The three-year-old “big-data” company has now raised some $23 million, and is using the new money to expand into additional business lines.

Metamarkets started out providing data tracking and analytics to digital publishers like AOL, Demand Media and the Financial Times, so they could get a better handle on the value of their ad inventory.

But now it is branching out into other industries where companies generate enormous streams of data, like social media and payment start-ups.

CEO Mike Driscoll won’t disclose the names of his clients in these new categories. But Twitter and Square sure seem like obvious candidates. And it’s worth noting that Foursquare generates an awful lot of data, and Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley has made angel investments in Metamarkets.

It’s also worth noting that Driscoll, who co-founded the company and was its CTO, wasn’t CEO until January. He replaced co-founder David Soloff, who Driscoll says now works as a “close adviser” to the start-up.

My understanding is that the swap is at least partly related to that buyout offer Metamarkets didn’t take. People familiar with the company say that Soloff was interested in taking the deal, while his backers wanted him to build a bigger company — and generate a bigger return on their investment.

Driscoll won’t comment on the story behind the change. But he notes that the new funding makes it clear that “Metamarkets is not interested in going out for a small amount of dollars anytime soon.”

“I think too many people in Silicon Valley are shortsighted,” he says. “This is a huge space, and the opportunity is massive.”

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/sommthink)

Nowhere is that more true than in the world of smartphone applications, as app developers push the possibilities of how to use our smartphones’ location awareness and reach well beyond what our mobile data plans and battery lives seem to be able to support, especially in densely populated spaces.

It’s kind of sad, because for a while the release of new devices has set off rushes of creativity, with developers using touchscreens and accelerometers and other sensors in ways that seemed to make science fiction real.

With every available power outlet in use, a popular FedEx promotion brought a "human charging station" to the street. Thankfully it didn't enlist homeless people.

We see great stuff like phone cameras being used for everything from detecting heart rates to translating paper menus from one language to another. We watch serendipitous location-sharing tools go from typing in an address five years ago (Dodgeball), to linking with a crowdsourced database three years ago (Foursquare), to ambient awareness this year (Highlight).

The disconnect between app dreams and phone reality was particularly evident at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin this past week, where official attendance hit nearly 25,000, up 27 percent from last year. Combined with everyone else in the hip Texas town, including many SXSW partiers without passes, that made for phone network overload.

And when our phones are constantly searching for a signal or tracking our locations, their battery life tends to suck. Literally.

As most did, I had a hard time getting mobile data during all five days I was in Austin, with ongoing weak 3G service on my iPhone 4 on the AT&T network. AT&T wouldn’t give me a comment on its SXSW performance beyond a map of its event service plan, including 220 Wi-Fi hotspots and a couple of “COW” (cellular on wheels) trucks.

Other outlets also reported that bad data access at SXSW 2012 was a problem for many people. (Although not everyone and not every device had issues: Walt Mossberg was pulling down 18 Mbps back in his hotel room on his new Verizon LTE iPad that he was testing.)

Here’s the problem: SXSW has become a place where app developers come in the hopes that they can persuade a dense, social audience of early adopters to try their shiny new way to find what’s going on and where. Hundreds of start-ups lust after the idea of “winning SXSW,” following past examples of Twitter and Foursquare, and, to a lesser extent, GroupMe.

There was much debate, egged on by tech bloggers, about who would be crowned the SXSW winner this year. I think the consensus was that nobody won, although Mophie battery packs for the iPhone and sponsors who brought charging stations should get an honorable mention.

But I’d argue that one of the reasons it was impossible to “win” in 2012 was that these location and communication apps were hindered by poor service and battery life impact.

Foiled again! My repeated attempts to check in on Foursquare distracted me from yet another scintillating panel.

Also, as aged as they are in comparison to the newborn location vampires, Foursquare and Twitter still dominate SXSW. There were 755,373 total tweets with the keyword or hashtag “SXSW” during the Interactive portion of the festival, according to PeopleBrowsr. At one point, I had the 3,702nd concurrent Foursquare check-in at the Austin Convention Center.

“Foursquare’s part of the fabric of SXSW,” said Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley in an onstage interview at the event. I think he’s right.

But then Crowley took it a step further: “Foursquare in Austin at SXSW is like Foursquare of the future. It’s going to be everywhere.”

If that’s the case — and I’m not sure it is — I don’t think the future sounds so great. Because using Foursquare at SXSW was actually a total chafe. It often took four tries to send my Foursquare check-ins to the server. The error messages were constant.

More daring apps like the new Highlight — which constantly tracks users and pings them when they are near people with common friends and interests — had even more problems. One morning when I loaded up Highlight, the app told me that I had been in close proximity to 10 people the night before between 1 am and 2:30 am, over on the other side of the river from where I was staying.

Boring as I am, I was home in bed by then.

When I asked Highlight co-founder Paul Davison why the app messed up, he said Highlight had been experimenting with using mobile cell towers to locate users, because GPS has such an impact on their batteries. The cell tower had apparently retained my location while I was sleeping across town, not having opened the app and sent it an updated location.

(Although, to be honest, I don’t really want to share where I am while I’m sleeping — which is a very different concern.)

Thus, I found that a good SXSW icebreaker question was: “So, have you uninstalled Highlight yet?” In an unscientific but anecdotally significant number of cases, the answer was yes. Why? Almost always: Battery drain.

Davison said Highlight — which only launched in January — is working to improve accuracy and decrease battery impact. He added that he’s hopeful people will overlook these issues.

“For many, the ability to see profiles of the people standing nearby is so new and exciting that they want to try it out now, even if the location precision and battery life is not yet where they’d want it to be,” Davison said.

