Mark Zuckerberg isn’t the only social media company head anxious to get his hands on Google Glass for the betterment of his product. Dennis Crowley, CEO of Foursquare, has been talking about it as well.
At Mobile World Congress, Crowley spoke about the device, and TechCrunch says he also told them “Foursquare is looking at how it can evolve along with that”. Ingrid Lunden quotes him:
“Anywhere there’s a screen, we want to put our stuff on it, whether that’s on a phone, or a watch, or whatever,” he said. He also added that Foursquare hasn’t yet worked with Google Glass itself.
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Crowley said that Foursquare is gearing up to launch a new feature in the next couple of weeks that builds on this concept, enhancing the “contextual awareness” (his words) introduced by existing services like Radar. (Introduced in 2011, Radar alerts users to when they are near places that they have flagged in their app.)
Crowley, as you may know, co-founded early location-based service Dodgeball, which was acquired by Google in 2005, only to be shut down a few years later in favor of Google Latitude. He came out with Foursquare around that same time period.
He has since expressed interest in working with Google. At SXSW 2011, for example, he said that Google would be a great partner if the timing was right, and that they would “probably” partner with them. Since then, we’ve seen a handful of Foursquare integrations with Google. Google Places started importing Foursquare data, for example. Eventually, they started letting you add Foursquare check-ins to Google Calendar (which could prove quite useful for Foursquare users when combined with the new Google Calendar integration into Google Search).
At one point, it didn’t even seem out of the realm of possibility that Google would make a move to acquire Foursquare. Here’s a snippet from an article in December 2011:
Laura Goode at All Things Digital interviewed Crowley. On the possibility of an acquisition, she quotes Crowley as saying, “I wouldn’t disqualify anything. The thing that’s important to us is doing the things we want to do, which could be partnering with someone, or it could be continuing to grow the product independently.”
That is not exactly saying, “No, we’re not for sale.” For that matter, it doesn’t mean that Google, would be the winner of an acquisition, if in fact Foursquare is for sale. However, the interview is largely about Crowley’s relationship with Google, and how he has been talking with Googlers, including business development Googlers.
That, incidentally, was just after Facebook acquired Foursquare rival Gowalla. I’m not trying to start any new acquisition rumors here or anything. Just pointing out the potential usefulness of Foursquare and Google working together.
While Google is working on collecting a great deal of its own location-based data, even through games like Ingress, Foursquare no doubt has a lot to offer the company, especially for an offering like Google Glass, who co-founder Sergey Brin, by the way, seems to think will replace smartphones.
