“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.”

9:15 am: Kara: I gave you a hard time earlier this year.

Dennis: I noticed.

Kara: I called you the Hamlet of Web 2.0, because you didn’t know what you wanted to do. When you were raising funding, what was happening in your mind?

Dennis: We were focused on the product.

9:16 am: We knew what we wanted the product to do, and I think we were figuring out what we wanted the company to be. We were choosing between funding and aligning with a bigger company.

Kara asks specifically about Yahoo and Facebook, and Dennis replies very non-specifically: “We talked to those company about hey, it would be interesting to work together.”

9:18 am: Dennis: Dodgeball was the perfect storm of bad timing. In the N.Y. Google office, right after the IPO. I think we’d be smarter about structuring the deal now.

Kara: What’s the difference between Dodgeball and Foursquare? Didn’t you just sell the same company to Google and are now starting it again?

Dennis: Dodgeball was just dots on a map. After Google I worked at a company called Area Code, and (Foursquare co-founder) Naveen (Selvadurai) was working at a company called Socialight, building social guides. We brought a little of both into Foursquare.

Kara: You should do it again, and the next one should be called Tetherball.

Dennis: Actually, I wanted to name Dodgeball “Foursquare” back in the day, but some guy owned the domain.

9:21 am: Dennis says Foursquare gets people to try new experiences and go to the gym more. “Our ultimate focus is about becoming the best social utility possible that overlaps with the real world. We’re not trying to build this amazing game.”

We didn’t think the mayor thing would blow up into what it is now. One of the things we’re most excited about tweaking is we’re getting really good at game mechanics and we want to overhaul them.

9:24 am: Kara asks about improving incentives, and Crowley replies he wants to build a couponing engine that’s like a rewards engine on top of the stats.

“Everyone’s gotten a buyback from a bartender”–Foursquare wants to bring that online. (Crowley always seems to be assuming his NYC party scene is the model for the rest of the world.)

9:26 am: Dennis, on making merchant relationships scalable: Foursquare now has a self-service system. Eventually all businesses will have TV screens that will integrate with Foursquare.

Also, developers are extending what Foursquare can do–for instance cab-sharing apps use Foursquare info to know who’s checked into nearby locations and may want to share a cab.

9:29 am: What about competition? Dennis: It’s all about evangelism. The check-in itself isn’t interesting; it’s all about after the check-in. What is on the screen that you show, the deals, learning about what friends are ordering. He is most excited about recommendations, games and incentives.

Dennis: We’re not raising money, though people have approached us. We have enough money to go through till the end of next year. The point is not to become profitable now, but to grow. When we figure out what is actually working on the local merchant front, then we’ll pull that lever. (Hmm…Groupon didn’t take quite so long to figure that one out!)

We don’t want to charge local merchants for a product that isn’t ready yet.

9:32 am: Our business model is to create and sell tools to local merchants. Along the way we figured out other ways to make money, like getting brands involved to help explore the world through their lens.

Some more rapid-fire topics:

Longer-term goals: We’re so focused on what happens before the end of the quarter.

Facebook: We knew Facebook was going to do location for a long time. The question for us is how do we make our product as special as possible.

Groupon: There are lessons we can learn from them and ways we can work together. We could easily pull Groupon deals into Foursquare and make them sweeter based on the stats behind them.

Valuations and frothiness: Ours was around $100 million. For us the goal is to build products, not an amazing company; hopefully that will come out of it.

All start-ups have the same problems: We want to move faster, hire faster, revise the road map faster.

9:38 am: Foursquare will have 40 people by Monday; we’re putting the pieces together. Crowley says he’s still focused on product and evangelism. I’m a lousy engineer, he says, but I’ve always been hands-on, and it’s been hard for me to delegate, but I am trying to do so with the team we have now.

Dennis: 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 it was so frustrating not to be able to, and now we’re actually getting them done.