Foursquare’s response was similarly optimistic. As far as service goes, “things have gotten much better [at SXSW] in the last couple of years and are continuing to improve,” said a spokeswoman. “And battery life should be much better next year with the iPhone 5, iPad HD and new Android handsets launching.”

Everything might be exciting, but if your phone’s dead, you’re not using it. That makes me and many others unhappy.

Because while I’m sure better and more expensive services and devices will be on the market next year, I’m also sure SXSW 2013 will be even more jam-packed.

Folks are apparently so desperate for a boost they are willing to pull out their USB cords and plug them into a stranger’s jacket or pants.

FedEx has six people running around South by Southwest in USB-charger-equipped outfits. The specially equipped coat and trousers are filled with dozens of ports tied to Mophie battery packs. The shipper is also offering up another kind of recharging — serving up free lunch from a FedEx-branded food truck, along with the option to eat at picnic tables with built-in USB and power ports.

“We know people want free food and free power,” said FedEx’s Brian Hurt. “Those are two things we can give them.”

FedEx is looking to both build goodwill with entrepreneurs and tout a relatively new mobile app that lets people ship packages without ever printing a label.

Sunday’s shrimp po’boys, served up in a “lunch box” reminiscent of FedEx’s signature shipping packages, were a particular hit, though some also took the time to plug in.

“All I need is coffee,” said digital marketer Bradley Shende, before noticing that gratis java was also available.

FedEx is far from alone in trying to grab an audience by offering a power boost. Samsung, which places its recharging stations permanently at airports and other public places, has one of the stands at its booth.

AT&T has a number of recharging lockers that let visitors lock up their phone while it charges, allowing the owners to do other things. Google has a station with lots of USB cords in its Android booth — though, not surprisingly, there are no iPhone dock connectors.

Getting enough juice for one’s digital gadgets has become an increasingly important issue at tech events, including January’s Consumer Electronics Show.

Of course, there are also plenty of people at the Austin Convention Center, like every conference, sitting on the floor next to any available outlet.

And, for those who aren’t plugged in, Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley offered up a public service announcement on Twitter, specifically addressing all the newbies to the event.

“Don’t forget ‘ABC’ (Always Be Charging),” he tweeted on Saturday.

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It’s not just the photos of my dog as a puppy and parties I’ve forgotten I attended; it’s also the time capsules of what I thought was interesting at the time.

And, how meta: For me, that was often social media itself.

For instance, here are some of the pings I’ve gotten from Timehop and Memolane this week:

• Five years ago today, I tweeted a link to a Facebook company blog post noting a measurable and predictable decline in Facebook usage on Thursday night when “Grey’s Anatomy” aired. At the time, Facebook had only just recently opened up beyond students, and it was seeing peaks of one million users logged into the site at once. “When something occupies a big portion of the population’s attention, we notice,” wrote co-founder Dustin Moskovitz (who since left the company and is now co-founder of Asana). Now that Facebook is so much more global, it’s hard to imagine a single TV program having that kind of regular effect.
  

  Facebook usage plummeted during Grey's Anatomy airings in 2007.

• This week in 2010, I posted a link to an article citing a Google engineer saying Google personalized up to 20 percent of users’ Web searches. That might have seemed like a lot at the time, but Google has gotten massively more personalized since then, with logged-in searchers by default now seeing “Search Plus Your World” results and Google+ content promoted.
• Almost five years ago, just after the 2007 edition of SXSW, The Wall Street Journal posted a story examining the emerging phenomenons of Twitter and Dodgeball. Jack Dorsey was quoted as saying, “You find a lot of connection in just the simplest, most mundane updates from your friends.” I recently reposted the link to the article on Twitter after finding it on my Memolane, and got to see people’s reactions to it five years later. Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley replied to my tweet, “In high school/1994 I made a bet w my Dad over who could get their name in WSJ first. This article won me $100 :).”

These memories seem particularly precious because they’ve traditionally been hard, if not nearly impossible, for us to find. Facebook only recently introduced its Timeline layout, which makes old posts accessible. Twitter is just barely starting to make historical tweets available, through reseller deals with Gnip and DataSift.

I realize not all memories are happy, or wanted. The European Union, for instance, is trying to legislate an online “right to be forgotten.” But I have to say, I’m kind of excited to some day get a notification about what I tweeted 20 years ago.

For a blast from the slightly more recent past, here are our previous stories about the companies behind Timehop and Memolane.

(Scrapbook image via Flickr user meglet127.)

(c) Tim Vetter / Flickr

This last weekend, Foursquare founder Naveen Selvadurai announced in a blog post that he was leaving the company, three years after launching the check-in service with Dennis Crowley. In a terse note, Sevaldurai wrote that he would remain on the company’s board and as an adviser, as well as the “single most vocal user” of the popular check-in service.

But, he added, “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.”

Spring forward indeed, because — according to numerous sources inside and outside the company — the impetus for Selvadurai’s departure was a lot more complex and fraught than he or the company indicated.

To be fair, this is not uncommon for start-ups at all. Twitter went through the mother of all contentious partings — twice, in fact — in an ongoing battle among its founders. Tech is rife with similar examples, most often of lesser drama.

And it is much the same with Selvadurai and Crowley, who had together become New York’s highest profile entrepreneurs in recent years. The pair cut a wide swatch of fame, including doing commercials together (see video below).

But times change and sources said that they had come to the conclusion over a series of talks over the last several months that there was no place for Selvadurai any longer at the fast-growing start-up.

“This company grew very quickly and a lot of senior management has been added,” said one person with knowledge of the situation. “It got to the point where Naveen was not in charge of much.”

