Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Dennis Crowley

Foursquare Co-Founder Naveen Selvadurai Stepping Down

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 04:19:19 +0000

Foursquare investors such as Spark Capital have been buying up stock from current employees. Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai is leaving the company after working there for three years. Naveen Selvadurai and Dennis Crowley started Foursquare together. Selvadurai worked on the Foursquare iPhone app, but now the company is in the hands of hundreds of engineers and developers.

Foursquare recently moved into new offices and the company is valued at over $700 million. Foursquare’s team is growing in New York and San Francisco. When speaking at Mobile World Congress, Crowley said that Foursquare has tripled the number of users from 5 million to 15 million in the past one year and has signed up 750,000 merchants.

Here is what Selvadurai had to say about his departure:

“I’m on the board, I’ll still be advising, and I’m obviously going to be the single most vocal user. But the spring is time for things that are new, and i realize that i have a desire to do something new as well. I’m not sure about my exact next steps, but I’ll probably get back to what I love most – being an entrepreneur, learning and building new things.”

Foursquare Is Hiring A Data Scientist To Help Build Recommendation Engine

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 17:43:47 +0000

Geo-location check-in service Foursquare is currently looking into hiring a data scientist. The company is looking for a scientist that has “experience with prediction or recommender systems, search and ranking algorithms, and classification algorithms.” Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley said back in September that they are working on building a recommendation engine.

The job of the data scientist would be to explore, model, and interpret large chunks of data. Other requirements for the data scientist include:
- MS or PhD in CS/Machine Learning or Statistics or a BS with extensive experience in the field
- 5+ years experience as a data scientist/analyst on large datasets, or research in this area
- Ability to work with big datasets with minimal engineering support
- Comfortable in a small, intense and high-growth start-up environment

[ReadWriteWeb]

Foursquare Now Has Over 5 Million Users

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 21:19:15 +0000

Geo-location check-in service Foursquare has hit 5 million service confirmed CEO Dennis Crowley on-stage at the Le Web conference in Paris, France. These 5 million users check into venues about 2 million times per day. Around 25,000 new people are joining per day. Foursquare employs around 40 people compared to a year ago when they had 4 people. [TechCrunch]

Svpply Raises $550,000 In Seed Funding

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 21:02:18 +0000

Svpply is an e-commerce website that makes it easy to buy goods on the Internet. Svpply lets you search for accessories, apparel, shoes, gadgets, etc. Svpply has raised $550,000 in seed funding from Spark Capital, Founder Collective, Ron Conway, Dennis Crowley, and Jason Hirschhorn. Zach Klein, co-founder of College Humor and Vimeo, is also a co-founder in Svpply. Klein is working with Ben Pieratt, a designer that lives in Boston. [AllThingsD]

Dennis Crowley Tweets Foursquare Had Biggest Sign-Up Day

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 15:18:28 +0000

Earlier this week Facebook Places was announced. Facebook Places is check-in service that is similar to Foursquare and Gowalla. Rather than “killing the competition,” Facebook Places brought about awareness of geo-location services. Foursquare saw its biggest sign-up day after the Facebook Places announcement.

Even though Facebook Places is helping raise the awareness of geo-location services, Foursquare should be wary. Eventually Facebook may want to get into the coupon for checking-in concept that Foursquare is currently building their business on. Foursquare currently has 2.8 million users.

Just heard from The @HarryH that today was @foursquare‘s biggest day ever in terms of new user signups. #dball4lifeless than a minute ago via txtDennis Crowley
dens

[TechCrunch]

How To Use Facebook Check-In Service Facebook Places

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 20:58:29 +0000

Facebook launched a new check-in service called Facebook Places. Facebook Places is very similar to Foursquare. Currently Facebook Places in not available in most regions, but it will be soon enough. For those of you that have access to Facebook Places right now, here is a tutorial on how to use it:

1. Update the latest version of the Facebook application.
2. Click on the main menu by tapping on the thumbnails icon at the top left of the app.
3. Select “Places”
4. Tap the Check In button
5. After that, you are shown a list of nearby places.
6. You have the option of tagging friends that are with you and you can also write what you are doing.
7. Click Check-In after you are done filling in the information
8. You might see a warning that says “After you check in, friends can see where you are. You and your friends will also be able to check each other in whenever you go.”
9. You will also be able to click on Like or Comment on recent Facebook Places friends activities.
10. If a venue is not listed in Facebook Places, then you can manually add the information yourself by tapping on the + icon.
11. When you add a new place, you also have to add the name and description. After that you have to verify the location on a map.
12. If you don’t have an iPhone, you can access Facebook Places from http://touch.facebook.com

Facebook places product manager Michael Eyal Sharon graduated in the same NYU program as Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley according to BusinessInsider. Both graduated from the NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). Crowley built his first start-up Dodgeball with his ITP classmate Alex Rainert. Rainert is currently the Foursquare head of product.

Foursquare In Talks With Big 3 Search Engines For Partnership

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 05:33:17 +0000

Check-in geolocation service Foursquare has grown at a rapid pace. The data collected by Foursquare is valuable because it harvests information about how often people visit a specific establishment. Now Foursquare has the interest of Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! “Our data generates hugely interesting trends which would enrich search,” stated Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley, who previously sold a company to Google.

“We can anonymize data and use it to show venues which are trending at that moment. Twitter helped the world and the search engines know what people are talking about. Foursquare would allow people to search for the types of place people are going to – and where is trending – not what.”

Even though Google shut down the previous company they acquired from Crowley called Dodgeball, he said that he is still close with “the guys at Google” and even hired former employees from there. Foursquare just signed up its two millionth user about three months after their first million users. The company now has a valuation at $95 million based on their venture capital rounds. [Telegraph UK]

Foursquare Raises $20 Million Series B

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 16:38:35 +0000

Foursquare, the mobile check in service started by Dennis Crowley has raised $20 million in Series B funding at a $95 million pre-money valuation.

This round of funding was led by Andreessen Horowitz. Existing investors Union Square and O’Reilly AlphaTech also participated. Foursuqare has about 27 employees working out of the company’s New York offices.

About 15,000 new people are joining Foursquare per day. Foursquare now has about 1.8 million registered users.

[TechCrunch]

Foursquare Co-Founder Dennis Crowley Invests In Metamarkets

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 16:24:15 +0000

Metamarkets is a real-time data startup company that provides price data and analytics to global media companies. The company launched in late 2009 and is working towards solving the problem behind ad price discovery on mobile and web platforms. The company has raised $2.5 million from IA Ventures, Village Ventures, True Ventures, Founder Collective, Mike Maples, Stan Shuman, AOL Ventures, Josh Stylman, Jim Pallotta, Peter Hershberg, and Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley. IA Ventures led the round.

Metamarkets was founded by David Soloff and Michael Driscoll. Soloff is the former lead architect at Rapt, a company acquired by Microsoft in 2008. Driscoll is the founder of Dataspora. This new round of funding will be used to build the company’s engineering team. [TechCrunch]

Foursquare Adding 15,000 New Users Every Day

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 21 May 2010 20:03:58 +0000

Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley announced at the Business Insider Startup 2010 event in New York City that Foursquare is adding about 15,000 new users every day. Foursquare’s last major milestone was when they announced that they have surpassed one million users. Crowley also mentioned that an opportunity he is most excited about is what could be a “Google Analytics but for local merchants.” [Mashable]