“I think location is underhyped. People don’t understand how the stuff that we’re building will help change the way people experience physical space.”

9:41 am: Audience question about passive check-ins. “Ultimately that’s the way this stuff goes. It just doesn’t work very well. GPS isn’t smart enough to snap you to the right place at the right time.”

It’s also a matter of battery life. GPS and batteries need to be fixed before we can do that stuff.

Audience question about “off-the-grid check-ins.” Crowley says they’re below 20 percent of all check-ins, though he doesn’t know the number. He personally does it to leave breadcrumbs at all the places he’s been to, but when he doesn’t want people to come up to him when he’s having dinner with his girlfriend, for instance.

Also, he adds, about 20 percent of check-ins go to other networks like Facebook or Twitter. The Foursquare social graph is “much much tighter” and gets the majority of check-ins.

Question about devices. We haven’t built for iPad yet. Crowley just bought an Android phone. Ultimately, wants to treat all devices the same.

“Everyone thinks we’re a 200-person company, but there’s just not enough engineers to do all the stuff we want to do.”

9:48 am: By the way, there are now 17 people checked in to D:Dive Into Mobile on Foursquare. Guess seeing Crowley in person was a good reminder!

“How much do you think we would sell Android for today?” Lawee recently asked Reuters. “I would argue it would be in the billions and billions of dollars, it’s worth a lot of money. The same of YouTube.”

Of course those are just two acquisitions out of the 80 or so that Google’s made since 2001. Which is not to say that there isn’t another Android or YouTube on that list, just that “paying off huge” isn’t the way one would describe Google’s purchase of, say, Jaiku or DodgeBall or the five percent equity stake it took in AOL (AOL).

But obviously the threat of a clunker investment or two isn’t going to temper Google’s aggressive acquisition strategy. Back in January, CEO Eric Schmidt predicted the company would make one acquisition a month. With a little over three months left in the year, Google (GOOG) has made 23, nearly double Schmidt’s forecast.

After a very long and decidedly strange funding journey, Foursquare has finally officially landed a new round of $20 million in venture funding, with Silicon Valley’s Andreessen Horowitz leading the new investment.

BoomTown reported last week that the new deal, which puts Foursquare at $95 million pre-money valuation, was in the bag.

Interestingly, it is only the second round for the New York-based social location start-up and includes its current investors, Union Square Ventures and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.

Ironically, Andreessen Horowitz had walked away from earlier investment talks because of the excessive hype and indecision around the race to fund Foursquare.

But in an interview this afternoon with me, partner Ben Horowitz said that once Foursquare became firmer in its determination to build the company rather than selling it, his firm was all in.

“Basically, Foursquare made an important decision on the future of their company to build it into a really significant, independent business,” said Horowitz. “It’s a big step and we’re thrilled to back them in doing that.”

Indeed, the wrapping-up of what has been a very convoluted funding process comes after a series of missteps and switchbacks over what’s next for Foursquare, which allows users to “check in” from various places.

Among the twists: Serious but failed acquisition talks with both Facebook and Yahoo (YHOO), as well as a messy beauty pageant of other big VC firms, mostly in Silicon Valley, including Khosla Ventures, Accel Partners and Institutional Venture Partners.

The overhyped interest is because Foursquare and many others like it have seen strong growth and much innovation, although it is not clear yet if that will translate into solid businesses.

Still, Foursquare hit one million users in April and is now approaching 1.8 million, adding about 15,000 users per day. It uses a variety of game techniques and other features, such as the awarding of digital badges, to hold user interest.

And though small, it is trying to work with major brands, most notably Starbucks (SBUX), on a variety of marketing deals.

That requires money, especially given increased competition as everyone girds to race ahead first.

Foursquare’s original $1.35 million funding was raised from Union Square Ventures and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, as well as some well-known angel investors, such as Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Kevin Rose of Digg and Ron Conway.

Foursquare’s current investors also recently gave it a bridge investment.