Indeed, since Foursquare began adding execs — I have a list below — he had become ever more sidelined, ending up with a small team focused on platform efforts and supporting APIs.

“Naveen was no longer heading any meaningful area of functional responsibility, so things got tense,” said another source.

Still, according to several people familiar with the situation — unlike the highly charged parting that took place at Twitter — the departure was not ugly or closely related to either a recent stock sale by employees or its most recent funding in June that valued Foursquare at $600 million.

“Dennis and he don’t hate each other — things just changed,” said one person.

Said another source: “When you look at all the external stuff, Naveen’s leaving was really not tied to anything in particular. The business was really starting to mature … and there is eventually a line in the sand between building a product and building a company.”

Indeed, rather than a scrappy start-up, Foursquare now has 111 employees, up from 50 last year, and has moved into a new phase of trying to evolve from simply being a check-in service.

As that was happening, said multiple sources, the discussions about roles at the company became more pronounced.

“The way this company has been structured, the talks centered on how to contribute to a company and Naveen and Dennis agreed that there was not a place for him day to day,” said one person. “But that does not mean he still will not be contributing to the future of Foursquare in a different way.”

The pair both emailed Foursquare’s staff about the change, although Crowley’s public goodbye on Twitter was short and, yes, sweet:

After 3 yrs, my @foursquare co-founder is moving onto new projects & big ideas. Can’t wait to see what’s next @naveen! naveenium.com/stream/next

— Dennis Crowley (@dens) March 5, 2012

Like I said: Things change.

Here’s the current Foursquare management team:

Dennis Crowley, CEO & co-founder
Evan Cohen, COO (joined January 2010)
Holger Luedorf, head of business development (joined summer 2010)
Alex Rainert, head of product (joined April 2010)
Harry Heymann, head of engineering (joined summer 2009)
Susan Loh, head of talent (joined fall of 2010)
Jon Steinback, director of marketing and communications (joined fall of 2010)

And here are some of the latest stats from the service:

* Over 15 million users (up from just over five million this time last year).

* Over 1.5 billion check-ins.

* Five million check-ins per day.

* Over 750,000 businesses affiliated.

And here’s the video that Foursquare’s co-founders did together for USA Network last year:

Image: (c) Tim Vetter / Flickr

“Save money and unlock rewards” based on stuff you and your friends like. Now that sounds like a pretty interesting service.

And one that makes a whole lot more sense than “You’re supposed to ‘check in’ when you go some place. And also you might get a ‘badge’ or something,” which is where Fourquare has been for most of the past three years.

Of course, during that time Foursquare has racked up plenty of gaudy growth statistics, and big piles of VC money, and seems to have fended off would-be competitors from Gowalla to Facebook to Google. So you could argue that they’ve been communicating just fine, thank you very much.

But even though everyone you know knows about Foursquare, 15 million users — and a much smaller, and undisclosed, number of active users — isn’t close to a full-on mainstream service. So this kind of messaging is important as the company tries to grow into something much bigger.

Also important: Actually delivering on the promise of the video above. The idea is that you give Foursquare lots of data about what you like and what you do, and it offers up value to you in return, in the form of suggestions, or deals, etc.

We’re starting to see glimpses of that now, but my sense is that this is still more aspirational than anything else, and that Foursquare’s management and backers agree. Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley, in a meta post where he comments about someone else’s comment about his video, hints that there’s much more to come. Fun to watch.

Now Foursquare has done something pretty interesting with a couple of its developers: Hired them for gigs as summer interns. CEO Dennis Crowley said as much during a chat on Thursday at his company’s newly opened San Francisco office.

Pierre Valade, who built an app called Agora that helps users find Twitter accounts to follow based on mutual Foursquare interests, joined the Foursquare product team as a summer intern in June. And Max Stoller, who created a tool called Don’t Eat At — it texts participating Foursquare users when they check in at New York restaurants with health code violations — started (also in June) as a summer intern on the Foursquare platform team.

Foursquare hasn’t yet made any acquisitions, talent or otherwise, Crowley said. It also doesn’t necessarily have a grand agenda for giving internships to developers.

Both Agora and Don’t Eat At, which are really more hacks than apps, are still live online.

Being a third-party developer on a social Web platform is tricky; sometimes the API that feeds you turns around and copies you, bans you or buys your competitors (sorry to bash on Twitter, but … yes). Other times you create an immense business (Hey Zynga, how ’bout that S-1 filing already!). And other times you get a summer job.

The round was expected, and comes in a week when Foursquare hit a significant milestone of 10 million registered users.

It was led by Andreessen Horowitz and included O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Union Square Ventures as well as new investor Spark Capital (the picture here is from Spark Capital partner Bijan Sabet’s blog).

TechCrunch reports the valuation as $600 million.

Foursquare is often maligned for not being a serious company, so for the occasion of the funding founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Seldurai wrote on their blog a sort of long-form mission statement about their future:

Foursquare is not just about the check-in, or recommendations, or points, or badges. It’s about making the world easier to use. It’s about discovering new places, connecting with friends, and forging new relationships with the places you visit. It’s finding new ways to layer technology on the real world. All of our employees believe strongly in this vision, and we’re incredibly lucky to have investors and a board that feel the same way.

Foursquare had raised a $20 million round about a year ago and angel funding in the fall of 2009.

That’s the basic premise behind Metamarkets, a 2-year old startup that just raised another $6 million.

This was an inside round, with most of the folks who invested $2.5 million a year ago re-upping: Roger Ehrenberg’s IA Ventures led the round, and previous investors including Village Ventures, True Ventures, Omnicom vet Jerry Neumann and Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley chipped in.

