Now Google is readying its next update to the Maps mobile app, which will be rolled out for both Android and iOS devices sometime this summer. The app will be optimized for iPad and Android tablets, as well.

Shown off today at Google I/O by Brian McClendon, Google’s vice president of Maps, the upcoming app seems to take small slices from both Foursquare Explore and Waze, improving local venue search as well as live rerouting recommendations during navigation.

McClendon showed how a smart search from Maps for “Burmese food” or “pizza” in San Francisco will turn up a bunch of local results that include friends’ ratings — the way Foursquare does — but also utilize Zagat data to show places worthy of a Zagat badge. This is all part of Google Maps’ new “unified five-point rating scale.” Huh. Well in either case, there’s a seemingly cool swipe feature for swiftly browsing through search results in Maps rather than reading them in list format.

And Google’s Offers service was tied into the mix by showing venues with deals or discounts in results. The first of these offers will come from Starbucks, but as Google incorporates Offers more into mobile, we can likely expect to see deals from other businesses.

I/O attendees also got a sneak peek at the app’s “dynamic rerouting” feature, meant to give better, faster, real-time navigation updates. (Waze might want to look up from its acquisition talks long enough to take note of this one.)

Early in the presentation, Google took a jab at Apple’s map mishaps, with McClendon saying that Google Maps in iPhone has been a “success” due to the fact that the app is “sleek, simple, beautiful, and let’s not forget, accurate.”

RELATED POSTS:

• Shoot the Moon: How Google Turned a Hodgepodge of Upgrades Into a Show of Strength
• Google I/O: Music, Maps, Messaging and More
• Larry Page Takes the Pulpit to Praise Technology, Snipe at Competitors
• Next Google Maps Update to Include Better Venue Search, Waze-Like Rerouting
• Google Gives Search a Deeper Voice and Adds Reminders and More to Google Now
• With Revamped Hangouts, Google Aims to Unify Messaging
• Google+ Gets a Bit More Pinteresting
• Google Chrome: 750 Million Active Users, Synchronized Web and Mobile Browsing
• Coming Soon From Google: A $649 Samsung Galaxy S4 Running Stock Android
• With Sights Set on Spotify (And Pandora), Google Launches a Music Subscription Service
• Google on Android: 900 Million Activations, New Tools for Developers Coming
• Google Doubles Down on Music Subscriptions, Which Means Google Isn’t Serious About Music Subscriptions
• Where Are They Now? Google I/O 2012 Edition.
• At I/O, Google Tilts Toward Android Services Over Android OS
• Google Downplays Expectations Ahead of I/O Developer Conference
• Will Google Deliver on Its Nexus Q Promise? Not at This Year’s I/O.
• Ahead of I/O, Google Wallet Drops Plans to Introduce a Physical Card
• Google Goes With Unified I/O Keynote (But Will It Unify Its Products?)

Oh, wait. Scratch one more idea off the list. Now seeking funding via a just-launched Kickstarter, CatLand would give users the chance to care for a Tamagotchi-esque pet by sending check-ins to a location-aware mobile app.

So, if your cat is hungry, you can check in at a restaurant, and if it’s bored, you can take it to the park. CatLand’s creators said they’re still uncommitted to any one business model, since their first priority is just to get funded and get users. But it might eventually offer the ability for local businesses to sponsor special check-in hotspots that reward one’s digital kitty with more virtual points than check-ins at other, non-paying locales.

Silly? Yeah, a bit. But this piqued my interest for two reasons:

1. Foursquare, the former mayor of location-based gamification, is backing away from check-ins and moving toward local discovery; since it’s targeted at teenage girls, CatLand may be an interesting test case for check-ins as a niche product as opposed to a broad “Yelp-plus” service.
2. With the exception of a few apps like Quadstreaker and — more notably — Google’s alternate-reality game, Ingress, mobile games haven’t yet embraced location as an important element of play, either because it’s hard to implement or maybe because it’s just not fun for most types of games. So that’s two trends this silly Kickstarter project is bucking.

(And — unofficial third reason — just because this is about cute animals. We’re definitely gonna win that Webby next year, guys!)

CatLand’s Kickstarter page is here, and a video explaining the app in a bit more detail is below:

A steady progression from tools for small teams (launched 2011) to tools for large teams (launched 2012) — and today, tools for entire organizations.

The new Asana Organizations includes more traditional management tools, with executives being able to see across multiple departments, and IT departments getting access to administration tools. Now anyone who creates an Asana account using a company’s email address will be automatically added to their org, and get to see all the various groups their coworkers are using.

Today, Asana is used by lots of tech companies — Airbnb, Uber, Foursquare, Pinterest — as well as teams in industries like healthcare and real estate.

“Any company that’s organizing on email, Asana is a better way to do that,” said co-founder Justin Rosenstein.

But he’s also used to telling people not to think of Asana as Facebook for business. “The social graph is around people. Asana is around work,” Rosenstein said. “We always say, if we wanted to do Facebook for business, we would have stayed at Facebook.”

However, as Asana tries to become more of an enterprise software provider, the company isn’t planning to build a traditional sales organization. “We’re not planning to do sales flying around the country,” said Asana operations manager Kenny Van Zant. “It’s still mostly bottom-up.”

Here’s a transcript of a quick chat I had with the startup’s CEO this morning, while he was en route to some Silicon Valley meetings. (Don’t worry! No law-breaking here: “Uber is driving,” Crowley assured me.)