Thus, Foursquare needed bigger funding, a process that soon became unusually complicated, in part because of indecision by CEO Dennis Crowley and in part because of some very public deal-making.

In fact, that’s what initially scotched very advanced funding talks between Foursquare and Andreessen Horowitz. The high-profile Silicon Valley firm–helmed by Internet icon Marc Andreessen and his longtime business partner, Horowitz–smacked Foursquare hard after those discussions and talks with other firms were leaked to the media.

In an exclusive interview with me in April, Horowitz took the unusual step of talking publicly about VC frustrations that are typical in deals around hot companies.

At the time, Horowitz acted as if he were checking out of Foursquare.

“We withdrew our funding offer to Foursquare and we are out,” he said in an interview with BoomTown then. “This is playing out too much in public and clearly someone has an interesting agenda here, so this is not something we want to participate in.”

At the same time, Horowitz left the door open. “If the process was changed, we still like the company,” he said then. “But since it has been long and undefined, it is prone to manipulation.”

That sentiment obviously changed, said Horowitz.

“A lot of the problems we were worried about were the result of their ambivalence on what to do, and so we were almost a distraction until they could decide,” he said. “Since they got clarity, it has been a very efficient process.”

Horowitz will become a Foursquare board observer and what he characterizes as a “CEO coach” to Crowley.

But he stressed that so far, the leadership of Foursquare was doing very well.

“I think they are clearly best of breed and very far of ahead of everyone else in what is a very complex business to get right,” Horowitz said. “There are definitely competitors large and small, but this company has a lot of experience and data atop a big vision.”

We’ll see, of course! And as hard a time as I have given him, Crowley–who sold his last company, Dodgeball, to Google (GOOG), which ended not so well–is definitely on another roll.

Until then, here are the blog posts by Horowitz and Crowley on the deal:

Why Andreessen Horowitz Invested in Foursquare

They say he’s a grinder
fly ass rhyma’
With a CEO’s mind bra’
–Kinfolk Kia Shine

Today we are extremely excited to announce that we are investing in Foursquare, a service that mixes social, locative, and gaming elements to encourage people to explore cities in which they live.

Here are the three reasons we invested.

1. A great Founder/CEO: Dennis Crowley

We prefer founding CEOs. In particular, we think the keeper of the product vision should run the company whenever possible because the toughest and most important decisions in technology companies are always about product strategy.

The only thing better than the CEO being the keeper of the vision is the CEO being the creator of the vision. In Foursquare’s case, Dennis not only created the vision for the company, but for the entire product category. Beyond that, he is very clearly the thought leader in the market. This is not at all surprising as he has been working on the problem for a decade and has highly refined his thinking through that period.

As importantly, Dennis embodies the kind of leadership that I described in Notes on Leadership. He’s the kind of leader that great technical minds will be excited to follow: visionary, righteous, and competent. I am really excited to work with Dennis to help him on his path from being a great leader to a great Chief Executive of an incredibly important company.

2. A killer product

When you look at the numbers, you’ll see that Foursquare is growing faster than Twitter did at this stage. In particular, their growth has been explosive over the past few months–they just hit 1 million users in April and now they’re approaching 1.8 million, adding around 15,000 users per day. It’s easy to see that people absolutely love the product. Less obvious to the competitors and pundits are the reasons why people love the product so much. I often hear people attribute Foursquare’s success entirely to check-ins or other easy-to-understand product features. It reminds me of the early days of Zynga when people thought the secret sauce behind Mafia Wars and Farmville were that those games were web-based.

It turns out Zynga games are wildly successful because Zynga has mastered the art of connecting friends via games–and they work incredibly hard behind the scenes to deliver what at face value looks very easy. How many times have you heard someone say, “I could have built Farmville in a weekend”?