CEO David Soloff says Metamarkets now has 3 paying clients, and is recording between 3 and 5 billion “events” — ad impressions bought and sold – per day. Metamarkets stores and analyzes all of that data — it’s up to 500 terabytes so far — and the publishers are supposed to use it to help them figure out how much to price their inventory in real-time. It’s also supposed to let them predict what kind of business they’ll be able to do in the future.

Originally, the company thought it would also compile that data to create the equivalent of stock index, which buyers and sellers could use to gauge the state of the ad market.

The idea: If  you were buying inventory from, say, Google, it’d be good to know how the rest of the market was performing. But for now Soloff says they’re busy with the proprietary products they’re selling directly to ad sellers.

Metamarkets will use the money to build out its 14-person engineering team. But the company’s existing workforce is already doing something right: I’m told that Twitter, among other potential acquirers, did some tire-kicking before the company closed this round. Soloff wouldn’t comment on that line of questioning; I’ve asked Twitter but don’t expect to hear much from them, either.

After that, the company will build versions of its apps that include “passive check-ins” that detect where a regular user is and prompt him or her to check in, Crowley said. He also plans to add a sort of Facebook news feed for Foursquare that better filters relevant information rather than just blasting notifications.

Foursquare is ultimately about offline discovery and exploration, said Crowley. He said his goal is for the app to be a sort of personalized helper with personality, like Microsoft’s much-hated and now-discontinued Clippy office assistant, which tried to anticipate what help users might need with a document.

But instead of lamely asking if a user wants help formatting a list, Foursquare’s “Clippy in your pocket” would know who a user’s friends are, what venues they like, what’s going on in their calendars, where they are, if they are walking fast or slow.

This Clippy, Crowley said, would be “the master of the sensors,” combining all that information to make relevant and serendipitous recommendations.

Some things Foursquare doesn’t want to do, Crowley said, are enable mobile payments, help users check into TV shows, and create content. Everything on Foursquare should involve actions tied to space by latitude and longitude, he said.

Crowley offered some stats about Foursquare: It has 8.5 million registered users. They each have an average of five to eight friends on the service (whereas Facebook is for “everyone you’ve ever made eye contact with in your entire life,” Crowley joked).

Foursquare’s main demographic is ages 24-27, though the service is now seeing pockets of users who are parents of new kids and college students. The company is just starting to analyze data to identify its strongest drivers of growth.

Foursquare has 300,000 merchants registered on its platform and 10,000 developers using its API. It employs 56 people and is hiring as many engineers as it can find, Crowley said, noting that part of the reason he’s in California is to find a larger office space for his growing team in San Francisco.

Here’s a video of the talk taken from the audience by Daniel Odio of AppMakr (he also took the photo above). When Girls in Tech puts out their professional version later this week I’ll add it as well.

Dennis Crowley CEO of Foursquare at Girls In Tech from Daniel R. Odio on Vimeo.

Flipboard, the high-profile and highly designed social media reading app for the Apple iPad, is out raising another round of funding at an eye-popping $200 million valuation, according to numerous sources close to the situation.

The Palo Alto, CA, company declined to comment on its new funding efforts, which sources said had recently accelerated.

While that valuation might change, several sources considering the investment said it is unlikely to go down in the current frothy financing market in Silicon Valley, especially given Flipboard’s splashy profile and top-drawer pedigree.

Co-founded by longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mike McCue and former Apple iPhone engineer Evan Doll in January, Flipboard launched to much attention in July.

That included $10.5 million in venture funding from Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures and a spate of well known angel investors, such as Twitter Co-founder Jack Dorsey, Facebook Co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, the ubiquitous Ron Conway, actor Ashton Kutcher and the investment company of former News Corp. exec Peter Chernin.

At the time, it was unclear what Flipboard’s valuation was. But now, said several sources, it’s clocking in at a hefty $200 million, which is perhaps no surprise at a time of increasingly lofty investments in tech start-ups.

Suddenly, Foursquare’s $95 million valuation seems like a bargain! (Sorry, Dennis Crowley, for comparing you to the Kool-Aid pitcher dude.)

In any case, the elegant Flipboard–which McCue recently told me in an onstage interview at the South by Southwest conference in Austin had zero revenues thus far–has changed the game on the consumption of social media.

Its innovative social magazine concept is attempting to make the social networking universe more accessible, consumable and, perhaps most importantly, visually arresting via its rich app.

Essentially, Flipboard pulls information from sites such as Twitter and Facebook data streams and then reassembles it in an easy-to-navigate, personalized format in a mobile tablet touchscreen environment.

In this offering, there are pull quotes, photos, videos, status updates and even the first paragraphs of linked-out content. There is also the ability to comment and share, as if one were on Twitter or Facebook.

Flipboard has since added a number of features and will be launching its new iPhone app later this year.

Right now, the Flipboard app is free and the business plan is advertising and some possible subscription scenarios.

It will be interesting to see who will jump into this leader in a nascent market, besides its current investors. Sources said one likely target group for Flipboard could be a large traditional media company.

Until the financial dust settles, here is the video of an onstage interview by the Digital Solution’s Katherine Boehret with McCue at the All Things Digital event, D: Dive Into Mobile, in December:

(Full disclosure: ATD is part of Flipboard’s publisher beta program.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110323/pretty-flipboard-fundraising-at-an-even-prettier-200-million-valuation/feed/ 8 http://allthingsd.com/20110317/viral-video-dennis-crowley-is-character-approved/ http://allthingsd.com/20110317/viral-video-dennis-crowley-is-character-approved/#comments Thu, 17 Mar 2011 07:05:55 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=41713

Recently, Foursquare was selected for an “award,” as part of an advertising campaign for USA Networks, whose motto is “Characters Welcome.”