Peter Kafka: It seemed like this funding round took a lot longer than you wanted. Do you think you could have done the deal quicker prior to the Facebook IPO?

Dennis Crowley: I don’t know. There’s a lot variables at play here. I don’t want to point to any one particular factor.

The thing that’s important is — hey, we just raised $41 million to do the things we want to do. That’s the thing that we’re psyched about.

I just sent this email out to the team. It’s like “Hey, there’s not a lot of companies that get to play in this space. And guess what? We get to be one of those companies.” That’s a really big, motivating thing for myself, and I think for everyone else.

Union Square’s Fred Wilson explained why a debt deal made sense for you guys. But you can also read between the lines and conclude that if you guys were able to get the valuation you wanted, you would have done a traditional equity deal. Is that a fair assessment?

Some of the things we were hearing from people was that we’re a difficult company to value. Because, you know, we’re rolling out new stuff every single month. And it’s not like we’re just putting a new coat of paint on the app. We’re rolling out new merchant tools, we roll out credit card specials. We’re in this space where we’re reinventing mobile, local, deals with merchants; we’re doing it very quickly.

You look at what we’re doing, and you can see that this is going to be incredibly transformative. And we have some people who say, “you guys are still small, but we can see how you’re going to do it.” And given those circumstances, the way we structured the deal was the best way to do it for a company of our stage and our size.

I understand your messaging about transforming from a check-in tool to a search app. But why are you always talking about becoming a location layer for the Internet? What does that actually mean, and who’s supposed to care about that? Should users care?

We’ve had our share of people who look at the check-in data and kind of pooh-pooh it. “How interesting is it that you know that this random person went to a coffee shop?” That’s why, in a lot of talks that I’ve been doing, I start out by showing this heat-map data-visualization video:

Foursquare check-ins show the pulse of New York City and Tokyo from Foursquare on Vimeo.

One check-in on its own isn’t interesting, and maybe 10 isn’t interesting. But you put millions of these things together every day, and you suddenly have this heat map of where people are. You can start to predict where people are going to be, and what was popular two weeks ago, and what might be popular in the future.

So we can do that, and start sharing that, not just with our users, but developers, too. So we’ve got this point-of-interest database, and we’re sharing that with developers like Path, Vine, Flickr. The stuff that we’ve built is powering the location features for the whole next generation of consumer Internet services.

But just to be clear. If you’re a user, you shouldn’t know or care about that data, right?

Well, a lot of consumers don’t know that Foursquare data is powering this stuff. But there’s also an opportunity there, for every time a Vine is tagged with something, every time a photo on Flickr is tagged with location, there’s an opportunity for Foursquare to layer up that data.

We can say, these are all the services that you’re using, these are all the signals that are coming back to us, and this is how we can make your map a little bit different than your friends’ map, because of all the things that we’ve done across all these different properties.

In your post this morning, you thank 33 million people for trying Foursquare. How many people are using it each month?

We’re not disclosing that.

I talked to you a few years ago about monetization, and your plan then was to rely on a self-serve model. Now you’re hiring lots of sales people. Did your thinking change?

It’s a little bit of both. We have sales people making calls, because that’s how you’re going to go get big national retailers. But I don’t think we’re going to go out there and call every single coffee shop in the country.

Even when we were a much smaller team, we had a million merchants that had signed up. A lot of that came from our user community going to places and saying “Hey, I checked in five times. What do I get?” The users have been teaching the merchants about the product.

I believe as the merchants are becoming more aware of it, we can put those self-serve tools in front of them, and we can make the pitch, where we say “Hey, if you spend X amount of dollars with us, we can drive you Y amount of customers, and we can prove that we’re doing it, and we can tell you if they’re good customers or lousy customers.”

Those are really powerful tools, and we’re taking them and expanding beyond the merchants we have talked to on the phone, and making them available to a million merchants that have already signed up.

You started off as a check-in service, now you’re a search tool. How do you get people who used you for check-ins but then stopped to come back? And how do you reach the much larger group of people who have never used you? How do you grow?

Look at what we did yesterday, when we launched Foursquare 6.0. We put out a new version of the app, and people say “Oh, I get this in a way that I didn’t before.”

It’s amazing — you put search front and center, and people are like “Oh, yeah, I can use this to search for stuff.” And when they search, they realize that it’s a lot richer than other apps they’ve been using to solve the same problem.

So it’s not that you flip a switch, and you launch an app, and suddenly it’s there. But if you build something great, that people use, people talk to their friends about, people show their friends. That’s how this stuff grows. That’s how it’s been working for us since the beginning.

So you’ll build it and they will come?

[Laughs] That’s a good way of putting it. Yeah.

One question unanswered: How much do investors think Foursquare is worth? We don’t know, exactly, because this round is all debt: Silver Lake is giving the company a multiyear loan, and the other investors — Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Spark Capital — are all buying convertible debt.

Why does that matter? Because “by taking on debt, rather than giving investors equity stakes, Foursquare delays a public debate about its true worth,” said Bloomberg Businessweek, which has the details on this one.

Here’s even more detail from investor Fred Wilson, whose Union Square has been a longtime Foursquare backer, on the logic behind the debt round:

Valuation is somewhat immaterial to us as our stake in the company is not going to increase much in this round of financing. But valuation is very material to the Foursquare management team because $41mm of capital is going to be dilutive at any valuation that would make sense here.

So the optimal structure is convertible debt. That means this round is not dilutive to the Foursquare management at this time. But it will be dilutive when the debt converts into equity, most likely at the next equity issuance. For the investors, we get the comfort of knowing that eventually our investment will become equity and we will not have to price it. Someone else will.