Foursquare is very similar in that a lot of hard work behind the scenes goes into delivering a product that users love. Dennis and team have identified over a dozen different dimensions of the Foursquare product that must interact with each other in precisely optimal ways to achieve user delight. Years and years of research and sweat equity went into cracking the code, and the results are magical.

3. A gigantic market

At a macro level, over 4.6B people have mobile phones and there are 1.7B people on the Internet. Already, over 200M people worldwide have smart phones and that number is headed north fast. Foursquare might not win the entire smart phone market (some people don’t even like to leave their house), but it will capture a huge portion of it because it’s incredibly fun and addicting.

As importantly, we are very excited about Foursquare’s ability to make money in a way where all parties win: users, merchants, venue owners, brand advertisers, and more. In fact, users have been so excited about the product that they’ve actually been signing up local businesses to run promotions for Foursquare’s mayors and active users. This natural enthusiasm is happening even before Foursquare has added specific product features to help businesses run campaigns. As a result, major brands such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Zagat, Bravo TV, Starbucks, C-SPAN, Marc Jacobs and over 10,000 businesses are currently working with Foursquare to build customer loyalty and drive traffic. Not many companies have their users turn into their sales force, and it’s definitely a good sign that this is happening around Foursquare.

We are excited to be on this journey with our good friends at Foursquare.

We’re just getting started…

Hey all–

It’s been quite the year for foursquare. Last year at this time, Naveen and I–tired of working around my kitchen table–borrowed a desk from our friends at Curbed.com and Hard Candy Shell. Two months later we brought on our first hire (Harry!) and a few weeks after closed on our first round of financing: $1.35m from Union Square Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and a handful of angels. Back then, our office looked like this.

Fast forward a year: We’re now 27 people strong. We can’t fit any more desks or chairs in our office so we’re borrowing cubes from our neighbors downstairs. We’re about to hit 1.8 million users and we’re seeing Super Swarms happen all over the world (Indonesia, you crazy!). In short, it’s been an amazing year for foursquare. A huge thank you to anyone that’s ever unlocked a Newbie badge!

And with that, we’re excited to announce that we’ve raised another round of capital. Today we closed on a $20m Series B round with Union Square Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and our newest partner, Andreessen Horowitz. We’re thrilled to have the continued support of our original investors and additional support and expertise from the team at Andreessen Horowitz.

The two big names behind Andreessen Horowitz–Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz–are each legends in Silicon Valley. They know better than anyone how to transform startups into successful organizations. As we continue to rapidly expand to take advantage of the opportunities in front of us, Ben and Marc’s expertise in growing companies will be invaluable.

With this new round of financing, our main priority will be to expand our organization to supplement the amazing core team we’ve assembled already (know any great engineers? send them our way!). We’re hoping to build a world-class engineering organization, based primarily in our headquarters in the New York City to help us develop the next generation of mobile + social + local products that will excite our users and provide unique value for local merchants. The new investment capital will also help fund the infrastructure needed to house our team (we’re finally getting a new office!) and support our growing audience of nearly 2m users.

It’s been a crazy year for us and we’re expecting the next 12 months to be even more of an adventure. Look forward to more great product from us soon…we’re really just getting started.

–@dens and the rest of team foursquare

Much to the chagrin of valuation-hyping Silicon Valley VCs, Yahoo is still in the running to acquire Foursquare, the hot social geolocation start-up, much longer than expected.

Foursquare’s board met last week about the possible acquisition deal. But, so far, it’s turned it down flat.

Nonetheless, (YHOO) is still interested, sources said.

Yahoo declined to comment, and I have an email into Foursquare, which has yet to respond.

But sources close to the situation said that Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley is holding his cards very close to the vest about whether Foursquare will reconsider the offer–which could reportedly go up to $125 million to $150 million in cash–from the Internet giant.

Crowley’s alternatives are two powerful venture firms–Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures–which had put lucrative funding deals on the table, trying to entice Foursquare to remain independent and turbocharge its fast-growing status-update service.