On its Web site, “USA Network’s Character Approved: Honoring 12 Cultural Trailblazers” is described as “innovators in their field who influence our opinions, our style, and our view of the world.”

Now, a commercial featuring co-founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai is in heavy rotation on the cable television channel–what can BoomTown say, except, “NCIS” rocks, and thus, I have had to endure the ad 67 times so far!

In fact, it’s actually kind of sweet and awkward, as the pair try to explain the social geo-location service to the masses.

Enjoy:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110317/viral-video-dennis-crowley-is-character-approved/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110312/report-from-austin-the-social-fragmentation-of-sxsw/ http://allthingsd.com/20110312/report-from-austin-the-social-fragmentation-of-sxsw/#comments Sat, 12 Mar 2011 22:59:33 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=4201 Austin’s annual South By Southwest Interactive conference is bigger and glitzier than ever. Physically and virtually–even though it seems more fragmented this year.

But that’s not to say that it’s not full of lines and crowds as usual at SXSW.

Organizers of event, which started Friday and runs through Tuesday, said they expect a 30 to 40 percent increase in attendance from 2010′s 14,000 attendees.

SXSW has in recent years acquired a reputation as an ideal environment for launching social technology products, because it’s such a concentrated hotbed of socializing by people with smartphones.

But, honestly, it’s such a concentrated hotbed of socializing, these apps seem barely necessary.

Just walk around the streets and you’ll find relevant people and friends. In fact, schedule planning and friend finding are so fragmented across all these different apps, they’re almost superfluous.

On the plus side for attendees (and opportunistic locals), the various check-in and group messaging apps are so eager to get brand recognition that they’re offering free rides to downtown Austin from the airport (Fast Society), free grilled cheese sandwiches (GroupMe), free tickets to see Big Boi (Foursquare) and free beer (everyone).

This could just be me trying to rationalizing a Zen attitude for my own personal aimless wandering, but I think there’s a larger theme about the fragmentation of SXSW as both a business and social event.

Physically, this year there are more conference locations than ever, with panels and speeches across the river and down at a conference center near University of Texas Austin. (Plus the regenerating line around the block at Apple’s pop-up iPad 2 store, which is a sort of satellite event of its own.)

There’s also no one 2011 focal point that everyone’s buzzing about, like last year’s interview with Twitter’s then-CEO Evan Williams. The introductory keynote on Saturday by SCVNGR’s Seth Priebatsch about how a game layer can improve the world was entertaining, but hardly filled the room.

This sort of destabilization has unintended benefits. For instance, this morning a panel on social TV with participants from Twitter, Next New Networks and “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” attracted an audience far beyond the capacity of its allotted room. Would-be audience members–including experts on the topic from NBC and the New York Times–who had trekked way across town first thing in the morning set up their own ad-hoc panel next door. (Here’s a write-up and the #rebeltv hashtag conversation.)

Embedded below is a gallery of some moments from the first days of SXSW Interactive 2011, including a mobile photobooth for Instagram pictures called Instaprint, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley playing an actual game of Foursquare and Ditto CEO Jyri Engeström at the rocking steampunk/burlesque launch party co-hosted by his venture firm.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110312/report-from-austin-the-social-fragmentation-of-sxsw/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110213/checking-in-with-foursquares-dennis-crowley-at-mobile-world-congress-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20110213/checking-in-with-foursquares-dennis-crowley-at-mobile-world-congress-video/#comments Sun, 13 Feb 2011 23:00:32 +0000 Ina Fried http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/?p=3996 Although tens of thousands of people have checked in to Mobile World Congress in recent years using Foursquare, this is the first time that Dennis Crowley has done so.

However, the youthful chief executive said that as a big mobile geek, he’s excited to see what all the phone makers have in store.

“This is like the South by Southwest of mobile,” Crowley said, referring to Austin’s annual tech and culture festival.

He’s also eager to meet with carriers and phone makers to convince them to more deeply integrate Foursquare into their devices and services.

People mistakenly think of Foursquare as just a game where people boast to their friends about all the places they have been, Crowley said, but what underlies that is a hugely powerful database of places filled with all kinds of recommendations and other inside information.

Over time, Crowley hopes Foursquare will be able to tap the aggregate data and serve it up in useful ways, as well as help individuals get personalized recommendations based on their past check-ins.

One way Mobilized tries to get a sense for the strength of the different mobile platforms is by asking time-crunched developers how they are allocating resources. Crowley said Foursquare, which now has about 50 employees, has three developers on iPhone and two each on Android and BlackBerry. The company used outside partners to create its Nokia and Windows Phone 7 apps.

As for Crowley, he’s been splitting his time between an Android device and his beloved iPhone. His well-worn phone is covered front and back with various stickers–all the easier to pick out his device, he says. But Crowley doesn’t have the iPhone 4, instead sticking with the 3GS. Crowley said his colleagues all upgrade to the latest and greatest and someone needs to make sure the service still works on older gear.

“I like to keep it one generation behind,” he said. “Someone’s got to take one for the team.”

I pressed him on the potential for dangers with all this checking-in, including concerns about physical safety. Without trying to dismiss the issue, Crowley noted that he’s been checking in with his location as long as anyone–since 2000–and has yet to have anything bad happen. The worst thing that’s happened to him, he said, is people showing up to parties uninvited.