My educated guess, though, is that Silver Lake, et al, still believe that Foursquare is worth something close to the $600 million the company was pegged at in 2011. Yelp, the company’s obvious public comp, has a market cap of $1.6 billion.

Whatever the valuation is, it’s not going to be based on a multiple of revenue: The company brought in just $2 million last year, Businessweek said. Not unrelated: Yesterday, the company rolled out a redesign that is supposed to emphasize local search, a market that digital guys have been trying to monetize, without much success, for a very long time.

Those currently using Foursquare’s app are used to a three-tabbed main screen, where you’re always greeted with a home screen of your friends’ check-in updates. From there, users can navigate to the “explore” tab, essentially a feed of business recommendations based on your location, time of day and regular check-in habits. (There’s also a third tab, which leads you to your profile page.)

“Explore,” however, is the direction Foursquare wants to go in for the future. Over the past year, the company has slowly moved away from its heavy emphasis on badges, mayorships and “gamification” (my least favorite word in tech), instead moving toward a mobile discovery service somewhat akin to the space Yelp currently inhabits.

“Years ago, search queries were more high-level, for ‘food’ or ‘drinks,’” said Andrew Hogue, Foursquare’s head of search and data. “But now people are starting to treat ‘explore’ with a bit more depth. And as people search more often, there will be a lot more exposure to ‘explore.’”

This has been a long time coming. Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley has said in the past that the search function should have been on the front door of the app from early on, calling it the company’s biggest mistake, in retrospect. He has also said that there should be fewer friction points in navigating the apps.

That’s what we should expect from Wednesday’s app update. Fewer taps, heightened emphasis on local search, and little bells and whistles like autocompleted suggestions in the search box to serve up recommendations for places to discover.

Ostensibly, that’ll be better news for Foursquare’s paid products, as well. Local updates — or business suggestions inserted into a users’ feed at the paid request of an advertiser, based on location and time of day — will now receive more prominent placement in the app by default, as users won’t be forced to make those few extra taps to navigate into the “explore” tab to see those suggestions.

An important thing, considering that Foursquare is feeling the pressure to monetize, four years in.

Expect the update to roll out Wednesday morning.

Aspen Photo / Shutterstock.com

1.) ESPN’s Cunning Plan to Stream March Madness: Head to Bill Simmons’s House

2.) Foursquare’s Yelp Problem

3.) BlackBerry CEO Says iPhone Is Passé

4.) Seven Questions for the Man Shaking Up HP’s Operations, John Hinshaw

5.) Samsung Galaxy S4: Bigger Display and Bolder Software — But Is It Better Enough?

6.) Hey, Remember How Awesome the iPhone Is?

7.) Looking East to Predict the Next Billion-Dollar Mobile Company

8.) Jerry Yang Is Back (And Investing More Than Ever)

9.) Global Platform Head Carroll Departs Yahoo for Go Daddy, While Yahoo News Head Leaves for NBC

10.) Mossberg on Apple’s Rivalry With Samsung and Why the iPhone Is Like Switzerland

For more of the week in review, please follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

My hunch is that TechCrunch got this one right: Foursquare is going to get some more money soon, and the terms won’t be awful — not a down round, but not an exuberant one, either.

The last time Foursquare raised, back in June 2011, it was reportedly valued at $600 million. You can debate how far the company has or hasn’t come since then. But beyond its own issues, it is now dealing with another set of factors when it asks big investors for money: The public markets.

There was the Facebook IPO, of course, which let the air out of many consumer Internet companies’ valuations. But for Foursquare, the most important IPO of last year was Yelp.

The good news is that the local reviews service has held up, price-wise, better than just about any other recent big-name Web IPO except for LinkedIn. The bad news for Foursquare is that, as far as the market is concerned, Yelp seems to be worth something in the $1.5 billion range, and not much more. At $25, where it opened today, it’s worth $1.6 billion.

CEO Dennis Crowley might bristle at the Yelp comparison — “location layer for the Internet” sounds much more ambitious, and a good way to slay those haters — but until he can prove otherwise, most check-writers are going to view Foursquare as Yelp with badges. (Pretty sure the Yelp guys do.)

So if you put money into Foursquare at $600M two years ago, and its public comp is trading at 2.6x, you probably feel okay about that. But if you go much higher than that, it’s a different story.

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

But four years on, Crowley finds himself in a different place. Foursquare is in the midst of a major brand and product transformation, and he’s rethinking how he wants to position his company in a crowded social space.

What was clear from his talk at SXSW on Monday was what he thought Foursquare hasn’t done well, along with some on what Foursquare wants to be.

The early emphasis, as he’s been wont to say over the past year, was placing far too much importance on badges, mayorships and the game-like aspects of the app.

“Foursquare is much more than mayorships and badges,” he said onstage on Monday. “It’s a perception issue. We’ve definitely been phasing a lot of that stuff out.”

That’s not what Foursquare wants to be in the future. The app has pivoted into the location-and-discovery space, aiming to direct users to points of interest based on time of day, check-in history and past data. That’s also where Foursquare hopes to make its money going forward, offering strong tool sets to local businesses and large national companies willing to pay for better analytics services.

That’s an uphill battle, considering how Foursquare rose to prominence in its early days. The avid “superuser” fan base would vie to be the “mayor” of a specific location — the person who had checked in the most. This, Crowley admits, was likely one of Foursquare’s early strategy stumbles, along with almost completely marginalizing the discovery capacity of the app.