Other big firms have dropped out of the race, although sources said more are now sniffing around, including free-spending Russian moneybags, Digital Sky Technologies. It has already sunk copious funds into social networking giant Facebook, game powerhouse Zynga and, today, social buying site Groupon.

The VC selling point is freedom, the ability to sell for more later and perhaps a more modest payout for talent, including Crowley, by buying some of their common shares. Their valuation is hovering around $80 million.

Crowley (pictured here) controls a large chunk of the shares of the start-up and has so far turned down the $100 million offer from Yahoo, despite the fact that Foursquare is still small (about one million users) and unprofitable.

But it has grown dramatically and raised $1.35 million last August, valuing it at $6 million. Funds came from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Union Square Ventures, as well as a spate of well-known angel investors.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz hopes to best all VC offers after having recently made some significant noise about starting to engage in aggressive M&A to attract talent and inject innovation into the company.

She has mentioned mobile start-ups specifically, and Foursquare is indeed among the hottest in the space, offering its growing base of users an ability to “check in” from a variety of places.

But the location-based services arena is heating up, with multiple competitors to Foursquare, such as Gowalla, as well as recent efforts by Facebook and Twitter to enter the space in a big way.

In fact, Wednesday at its F8 developers event, some expect Facebook to talk about its own version of Foursquare.

Still, Crowley may welcome the challenge after selling a similar location service called Dodgeball to Google (GOOG) in 2005 and ending up with very little. He left the search giant on bad terms two years later, and Dodgeball was closed down by Google in early 2009.

At the time, Crowley called the experience of being at a large company “incredibly frustrating.”

Which is why it will be interesting to see the choice he makes in what one person close to the situation called: “A very deft Hamlet act.”

Until he does, this is a perfect time for my Foursquare version of the indecisive Prince of Denmark’s most famous soliloquy–with apologies to Shakespeare–redone for a New York-based hipster Web 2.0 dude:

Dennis Crowley Does Hamlet:

To sell, or not to sell, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous Facebook,
Or to take arms against a sea of Twitters,
And by opposing end them? To die, sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we become Digg with
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That over-hotness is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be avoid’d. To die, to become Friendster;
To sleep, perchance to be crammed down:
Ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what hotter start-ups may come,
When we have shuffled off this overhyped coil,
Must give us pause to check in constantly:
there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long it takes for funding;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of bloggers,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despis’d love by Andreessen and Yu,
the law’s delay,
The stalker ways of those scary Russian investors,
and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy lowball offers,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin of no profits?
Who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a Yahoo life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d acquisition, from whose bourn
No Flickr returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to VCs that we know naught of?
Thus overvaluation does make greedy piggies of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of Pets.com;
And Web 1.0 enterprises of great pith and moment,
With this regard, their currents turn awry,
And as was predicted by Economics 101.

You have to give Yahoo an A for effort, if perhaps the ultimate grade in its ongoing quest to buy hot mobile social network Foursquare is an F.

While Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley–who controls a large chunk of the shares of the start-up–has so far turned down several $100 million-plus offers from Yahoo, sources said the company’s newish head of mergers and acquisitions, Andrew Siegel, is back in New York today still trying to convince him to sell.

So far, especially because the effort has dragged on for a while and Yahoo (YHOO) has not made an overwhelmingly massive show of financial might, Crowley appears to have develop a case of cold feet about marrying the Internet giant.

Sources said Foursquare has so far turned down Yahoo flat.

Meanwhile, two powerful venture firms–Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures–are putting lucrative new funding deals on the table, trying to entice Foursquare to remain independent and turbocharge its fast-growing status-update service.

Other big firms have dropped out of the race, although sources said more are now sniffing around, including free-spending Russian moneybags, Digital Sky Technologies, which has already sunk copious funds into social networking giant Facebook and games powerhouse Zynga.