For more from Crowley, check out the video we did in the lobby of his Barcelona hotel.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110213/checking-in-with-foursquares-dennis-crowley-at-mobile-world-congress-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110131/boomtown-did-not-call-groupons-andrew-mason-a-corporate-d-bag/ http://allthingsd.com/20110131/boomtown-did-not-call-groupons-andrew-mason-a-corporate-d-bag/#comments Mon, 31 Jan 2011 14:15:42 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=39982

Oh, to be misquoted!

Last week, a lot of folks on Twitter and elsewhere thought I had called Groupon co-founder and CEO Andrew Mason a “corporate douche bag” onstage in an interview gone badly awry.

While such a comment is not beyond me, the fact of the matter is that he called himself that.

At the DLD conference put on by Burda Media in Munich, Germany, I interviewed Mason, along with Foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley, about local online markets that they both now dominate online.

During the session, I pressed Mason about his aborted acquisition negotiations with Google, as well as future IPO plans for the Chicago-based social buying service.

When he demurred, I let it go, but then the ever-voluable Mason decided to explain himself.

“I used to watch people doing like what I just did on TV and be like, ‘What a corporate douche bag, I’m never going to be like that.’ And here I’m doing it. You made me do it!”

I didn’t, but thanks for the credit, Andrew!

After I pressed him on the Google talks, he tried the kiss-and-not-tell excuse.

“It’s very personal between the companies. You’re exploring each other and then everybody wants us to do that out in the open. We don’t have all the answers yet. We’re figuring things out. “

Thus, putting words in his mouth, I concluded:

“Sorry to put words in your mouth, but you’re basically saying ‘We’re a fucked-up group of people behind the scenes, but please invest in our IPO.’”

Mason’s answer: “Yes!”

I’m glad I cleared that up!

In any case, here’s the full video of one of the more enjoyable interviews I have done in awhile:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110131/boomtown-did-not-call-groupons-andrew-mason-a-corporate-d-bag/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110124/groupons-andrew-mason-explains-why-he-is-coy-on-google-acquisition-he-doesnt-kiss-and-tell/ http://allthingsd.com/20110124/groupons-andrew-mason-explains-why-he-is-coy-on-google-acquisition-he-doesnt-kiss-and-tell/#comments Mon, 24 Jan 2011 15:56:37 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=1887 Groupon’s Andrew Mason opened up today for the first time to BoomTown’s Kara Swisher at the DLD conference in Munich, Germany, on why he refuses to talk about rejecting Google’s $6 billion takeover offer (while also managing not to confirm that one ever existed).

After a few painful non-answers to placate the crowd, he announced unexpectedly: “I’d like to explain why I’m not answering the questions.”

Mason said he’s been there himself, and it’s not easy. “When you are in the room doing negotiations, we don’t know anything. This could be a total disaster–do we love each other, or not? It’s personal between the companies…and then everyone wants you to do it in the open, even though we are figuring things out. It’s not respectful for the people involved to talk about it.”

Swisher: “So, what you are telling me is you don’t kiss and tell?”

Mason: “Yeah.”

However, Mason was willing to gab about the meetings he’s had with bankers to discuss taking the company public. “We are talking to bankers, and we are learning, and we don’t know what we are going to do. We haven’t made a decision…It’s something many companies eventually do, so it’s reasonable for it to be on the table.”

Mason argues that while the details of acquisitions and IPOs appear so juicy for the business community, in reality “they are so uninteresting,” especially compared to what Groupon could be in five years.

He was willing to theorize about that, too, explaining that he wanted to be the same thing for local that Amazon has become for products. “There’s an opportunity for offline transactions to be online. It won’t be easy, but I want to become a company where my kids won’t imagine a world without.”

Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley, who was on the stage at the same time, chimed in on why he turned down buyout offers from companies like Yahoo and Facebook. “There’s so many things we haven’t done yet, and so many opportunities for the products we are building and the data set we are gathering….We are 10 percent of where the roadmap ends.”

At one point, the two celebrated their successes in local with the “geekiest high-five ever.”

Crowley, who said Foursquare raised $20 million in venture capital after turning down the buyout offers, said it’s a gamble. “The investors have been completely supportive. They want us to shoot the moon. Someone told me that when the  [negotiations were] going down, every day you’ll think about it, which is true. We rolled the dice.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110124/groupons-andrew-mason-explains-why-he-is-coy-on-google-acquisition-he-doesnt-kiss-and-tell/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110121/from-u-s-to-germany-to-china-boomtown-goes-around-the-digital-world-in-a-week/ http://allthingsd.com/20110121/from-u-s-to-germany-to-china-boomtown-goes-around-the-digital-world-in-a-week/#comments Sat, 22 Jan 2011 01:22:34 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=39822

It’s a big, wide and very digital world out there and that’s why I’m headed around the globe–quite literally–for the next week.

First stop, due east of San Francisco, where I arrived today in Munich, Germany, to moderate several sessions for Hubert Burda Media’s annual DLD conference.

That includes interviewing a whole lot of players I see all the time in Silicon Valley, including investor Reid Hoffman, Accel Partners’ Jim Breyer and Google sales majordomo Nikesh Arora, as well as the two hottest start-up leaders on the Web, Groupon’s Andrew Mason and Dennis Crowley of Foursquare.

And while there are even more U.S. techies here–many on their way to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland–I like DLD because it gives me a chance to meet a lot of European entrepreneurs and also grok a different and global perspective on tech, media and more.

It starts Sunday.

Then, from here, even farther east. I head for Hong Kong, where I’ll be meeting my All Things Digital other half, Walt Mossberg and ATD’s secret brain Lia Lorenzano to meet with our Dow Jones partners and scope out a possible AsiaD conference in China in the fall.

We’ve had our international aspirations before that did not pan out–see one of the many videos I did for a possible EuroD in 2007, while we visited Dublin, Ireland–so nothing’s certain.

