Putting all of that in one big feed is really nice and is probably one of the biggest feed changes that tens of millions of people are going to engage with next year. That will make it one of the biggest, except for...

2. The Facebook Timeline

Facebook's new Timeline feature looks at all the activities you've published into the site since creating your account and it surfaces the highlights by analyzing social activity around each event. It's awesome, if a little frightening. Now that hundreds of millions of people will become familiar with this kind of presentation around their data, they'll be all the more ready for...

1. Facebook Seamless Sharing

The biggest thing in feeds for 2011 is clearly Facebook's Seamless Sharing, or Open Graph Protocol. I think the way the company implemented the paradigm is risky, irresponsible and wrong. But it's going to pave the way for a wholly instrumented world. Today the music you listen to is streamed into your social network and profile (unless you opt-out) and in the future almost everything else you do with a machine will be, too. Every machine you use will be network-connected and will publish data onto the web. Remember when Facebook hired "my year in review" infographic artists Nicholas Felton and Ryan Case this Spring? Their work appeared in the aforementioned Facebook Timeline, but they and their thinking will help build dashboards we use to track our home electricity usage, our debit card activity, our exercise, our travel and a whole lot more in the future. It will all be pushed automatically into the network too, just like Facebook's Seamless Sharing.

Hopefully Facebook can move this ball forward in a way that allows users to make clear, informed decisions how to participate - odds of that aren't great - but either way it's likely to happen. And it's going to be very big.

Those are my list of the Top 10 Feed Technologies in 2011 - what do you think? What should be included? Is there too much Facebook here? Please share your comments below.

Disclosure: The author is building an unlaunched startup related to this sector; it may either compete or collaborate with any number of the above companies. Except Facebook, it doesn't have anything to do with Facebook.

Discuss

Foursquare Surpasses 500,000 Merchant Accounts

admin — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 02:46:48 +0000

Fresh off celebrating 10 million members, Foursquare is now commemorating a new achievement — more than 500,000 merchant accounts.

The startup made the announcement in a blog post Wednesday, highlighting several creative brands who are currently using Foursquare for marketing purposes.

2011 is proving to be a big year for the two year-old Foursquare; it recently raised another $50 million in funding and just announced a nationwide partnership with American Express.

More About: foursquare, MARKETING, merchants, social media

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Starwood Hotels Adds Foursquare to Loyalty Program

admin — Tue, 10 May 2011 16:41:09 +0000

Foursquare has partnered with Starwood Hotels and Resorts to begin offering members of the Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG) loyalty program additional points, badges and rewards for their checkins at participating hotels.

Beginning Tuesday, Foursquare members who connect their SPG and Foursquare accounts will earn 250 bonus Starpoints when they check in with a confirmed reservation at one of more than 1,000 hotels.

Starwood first announced the new program Tuesday morning via its SPGInsider Twitter account, tweeting: “Checking-in just got even more rewarding. Link your SPG acct with foursquare and earn bonus Starpoints, visit http://bit.ly/SPG4Square.”

“We’re thrilled to have the opportunity to work with Starwood on what will be one of the widest reaching loyalty integrations on any location-based service,” says Tristan Walker, director of business development for Foursquare. “Foursquare is focused on helping businesses reward loyal customers, and few companies truly understand customer loyalty like Starwood, so the partnership is a natural fit.”

Starwood properties include the St. Regis, W Hotels, Four Points, Westin, Le Meridien and Sheraton hotels.

The promotion runs through July 31, 2011, and members who check in during the promotion period will be eligible to win a resort getaway. SPG members will receive one entry per checkin.

Starwood is also hiding a Free Resort Night Award at some hotel locations. SPG members may find and unlock the reward by checking in between now and May 31, 2011.

SPG members who check in frequently at Starwood locations may be anointed as the “SPG Mayor.” Each month, Starwood will declare the member with the most checkins across all its properties as the SPG Mayor. “Mayoral duties will include sharing your favorite insider travel tips and destination hotspots with fellow frequent travelers around the globe,” according to Starwood promotional materials.

Starwood plans to kick off additional Foursquare promotions in August, but details are unknown at this time.

The partnership furthers Foursquare mission to reinvent loyalty programs and most closely resembles a similar program it started with Safeway last year.

More to come …

More About: checkins, foursquare, loyalty, loyalty program, MARKETING, SPG, starwood hotels

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