Their selling point is freedom, the ability to sell for more later and perhaps a more modest payout for talent, including Crowley, by buying some of their common shares. Their valuation is hovering around $100 million.

“Why sell now, when they are on a roll no one is going to catch them for a year at least,” said one person involved in talks with Foursquare. “There is a lot of benefit in waiting to cash in totally.”

Foursquare has grown dramatically, from 50,000 users less than a year ago to closing in on one million soon.

Despite negligible revenue, Foursquare raised $1.35 million last August, valuing it at $6 million.

Foursquare’s VCs include O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Union Square Ventures, as well as a spate of well-known angel investors.

The choice for Crowley: Take the big pile of money from Yahoo–which is offering all cash, giving Crowley a huge windfall–and run, or double down with VCs.

“Yahoo should just pay a huge premium and scare away the VCs to become relevant among the cool kids again,” said one person close to the situation. “”In my mind, it’s a litmus test for Yahoo.”

Yahoo is well known in the tech space for hemming and hawing over acquisitions. Dithering over price and copyright issues, it famously lost a nearly completed purchase of YouTube to Google (GOOG), which swooped in with a bigger and cleaner offer almost overnight.

A similar scenario played out when Yahoo tried to buy Facebook when it was very small. Facebook not only remained independent but is considered to have surpassed the once mighty company in innovation and consumer appeal.

In addition, as many big companies have, Yahoo has bungled purchases of hot start-ups before, such as Flickr, the pioneering online photo service.

But CEO Carol Bartz has recently made some significant noise about Yahoo starting to engage in some aggressive M&A to attract talent and inject innovation into the company.

Internally, sources said she has told staff that Yahoo has to start engaging externally and with force.

She has mentioned mobile start-ups specifically, and Foursquare is indeed among the hottest in the space, offering its growing base of users an ability to “check in” from a variety of places.

The location-based services arena is heating up, with multiple competitors to Foursquare, such as Gowalla, as well as recent efforts by Facebook and Twitter to enter the space in a big way.

Still, Foursquare is the start-up of the moment among the digerati, striking deals with a wide range of partners, as well as tech giants like Microsoft (MSFT).

Thus, it has attracted a lot of look-sees, from AOL (AOL), Twitter and Google, although none have made a serious effort to buy Foursquare.

Even Facebook has contemplated the start-up, although it is more likely to try replicating its own version of Foursquare, which is could announce at its F8 developers event next week.

Twitter also indicated at its own conference this past week that it will continue to offer similar location features.

The challenge for Foursquare’s Crowley is in the timing, and deciding if he can look such a large gift horse in the mouth.

He sold a similar location service called Dodgeball to Google in 2005, but left the search giant on bad terms two years later. Dodgeball was closed down by Google in early 2009.

At the time, Crowley called the experience of being at a large company “incredibly frustrating,” while Google sources said Crowley was a bit of a frustration to them.

Translation: No tears were shed on either side by his leaving.

In any case, he rebounded with Foursquare and is now being pursued again in the throw-caution-to-the-wind manner some entrepreneurs enjoy.

“It’s an insane offer, in a lot ways, but big enough that we all have to take it seriously,” said one person close to Foursquare.

Insane is what some think Yahoo has to be.

“Yahoo needs to kneecap everyone near Foursquare,” said one with knowledge of the situation. “This is a strategic purchase, not one based on any metric of revenue or users, so it’s just as crazy at $100 million as at $150 million.”

Well, a little crazier, but you get the point.

Yahoo declined to comment, and I have an email into Foursquare, which has yet to respond.

Silicon Alley Insider first wrote about Yahoo’s interest in Foursquare about two weeks ago.

And many also had this reaction: Why, exactly, should I care about Foursquare?

The first reaction makes sense. Foursquare is just a few months old, but it has received an extraordinary amount of buzz and press since its debut at South by Southwest in March. That seemed to reach a fever pitch this summer when Twitter investor Fred Wilson started blogging about it.