But we’re hoping we can pull off some kind of international conference in 2011, one of the many parts of the expansion of our D offerings, including more events and many additions to our reporting staff on the ATD Web site this fall.

I will be posting videos from both places, including another episode of “Where in the World Are Walt & Kara?”

Until then, enjoy this one from Dublin Castle in 2007:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110121/from-u-s-to-germany-to-china-boomtown-goes-around-the-digital-world-in-a-week/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110102/a-few-holiday-photos-from-techs-cool-kids-what-they-did-on-winter-vacation/ http://allthingsd.com/20110102/a-few-holiday-photos-from-techs-cool-kids-what-they-did-on-winter-vacation/#comments Sun, 02 Jan 2011 15:00:19 +0000 Drake Martinet http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=34606 For many in tech, 2010 was the year of photo sharing.

With higher-resolution cameras in our smartphones, everyone seemed to be adding social photo posting to their apps.

Hi-res photos hit Facebook, pictures came to Foursquare, and phones filled with apps to crop, stretch, filter, sketch and generally punch up our often marginal photography.

So, in honor of a big year of sharing photos with friends, here is a quick gallery of shots from the holidays, gathered with care from the walls and feeds of a few of tech’s most social shutterbugs.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110102/a-few-holiday-photos-from-techs-cool-kids-what-they-did-on-winter-vacation/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101221/the-men-and-no-women-of-web-2-0-boards-boomtowns-talking-to-you-twitter-facebook-zynga-groupon-and-foursquare/ http://allthingsd.com/20101221/the-men-and-no-women-of-web-2-0-boards-boomtowns-talking-to-you-twitter-facebook-zynga-groupon-and-foursquare/#comments Tue, 21 Dec 2010 22:44:05 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=38810

In one memorable episode of the famous old short films “The Little Rascals,” after not getting invited to a party, the Our Gang little dudes decided to form their own group, comically called “The He-Man Woman-Haters Club.”

In other words: No girls allowed!

While it was wink-wink cute when Spanky, Alfalfa and Buckwheat huffed and puffed about keeping out Darla–which they never ever could do–back in the last century, it’s not quite as adorkable when it comes to the boards of all the major Web 2.0 hotshots these days.

That would be Twitter, Facebook, Zynga, Groupon and Foursquare, none of which have any women as directors.

As in zero.

What’s most remarkable is that most of these start-ups are run by what I consider enlightened and open-minded entrepreneurs, mostly young enough to be part of a generation more inclined to value equality and diversity in the workplace.

In addition, each of these companies has a massive base of women consumers, in some cases well over 50 percent of its audience.

Thus, it would seem logical that in casting about for those to help guide these companies, one or two women leaders might slip in.

To be fair, it’s not for lack of trying, but of completion, as was the case with Twitter’s recent addition of three new board members.

They were longtime Silicon Valley exec Peter Currie, Flipboard CEO and co-founder Mike McCue and former DoubleClick leader David Rosenblatt.

All are deeply qualified for the Twitter board, which is obviously prepping for its next stage of growth and maturity.

But in its search, the San Francisco microblogging site did not manage to cast the net quite wide enough.

While sources said at least one prominent online woman exec was considered, there were some legitimate issues with her appointment, and it was not completed.

Still, one might imagine Twitter could have tried harder to find other workable choices.

Currently, the Twitter board is made up of the new trio, as well as Benchmark Capital’s Peter Fenton, Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, CEO Dick Costolo and co-founders Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey.

Things are not any better over at Facebook, which has several prominent women execs running the show, most especially its high-profile COO Sheryl Sandberg.

But, inexplicably, though she does attend board meetings, she is not yet a director of Facebook, nor is any other woman.

In fact, here is Sandberg on topic at a recent TED event for women, in an eloquent speech titled “Why We Have So Few Women Leaders”:

Instead, the Facebook board is all men, all the time, composed of CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, prominent techie and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, investor Peter Thiel, Accel Partners’ Jim Breyer and Washington Post head Don Graham.

It is no better at three of the most prominent recent Web 2.0 start-ups, which one source attributes to the lack of woman VCs, who are often the first board members after major investment rounds.

At Zynga, the hot social gaming company in San Francisco, it continues, with an all-male board, despite a very heavily female audience for its casual social games.

That would be co-founder and CEO Mark Pincus, COO Owen Van Natta, investor Bing Gordon of Kleiner Perkins, investor Reid Hoffman and Brad Feld of the Foundry Group.

The same is true at woman-targeted–spas, spas and more spas–social buying site Groupon, which has an unusually large board for a start-up and made up of–as per usual–all men.

The list: Co-founder and CEO Andrew Mason, Accel Partners’ Kevin Efrusy, former AT&T President and COO John Walter, New Enterprise Associates’ Harry Weller and Peter Barris, former AOL exec Ted Leonsis, 37Signals co-founder Jason Fried and early investors Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell.

And, much smaller, is Foursquare’s board, which is the trio of co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley, co-founder Naveen Selvadurai and Union Square Ventures’ Albert Wenger.

New investors–Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures’ Bryce Roberts–have observer status and both are, needless to say, dudes.

There is no question it is tough to make sure there is a good balance of qualified women leaders to men in tech–it is an issue we wrestle with every single year for the program of speakers at our own All Things Digital conference, although we are most excellent on this issue on our Web site and conference staff.

But it can be done, especially at public tech companies. Google has two women on its board of nine directors; Yahoo has three of 10; even Oracle has two of a dozen.

But a grand total of zero at the leading companies of Web 2.0 is not just a coincidence.

It’s a shame.