Foursquare’s biggest mistake, in his words: “In terms of product, not putting search front and center from the beginning.” He also wants to reduce the amount of taps and friction for users to navigate the app, and to reimagine how badges and mayorships work in the real world.

The issue now is time and competition. Foursquare has 30 million users, a respectable amount of onboarding in the four years the app has been around. But major competitors like Google, Yelp and now Facebook are all delving deep into the local discovery space. Google has Google+ Local. Yelp is Yelp. And Facebook just unveiled Graph Search, an early tool with the potential for changing the way people find businesses of interest, through their friends.

Foursquare is also rumored to be in the process of raising a fresh round of venture capital, though it’s facing skepticism from investors who are iffy on the pivot to discovery, and aren’t convinced that Foursquare’s business is growing fast enough.

Crowley, of course, continues to champion the “underreported” potential of his company, emphasizing the large growth Foursquare is seeing internationally in Japan, Brazil, Russia and Turkey, and the underestimated power of the company’s place database, home to more than 50 million points of interest. He even cites the potential of wearable computing, like Google Glass or smart watches.

“I’m bullish on making it easier for people to consume data about what’s going on around them,” Crowley said. Hopefully, for Crowley and his company, users are, too.

But this year, the next big app is … well, it isn’t clear. After asking nearly a dozen of the hippest, smartest, earliest-adopting people I know in tech, media and digital advertising, the consensus is:

No idea.

What — no new killer app?

Of course, SXSW will still go on and will probably even be fun, even if there isn’t a new app that “wins” the event. And here’s why:

SXSW Interactive was never really a launchpad for apps. With the exception of Foursquare — which the social location company hustled to finish in the few weeks leading up to the 2009 conference — most noteworthy apps haven’t actually launched during the conference.

Twitter didn’t, despite popular mythology, although its numbers did swell during the 2007 SXSW conference. And some articles that year ventured to say that SXSW was a “tipping point” for the newish microblogging site. But the first tweet? It came a year before that.

Also not new-kids-on-the-block were the messaging apps that were all the rage in 2011. GroupMe, now owned by Microsoft, launched the August before; Beluga had been around long enough to get acquired by Facebook just before SXSW that year.

The hype machine is broken. Last year’s pre-conference predictions were over the top. Remember Glancee, Highlight and Sonar? These were hot. They were changing the world! In theory, these apps were taking geolocation services to the next level. Some call this SoLoMo. Others call it MoLoSo. (I get these confused and it hurts my head.)

In any case, users quickly ran into battery issues with their smartphones, since these types of apps constantly track and ping users when other app-happy friends are nearby. And by the end of that week, AllThingsD writer Liz Gannes reported, a good SXSW icebreaker question was asking which apps people had deleted during the event, not downloaded.

Highlight creator Paul Davison said the company never sought out that kind of attention. “We had a lot of visibility after SXSW, which was great,” he says. “But after coming back, we said, ‘Okay, we really need to spend some time building out infrastructure and optimizing battery life. We need to make this a long-term product, not a festival product.’” Highlight has just released a new version of the app, hoping to take a second stab at success at SXSW this year.

There are too many apps. App fatigue isn’t a new theory, but it’s one I’ve heard mentioned a lot more in recent days. “I think it might be more difficult for newer companies to launch things there now,” says Tristan Walker, entrepreneur-in-residence at Andreessen Horowitz, who was part of the early days of Foursquare. “There are only so many new apps you want to download, and you’re not going to benefit from having 16 of them on your smartphone.”

Venture capitalist Bill Tai echoed this sentiment: “There are so many apps, the barrier is harder to break through.” But Tai, who has backed a brand-new app called Posse that he hopes will gain traction at SXSW, added, “I do think some app makers still see it as a good place to launch.”

Exciting hardware is stealing some attention away from apps. It’s hard to imagine SXSW becoming the next CES-like miasma of gizmos and gadgetry, but the New York Times’ Jenna Wortham highlights a hardware trend in her piece this week, with keynotes coming from Tesla’s Elon Musk and the founder and creator of the Ouya gaming console, as well as plenty of 3-D printing sessions to go around.

SXSW isn’t just about apps. It’s about the networking … at the parties. And the non-digital, real, live, human-to-human connections you’ll make … at the parties. And the interesting keynotes and panel sessions … followed by parties. So, if you’re looking to get value out of this year’s fest, you might want to consider this piece of advice, courtesy of Ad Age: Stop looking for the next big app.

Also: Get to a party.

(Feature image: Rondo Estrello / Flickr.)

RELATED POSTS:

• How One Boring Company Pulled Off the Perfect SXSW Troll
• Attention SXSW Hipsters: Watch This Video and Get Some Much-Needed Help
• WordPress’s Matt Mullenweg Talks About Future of Blogging in a SXSW Pedicab
• Google’s Smack-Talking Shoe of South by Southwest
• Some More Inconvenient Truths (Including Spider Goats): Al Gore Talks About “The Future” at SXSW
• Moon Shot: Earthbound Investor Milner Talks About Origins of the Universe at SXSW
• People of South by Southwest — Please, Free Grumpy Cat
• MakerBot Unveils Desktop Scanner Prototype for Amateur 3-D Printing
• Ready, Set, Collaboratively Design a 3-D Printed Rocket
• This Year at SXSW, the Next Killer App … Maybe Isn’t
• Artificial Intelligence, Al Gore, Modern Blogging and More: Where to Find ATD at SXSW

Lost in the sauce of the national work-from-home debate of last week that engulfed all things Yahoo, was a fascinating tidbit that several employees passed on to me from a recent Friday FYI meeting at its Silicon Valley HQ.