And sure enough, Wilson’s Union Square Ventures did indeed end up betting on the company. The $1.35 million round was actually led by O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and by all accounts investors were clamoring to throw money at the revenue-free start-up, which may have all of 50,000 users. I know of at least one high-profile VC firm that wanted into the deal but got shut out.

But the befuddled reaction some people have to Foursquare also makes sense. Foursquare is a “location-based” app for your iPhone (or Android-based phone, or even your BlackBerry) that sort of combines elements of Twitter and Yelp and “social” Web/mobile games like Zynga’s Mafia Wars. But even if you’ve used it, it’s not exactly clear what you’re supposed to do with it. You tell your pals that you’re visiting this bar or that restaurant and then…what?

At least, that was my reaction when I played with Foursquare at South by Southwest in Austin: I couldn’t figure out how it was more useful than Twitter at broadcasting my location and/or finding my friends.

And once I got back to Brooklyn, there didn’t seem to be any point to the service at all for me. No point in telling anyone where I am because it’s almost always the same place: My apartment in Brooklyn. Nothing to see here.

But my nightlife problems aside, there are a bunch of people who think co-founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai are on to something. Even if they’re not sure exactly what it may be.

A more cynical take: Crowley sold Dodgeball, his last buzzy mobile start-up, to Google in 2005. And even if Crowley was unhappy about the way things turned out after that–he left in 2007, and Google (GOOG) pulled the plug on Dodgeball (along with a host of other nonstarters) this year–it’s always good to bet on a guy who’s already had one successful exit.

But why not listen to Dennis Crowley explain what he’s up to in his own words? Here’s an interview I taped with him last month, a couple days before he closed his funding round.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090908/what-exactly-is-foursquare-and-why-are-investors-clamoring-for-it/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090115/even-googles-cutting-back-firing-100-recruiters-dropping-projects/ http://allthingsd.com/20090115/even-googles-cutting-back-firing-100-recruiters-dropping-projects/#comments Thu, 15 Jan 2009 11:56:37 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=3147 Even Google, which posted profits of $1.3 billion last quarter alone, can’t keep expanding in this economy.

The search giant made a series of cuts yesterday: It fired 100 of its recruiters and announced it was shutting down a handful of its many side projects.

None of these moves means much on their own: Google (GOOG) still has some 20,000 employees, and some of the 100 HR folks it is cutting may find jobs somewhere else in the company. And you’ll be hard-pressed to find many Google users who are outraged about the stuff the company is pulling the plug on.

Jaiku, for instance, is a would-be Twitter competitor with no traction. And I know one person who professes to still use Dodgeball, a mobile/social service that seemed like a big deal in 2005, but never took off.

And if you’re determined to look on the bright side, you can view the cuts as a good thing: Wall Street has been begging Google to slow its hiring for at least a year. And even prior to last fall’s announcement that Google would be cutting “dark matter” projects that “haven’t really caught on” and “aren’t really that exciting,” CEO Eric Schmidt had been talking about refocusing on search.

The flip side: The layoffs are layoffs, and they are the first-ever at Google, which has only experienced growth in its 10-year history. And since the cuts are in the recruiting group, you can expect hiring to slow to a crawl. (Anyone apply for any of these jobs recently? Let me know how that went.) And if Google isn’t hiring, who is?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090115/even-googles-cutting-back-firing-100-recruiters-dropping-projects/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20071009/google-jaiku/ http://allthingsd.com/20071009/google-jaiku/#comments Tue, 09 Oct 2007 22:46:01 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20071009/google-jaiku/ Zingku, Jaiku. Jaiku, Zingku. Sounds like the makings for a reprise of David Letterman’s infamous Academy Awards “Oprah, Uma” gag. But really, they’re the names of Google’s latest acquisitions in the wireless communications space.

