We’re at SXSW 2011 in beautiful Austin (find our coverage here) and we talked to Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley and he told us about what we can expect from the future of the location-based check-in service.
Foursquare 3.0 just launched less than a week ago and it featured a major redesign for multiple platforms. You know the service because it kicked off this whole check-in craze that has been picked up by a variety of people and companies. Foursquare now has over 7 million users and its API is being used in some interesting ways.
Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley tells us that the company is just starting to ramp up, as it has the resources and scale to expand the types of services it offers and appeal to more users. The latest version has included an Explore tab which offers users location-based recommendations. This could be incredibly powerful because when you combine the wealth of location-date Foursquare has with a smart recommendation engine, you have something that could be quite useful to users and lucrative for the company.
This location-based recommendation is a hot topic here at SXSW 2011, as companies like LocalMind and Bizzy are dabbling in this space. Foursquare has the advantage of scale though and big-name advertisers may be more willing to work with it than some other smaller, LBS apps. For example, Foursquare was a major part of the Pepsi marketing push here at SXSW.
I’ve been skeptical of Foursqaure for a while now because I didn’t really have real friends using it and I thought the rewards weren’t relevant enough for me to care. I am starting to become a believer though because we’re seeing it evolve at a very intelligent pace. It’s not just the new features – I dig how the API is being used by companies like LocalMind and it may be able to be the platform for many LBS services.