At the gathering, CEO Marissa Mayer talked briefly about the new telecommuting arrangements for some staffers, including the controversial new work-from-home memo that HR head Jackie Reses had issued that day.

But when Reses — who also wears another corporate hat as head of M&A at Yahoo — spoke she mentioned to the crowd that Yahoo was working on two “significant” acquisitions and about six smaller talent “acqhires.”

“It was kind of odd to telegraph it in such a big forum,” said one employee of Reses’ comments at the meeting in late February.

The revelation was unusual, to be sure, but perhaps not a surprise, given the recent run-up in Yahoo stock, its healthy cash position and, most of all, its need to add meaningful growth to the current efforts at turnaround.

And while some of its recent buys have been interesting and focused on improving its moribund mobile efforts, they have also been very small. And, as one high-ranking exec there told me, they “don’t move the needle in the way we need to in bringing in senior talent or loads of users or serious revenue.”

Indeed, while Yahoo shares have benefited greatly from the impressive performance by Alibaba Group in China, which is clearly on a roll, many think that showing actual improvement in its core business will be critical in the months ahead.

While making changes to Yahoo’s homepage and email, as well as cutting products, has been done, it is not yet clear what the impact is; the changes are aimed more at holding on to consumers rather than exciting them with new offerings.

Yahoo could also create its own new products to wow the masses, but that has been harder for it over the years. (Remember Livestand? Yeah, not so much.) In any case, an innovation infusion of such a large magnitude will take some time, given Mayer has to get the right people into place to do so.

Thus, a big purchase of an exciting new company with prominent leadership seems more likely than not and sooner than later. While Mayer has not articulated her vision for the new Yahoo in anything more than general ways, what she buys will say a lot.

Thus, sources said that Yahoo has been looking at a range of such acquisitions, in a number of categories such as advertising tech, mobile monetization and, of course, consumer “daily delight,” which is a phrase Mayer has used a lot.

It would be bold if Mayer went all out and made a mega-buy that would shake up the competitive landscape. My first choice for that is Pinterest, the scrapbooking phenom that was just valued at $2.5 billion in a new funding round. Mayer has also shown a lot of interest in blogging superstar Tumblr, while at both Google and Yahoo, as well as Foursquare, the well-known location app. Of course, there is also the troubled gaming giant, Zynga.

All are very pricey and would face rival interest, but such a move would be akin to Facebook’s billion-dollar blockbuster purchase of Instagram. Many now think that was prescient and cheap, given how important mobile photos are to the current digital ecosystem.

The list of possible big deals goes on: Hulu (which needs a tasty content element to make sense) as a video play; Millennial Media or Jumptap for mobile advertising; Quora for social answers; Flipboard for social media consumption; Rubicon or PubMatic, for ad targeting; and many more.

But all of those begin at the billion-dollar or more range and I have checked with a number of these and come up peanuts. Still, there are a whole lot of choices for Mayer and Yahoo in the $200 million to $500 million price range.

Here, Yahoo has the financial strength to make at least two of these significant purchases that Reses mentioned, as well as developing a much better reputation for Yahoo to keep real talent interested.

As one prominent startup exec, who had told me he never would consider selling to Yahoo in the past, said recently: “They are no longer complete losers, although Facebook and Google and Apple and Amazon are still cooler.”

Hey, it’s a compliment, even if it’s a back-handed one, so it will be interesting to see who finds Yahoo cool enough.

The program builds on Foursquare’s partnership with American Express, which launched just under two years ago, which allows Foursquare users to redeem special discounts and deals by checking in to local businesses after linking their Foursquare accounts to their credit card. The idea was, according to Foursquare, to make the experience less awkward than pulling out a paper coupon or waving your phone in front of the cashier (a la some daily deals services).

So in theory, the easier and less clumsy the process, the more folks will want to do it. And that makes everyone happy — including Foursquare’s bottom line.

“When users are having a great experience and merchants earn more money, we earn more money in the process,” Foursquare product manager Noah Weiss told AllThingsD.

Which is something Foursquare needs to take more seriously as it begins to mature and think of itself as a growing, viable business. The company of course has its previously announced paid promoted updates pilot program to offer businesses more ways to lure in customers, but that’s still being fleshed out, and needs time before it scales widely.

That, combined with Foursquare’s added analytics dashboard that can help business owners see more information about the types of people spending money at their stores, could prove to be a fairly powerful tool set for understanding their customers.

For now, with any luck, the number of people using Visa, Mastercard and debit cards — which is pretty much everyone in the U.S. — will beef up Foursquare’s deals revenue. That is, if folks continue to check in.

Last week, a fierce debate erupted over a range of social networks and in the media about a story we posted on Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s new decree that employees at the Silicon Valley Internet company would no longer be able to work from home.

In a sometimes awkwardly worded internal memo I posted from Yahoo HR head Jackie Reses, the company rolled out the new rule — pushed through by Mayer — which requires that Yahoo employees who work remotely relocate to company facilities by June 1.

“Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home,” read the memo to employees. “We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.”

The goal of Mayer to cure what ails Yahoo: Reviving a moribund and enervated workforce that has struggled to innovate and excel over many years. One of the many problems has been the liberal use of work-from-home policies that have been woefully mismanaged to create a culture that is simply not energized.