Tomorrow, BoomTown will post a list of great women who would be superb directors for any of these companies, but until then, let’s not follow in Spanky’s steps:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101221/the-men-and-no-women-of-web-2-0-boards-boomtowns-talking-to-you-twitter-facebook-zynga-groupon-and-foursquare/feed/ 60 http://allthingsd.com/20101215/d-dive-into-mobile-the-full-interview-video-of-foursquares-dennis-crowley/ http://allthingsd.com/20101215/d-dive-into-mobile-the-full-interview-video-of-foursquares-dennis-crowley/#comments Wed, 15 Dec 2010 17:05:57 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=38555 As promised, All Things Digital will be publishing the full videos of the interviews we did last week at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference in San Francisco.

The first extension of the event, it produced some very newsy sessions. We’ll be posting them all this week and next.

Today, we check in–ha, ha, get it?–with Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley (pictured here).

The co-founder and CEO of the popular social geolocation service was actually quite up-front about a wide range of topics, from acquisition interest to Foursquare’s recent funding to an analysis of the increasing competition for the innovative mobile service.

Crowley also talked a lot about where Foursquare is heading as a business.

And he took it well when BoomTown compared his hairdo to Justin Bieber’s.

Here’s the video:

Next up: Spotify’s Daniel Ek!

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101215/d-dive-into-mobile-the-full-interview-video-of-foursquares-dennis-crowley/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101214/forget-goopon-why-a-groupon-foursquare-combo-makes-more-sense/ http://allthingsd.com/20101214/forget-goopon-why-a-groupon-foursquare-combo-makes-more-sense/#comments Tue, 14 Dec 2010 15:09:52 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=1202

As major Web players look to make a play in local, Groupon and Foursquare have both walked away from lucrative acquisition deals.

But now, as these young start-ups go it alone, would it make sense for the two to combine their forces and become the next major Web powerhouse?

The joint company would have an enviable head start on all things local and social, a combination current leaders Google and Facebook have yet to crack.

To be clear, it’s just a scenario. But in case any investment bankers out there are left without a new project after these acquisition talks fell apart, here’s something to explore.

Groupon has a working business model, local merchant relationships and an ample waitlist, and a salesforce numbering in the thousands.

Meanwhile, Foursquare represents the areas where Groupon needs to grow. Foursquare has innovated around GPS and the mobile application experience, which is obviously where local is headed. Foursquare also has insight into incentivizing users to connect to merchants and each other on a daily basis rather than for a one-time deal. It could provide the tools to help users and merchants have a lasting, mutually beneficial relationship.

Put more simply, Groupon excels at recruiting customers, while Foursquare’s emerging strength is loyalty and retention.

Still, Groupon currently has far more value than Foursquare, so a merger of equals is unrealistic. Groupon has more than 20 million subscribers and a $2 billion revenue run rate. Before Groupon walked away from recent talks, Google wanted to buy the company for $6 billion, an almost unimaginable valuation for a two-year-old company.

Foursquare, which was courted by Facebook and Yahoo before taking funding from Andreessen Horowitz, has five million users and its own experience striking merchant deals and branding relationships, if on a much smaller scale. For years now co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley has been passionate about social location-sharing and multiple start-ups, and is still waiting for, and provoking, the market to catch up to his vision of mapping people’s real-world experiences.

At the very least, a Foursquare-Groupon partnership seems likely. Speaking about Groupon at our recent D: Dive Into Mobile event in San Francisco, Crowley said, “There are lessons we can learn from them and ways we can work together.”

He elaborated, as you can see below in a video of the interview: “We could easily pull Groupon deals into Foursquare and make them sweeter based on the stats behind them.”

Crowley also seems less fierce about staying independent than Groupon CEO Andrew Mason, having reiterated at D: Dive that what matters most to him is to see his products built and used.

In addition to ample doses of irreverence and floppy hairdos, the two CEOs have in common the outside-of-Silicon-Valley factor. Foursquare is the pride of New York, while Groupon is Chicago’s most influential Internet start-up ever.

Put together, perhaps the pair could take on those geeky Californians and show everyone how social commerce is really done.

So, Fourpon? Groupsquare? What do you think?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101214/forget-goopon-why-a-groupon-foursquare-combo-makes-more-sense/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20101207/dennis-crowley-on-the-difference-detween-dodgeball-and-foursquare-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20101207/dennis-crowley-on-the-difference-detween-dodgeball-and-foursquare-video/#comments Tue, 07 Dec 2010 21:01:33 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=53904 If Dodgeball was, as founder Dennis Crowley claims, the perfect storm of bad timing, then his latest venture, Foursquare, is a sunny day. In the video below, Crowley talks about the mechanics of merchant relationships, valuations and frothiness, and the difference between Dodgeball and Foursquare.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101207/dennis-crowley-on-the-difference-detween-dodgeball-and-foursquare-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101207/foursquare-in-five-years/ http://allthingsd.com/20101207/foursquare-in-five-years/#comments Tue, 07 Dec 2010 17:40:27 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=53833 What’s the future look like for Foursquare? Founder Dennis Crowley isn’t quite sure, though he’s confident the company will grow far beyond where it is today.

“We’re not raising money, though people have approached us,” Crowley said at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference. “We have enough money to go through till the end of next year. The point is not to become profitable now, but to grow.”

Where will Foursquare be five years from now? Is there an IPO or acquisition in its future? Said Crowley, “I have a solid idea of what the product will look like after two years. No idea if we’ll be sold or independent in five years. The most frustrating experience for me was having a lot of things we wanted to build with Dodgeball and not being able to do them. Now we’re actually getting them done.”

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