In late September Google purchased mobile social-networking start-up Zingku. Now it’s gone and bought Jaiku, a Finnish company that offers an “activity stream and presence-sharing service” similar to the more widely known Twitter. Two months. Two mobile social-networking start-ups. Google never explained its plans for Zingku. What’s it going to do with Jaiku? Who knows …

“We plan to use the ideas and technology behind Jaiku to make compelling and useful products,” product manager Tony Hsieh wrote in a post to Google’s corporate blog this afternoon. “Although we don’t have definite plans to announce at this time, we’re excited about helping drive the next round of developments in Web and mobile technology.”

Ah. Helping to drive them the way you drove Dodgeball? To that happy place where social-networking apps go to die? Kidding, of course.

Anyway … Why did Google choose Jaiku over Twitter, a similar company with far greater brand recognition? “The answer seems pretty obvious to me,” says Tim O’ Reilly. “Jaiku isn’t a ‘lifestreaming’ company per se. They are a mobile company in the business of creating smarter presence applications. Far from being a runner-up behind Twitter, they are a leader in a category most people haven’t fully grasped yet. Google is clearly thinking a lot about mobile, and so they do grasp it.”

Of course, there’s another answer to that question as well. Twitter founder Evan Williams, whose previous company, Blogger, was acquired by Google in February 2003, may not have wanted to see another of his creations doomed to irrelevance by the search giant.

Which is not to say Twitter won’t be acquired. As RedMonk analyst James Governor points out, the company is probably looking pretty good to Yahoo right now. “Google and Yahoo are in dueling acquisition mode, and Yahoo is almost certain to respond,” said Governor. “Especially since Twitter has begun to use a footer on SMS messages it sends out–which could of course be used as a microbillboard.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20071009/google-jaiku/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20071009/google-jaiku-2/ http://allthingsd.com/20071009/google-jaiku-2/#comments Tue, 09 Oct 2007 22:46:01 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20071009/google-jaiku/ Zingku, Jaiku. Jaiku, Zingku. Sounds like the makings for a reprise of David Letterman’s infamous Academy Awards “Oprah, Uma” gag. But really, they’re the names of Google’s latest acquisitions in the wireless communications space.

In late September Google purchased mobile social-networking start-up Zingku. Now it’s gone and bought Jaiku, a Finnish company that offers an “activity stream and presence-sharing service” similar to the more widely known Twitter. Two months. Two mobile social-networking start-ups. Google never explained its plans for Zingku. What’s it going to do with Jaiku? Who knows …

“We plan to use the ideas and technology behind Jaiku to make compelling and useful products,” product manager Tony Hsieh wrote in a post to Google’s corporate blog this afternoon. “Although we don’t have definite plans to announce at this time, we’re excited about helping drive the next round of developments in Web and mobile technology.”

Ah. Helping to drive them the way you drove Dodgeball? To that happy place where social-networking apps go to die? Kidding, of course.

Anyway … Why did Google choose Jaiku over Twitter, a similar company with far greater brand recognition? “The answer seems pretty obvious to me,” says Tim O’ Reilly. “Jaiku isn’t a ‘lifestreaming’ company per se. They are a mobile company in the business of creating smarter presence applications. Far from being a runner-up behind Twitter, they are a leader in a category most people haven’t fully grasped yet. Google is clearly thinking a lot about mobile, and so they do grasp it.”

Of course, there’s another answer to that question as well. Twitter founder Evan Williams, whose previous company, Blogger, was acquired by Google in February 2003, may not have wanted to see another of his creations doomed to irrelevance by the search giant.

Which is not to say Twitter won’t be acquired. As RedMonk analyst James Governor points out, the company is probably looking pretty good to Yahoo right now. “Google and Yahoo are in dueling acquisition mode, and Yahoo is almost certain to respond,” said Governor. “Especially since Twitter has begun to use a footer on SMS messages it sends out–which could of course be used as a microbillboard.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20071009/google-jaiku-2/feed/ 0