But, unless I am reading the memo wrong, the ban is not just limited to those who have arrangements to work from home full time — which number in the hundreds — but also employees who take one or two days a week at home.

Top sources told me that Mayer has been particularly irked about Yahoo parking lots that are slow to fill in the morning and quick to empty by 5 pm — which is atypical at other tech companies such as Google. (Mayer was a longtime exec at the search giant.)

At first, she tried to change culture in ways that rained down tasty perks on employees — such as free food and smartphones. Mayer has also been practical, instituting please-be-here Friday afternoon FYI weekly meetings and stricter performance reviews.

But she is now inevitably doling out more unpleasant medicine to the troops, starting with the banning of work from home, which has caused a big ruckus both internally and externally.

Some inside the company are clearly appalled, especially since it might more severely impact working mothers.

“When a working mother is standing behind this, you know we are a long way from a culture that will honor the thankless sacrifices that women too often make,” read one email I got from an internal source, referring to the recent birth of Mayer’s baby.

Many others at Yahoo’s Sunnyvale, Calif., HQ pointed to the nursery Mayer had built — for which she paid personally — next to her office as a perk others at Yahoo do not get.

“I wonder what would happen if my wife brought our kids and nanny to work and set em up in the cube next door?” joked a husband of another employee who will be losing her work-from-home privileges.

Yahoo employees, as far as I can see from its company careers page, offers the typical Dependent Day Care Flexible Spending Account, where staff can pay “dependent care expenses, such as day care or after-school care, with pre-tax dollars.”

While it is fair to raise the issue of how employees will cope given the sudden change in HR policy, others also think that limiting work at home is a good idea because it galvanizes culture and creates a spirit of collaboration that has been missing at Yahoo for far too long.

“Marissa is doing what good leaders do,” wrote one person on Twitter. “Making sure her Yahoo team is communicating & working TOGETHER.”

That is actually a sentiment expressed by Google CFO Patrick Pichette at a recent talk in Australia, when asked about telecommuting at Google:

“The surprising question we get is: ‘How many people telecommute at Google?’ And our answer is: ‘As few as possible’ … There is something magical about sharing meals. There is something magical about spending the time together, about noodling on ideas, about asking at the computer ‘What do you think of this?’ These are [the] magical moments that we think at Google are immensely important in the development of your company, of your own personal development and [of] building much stronger communities.”

That said, officially, many Googlers are allowed and even encouraged to work at home. The company told me when asked about work-from-home policies: “We do not have a formal policy and leave Googlers to use good judgment.”

It is the same for Facebook, which confirmed a “policy to provide flexibility as work permits.” In fact, one exec at the social network giant noted to me that its entire camera app was built from an engineer’s garage, with the group staying away from the office as long as they wanted to build it from home.

Business networking site LinkedIn also said it had “no formal policy at present,” but noted that many employees work from home full-time and part-time as the situation warrants and in consultation with managers.

It goes on and on like that throughout the tech scene, part of an ethos of letting tech talent make its own rules — from what they wear to when and where they work — that is deeply ingrained in the culture.

A Hewlett-Packard spokesperson said of the tech giant: “We do not ban [work from home] and many HP people do it … it is not at all an issue at HP and hasn’t been for years. Some folks have a regular schedule, while others can do it from time to time with the okay of their supervisors.”

An AOL spokesperson said the company doesn’t ban work from home.

A Netflix spokesperson referenced a well-known premium video company’s job deck, which stressed a “freedom and responsibility culture” and notes, “We don’t measure people by how many hours they work or how much they are in the office. We do care about accomplishing great work.”

Twitter had a different twist, but still supports working from home. Said a spokesperson: “We believe there are significant tangible and intangible benefits when employees are working under the same roof. We also recognize that every so often it’s important to be able to work remotely, and we allow for that flexibility.”

A Cisco spokesperson said the networking company also allows it, but it has to be approved by a direct manager: “It is certainly utilized by those employees who earn it. And, of course, with our collaborative suite of technologies like Webex (with video) and telepresence it is the next best thing to being there in person.”

A Microsoft spokesman said that the software company “offers flexible work schedules for all employees.”

Perhaps one of the best companies for a long time in the telecommuting space has been IBM. From its corporate Web page, also touting the environmental benefits:

“IBM was one of the first global companies to pioneer programs to reduce employee commuting. It has sustained these programs for nearly two decades. Two key aspects are its (a) work-at-home program and (b) mobile employees program. Today, more than 128,000 (29 percent) of employees globally participate in one of these programs. In 2011, in just the U.S. alone, IBM’s work-at-home program conserved approximately 6.4 million gallons of fuel and avoided more than 50,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions.”

Startups are much the same.

Said an Airbnb spokesperson of the online housing rentals site: “It’s a flexible policy and managers determine what’s appropriate on a case-by-case basis.”

At location startup Foursquare, a spokesperson said, “Our policy is to allow for ‘flexible work hours’ — and that applies to both the hours you work, and where you work from. While we don’t have any dedicated remote employees, our folks do work from home on occasion and we’re fine with that.”

Private social networking company Path is much the same, according to a spokesperson: “Path has a work-from-home policy. The manager and employee work out the details together.”

The only company I queried that did not respond immediately is Apple, which has been known for a long time to have much tighter rules with its employees. I will update when I hear from the company.

I also have emails in to Amazon, which is already known for flexible working policies.

But, overall, Mayer is forging new ground with her work-from-home ban. Whether that is enough to turbocharge the Yahoo culture is anybody’s guess.

Over the past couple of years, American Express has been actively working on ways for its members to interact with merchants online.

As a result, Amex cardholders can link their account to a number of social networks, like Foursquare, Facebook and Xbox Live, for the chance to unlock discounts.

This announcement today, however, marks the first time American Express is allowing consumers to buy things through social networks.

Leslie Berland, the SVP of digital partnerships and development at American Express, said a year ago, it started distributing offers and coupons on Twitter. In that time, she said, cardholders have saved “millions of dollars” from “thousands of merchants.”

Starting today, all cardholders will have to register to participate, even if they’ve used the service before, this time to provide a physical address for delivering products.

After that, it should be pretty painless to buy something. For instance, participants will be able to buy a $25 American Express Gift Card for $15 this afternoon by tweeting #BuyAmexGiftCard25. American Express will reply via Twitter, asking the user to confirm the purchase in a tweet. All products will be shipped via free two-day shipping.

Starting Wednesday, more items will go on sale, including an Amazon Kindle Fire HD for $150 and an Xbox 360 4GB console with three months of Xbox Live for $180. All deals will be offered for a three-week period.

While it’s easy for cardholders to participate, American Express is having to do a lot of work on the back end to make it run smoothly. There is a customer care support team to address any issues that arise, and it is working with a partner to provide the shipping logistics — neither function trivial … or cheap.

Berland acknowledges that it took “a great deal of work to think about every single use case.”

The commerce platform is coming to Twitter first, but it will also eventually come to Facebook and other platforms, Berland confirmed. Twitter is not getting a cut of the revenue from the transactions. “This is Chapter One,” she said. “We are very invested in Twitter, and we’ve taken it a step further here, but the best is yet to come. We are very confident that it will perform very well.”

To date, there have been very few examples of Twitter commerce. The most high-profile launch, perhaps, was by Chirpify, a Portland-based startup that helps merchants accept payments from a Twitter stream. Otherwise, the best implementation of selling products on a social network so far is likely by Facebook itself through its sale of gifts.

Here’s a video demonstrating how an Amex cardholder can redeem offers and buy something through Twitter:

But what about apps?

For starters, a few key apps were already known, like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Foursquare. Several more were announced or shown onstage during the event: Skype, Amazon Kindle, WhatsApp, Angry Birds, Where’s My Water?, Where’s My Perry?, Box, MLB.com, Rdio, Songza, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, to name a few.

RIM — pardon me, BlackBerry — also showed how video chatting and screen sharing are now integrated into the popular BlackBerry Messenger application, as well as built-in photo-editing and music-video-making apps.

But right now it’s still unclear when apps like Instagram, Spotify and Pandora, or streaming video apps like Netflix, Hulu and YouTube, will make their way onto BlackBerry 10. And notably absent was Google Maps.

Update: A spokesman for BlackBerry says the company is “in talks” with Instagram and Netflix, but could not confirm when those apps will make their way into the store. Also, there is not a dedicated YouTube app, as we suspected, but he was quick to point out that YouTube can be watched on a mobile browser.

BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins has been quoted as saying that the company’s app store, still called BlackBerry World, would have more than 70,000 apps at the time of this launch. BlackBerry’s Martyn Mallick reaffirmed during today’s event that this is the case.

Just a couple weeks ago, RIM hosted a “Portathon,” enticing developers to create submissions for 15,000 new apps in a single weekend, as AllThingsD’s John Paczkowski reported.

To hear BlackBerry talk about it, developers are excited to take advantage of some of the new features that BlackBerry 10 offers, like “BlackBerry Flow,” or real-time multitasking between apps.

But keep in mind the competition. Apple currently has 800,000 apps in its App Store, with 300,000 optimized for iPad. The total number of apps in Google’s app store, Google Play, isn’t totally clear, but, by some estimates, Google is nipping at Apple’s heels.

Let’s not even get into apps for the Microsoft Windows Phone operating system. Okay, to be fair, let’s talk about it: Microsoft said in a recent blog post that it had “more than doubled” its Windows Phone app library with the addition of 75,000 new apps in 2012. Which means even Windows Phone boasts more apps than BlackBerry 10.

Of course, some will argue that it really doesn’t matter how many apps are available — it’s whether the important ones are there. Many smartphone owners download a bunch of apps, only to have them sit there taking up space on their phones.

Are BlackBerry’s apps enough to sway current iPhone and Android users?

The BlackBerry 10 event is still taking place. Click here for our live coverage.

RELATED POSTS:

• BlackBerry CEO: PlayBook Update Coming, Vague on Future Tablet Plans
• Most — But Maybe Not All — U.S. Carriers Will Have BlackBerry 10 Device by March
• BlackBerry 10 Boasts Some Key Apps, but Many Big Names Missing
• BlackBerry to Launch in U.S. in Mid-March
• RIM Changes Name to BlackBerry
• RIM Aims for Reinvention With BlackBerry 10 Launch
• Walt Mossberg: BlackBerry Reinvents Itself to Compete With All-Touch Smartphones

Yandex launched the app in beta form last week to U.S. users, but only hours after the app debuted, Facebook snipped Wonder’s access to the API.

“We discussed the issue with Facebook, and it was confirmed that Facebook views the application Wonder as something that violates the Facebook Platform Policies (section I.12) and that the access to Facebook’s Graph API will not be restored,” a Yandex spokesman told AllThingsD. “Since this access was revoked, we decided to put our application on hold for the time being.”

According to section I.12, outside sites and applications are not allowed to use Facebook’s Graph API if they are search engines or directories and don’t have Facebook’s express written consent. (Microsoft’s Bing, for instance, would fall into the “consensual partner” category.)

Why does an app like Wonder get shut off so fast? Well, for one thing, Wonder aims for the exact space Facebook looks to dominate in the coming years — social discovery. It’s essentially a voice-navigated social search application that lets users see the types of local businesses their friends have visited, the food they’ve eaten, the photos they’ve shot and the news and music content they’re taking in. That’s all valuable data to take from Facebook.

And with the recent Graph Search and updated Nearby mobile feature, it’s obvious that social discovery is one direction Facebook wants to dominate (much to the chagrin of others in the space, I’m sure, like Yelp and Foursquare).

Facebook tried issuing a statement last week detailing just why it shut down API access to Wonder so quickly, as well as other recent shutdowns of apps like Voxer and, separately, Twitter’s Vine app. But the company’s statement wasn’t entirely clear on which apps encroach on the social giant’s territory, or what specific factors make Facebook decide to go after some apps but not others.

What’s next for Yandex’s app? “We will be considering partnership opportunities with other social networks and services to offer our users a richer internet experience via Wonder.”

Good luck with that, guys.

The app is an extension of Foursquare’s additions to its merchant tools updates from mid-2012, which allowed business owners to better control special offers to nearby customers using a more robust desktop dashboard.

One problem with that, said Foursquare: If you’re a small outfit, running around your store helping customers willy-nilly, you may not have the time to run back to your computer and update customers with your latest happenings, like turning time-sensitive specials on and off, or pushing those items directly to Facebook and Twitter.

Not sure I buy that argument entirely; if I were running around my shop, I would think I’d type faster on a big keyboard than the smaller one on my smartphone. Still, if I’m out of the shop and on the town, I could see it being a convenient way of pushing out specials to my Foursquare account.

The new app comes at a time when Foursquare faces questions about the long-term sustainability of its business, as it has pivoted to a more discovery-focused model. As it happens, the startup now faces more competition in the space, as Yelp already handles many local discovery queries, and Facebook’s Graph Search seems to push into the discovery space.

Of note: The new app is aimed solely at local business owners, not the major retailers looking to update their specials across an entire chain — those folks still need to update via the desktop.

Head over to the App Store or Google Play to download the new app.

Problem: One of Facebook’s main ways of serving up relevant content is based on the “Like” button. Think of the stuff in your news feed — much of what flows through it comes courtesy of the types of items you’ve “Liked” in the past.

This is not to say Facebook only relies on the “Like” button. Things like profile visits, things you’ve listend to and photos you’ve viewed all serve as signals. But to serve up the best search results — especially in terms of places — Facebook needs far more signals to return the most pertinent stuff to its users.

In other words, “Liking” isn’t enough to cut it anymore.

That’s why the company will begin to lean heavily on a greater number of signals, emphasizing new ways of collecting data from users inside of Facebook. As Mark Zuckerberg said at the press conference this morning, check in to a restaurant, for example, and Facebook will now prompt you for a little bit more insight on your feelings on the place. It’ll ask you to rate the restaurant from one to five stars, for instance, and prompt you with a question on how much you like the place.

The other hope is that users will begin to check in to more Places using Facebook’s location services on their mobile phones and discover other points of interest using the new “Nearby” tab — also on their mobile phones. So not only will you be able to use the services to open up local discovery, but your history of check-ins and visits can help refine the types of places you’ll search for and are likely to visit in the future.

This is well-trodden territory from competitors like Yelp, which relies heavily on ratings, and Foursquare, which is the go-to mobile application for checking in to places. Both of these services are essentially local discovery engines, aiming to make it easier to navigate the world.

But if Facebook can rely on its powers of suggestion to get people to enter more data — like ratings of places and check-ins — the more signals will feed into Graph Search, and ostensibly, the better the results will be.

Potential roadblocks: Right now, Facebook isn’t known well for either check-ins or ratings — those are verticals owned by Foursquare and Yelp. But again, Facebook is far, far bigger than the 30 million-user Foursquare, and has potential for many more place ratings if the company can convince users to dole out their judgments.

Beyond check-ins and ratings, there are a number of other signals that Zuckerberg wouldn’t get into onstage (my guess is that they’re nerdy to the extreme). But one thing is for sure: If Facebook wants to own relevance, it’ll need to go far beyond our willingness to “Like” things.

At its Menlo Park headquarters on Tuesday, Facebook unveiled its take on search, the social giant’s major push into helping its users find content from within Facebook.

For as big as Facebook has grown, something like this has been sorely needed. More than one billion people are on Facebook’s network, with upward of 240 billion photos and more than a trillion connections within the social graph. For anyone looking for a specific topic of information, place or person, that’s a lot of stuff to sort through.

“Indexing all this content and making it so you can find it easily is a really hard problem,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said. “Graph search is designed to take a precise query and return to you the precise answer.”

What does that mean? Essentially, Facebook wants to make it easier for users to find stuff from within a user’s network of social connections, without having to exit the site. A search box topping the page prompts you to enter a search string that returns information relevant to your network.

The thesis is this: Web search is about returning links to keywords and phrases. Google made its impact serving up the most relevant Web sites based on Page Rank. But Facebook’s Graph Search is built on the idea that you’re better served by finding content that’s been shared within Facebook. It’s your network of social connections, after all, and the philosophy is that you’d rather see things from that network.

The search paramaters are all about the stuff that circulates inside of Facebook — namely, content. Games, videos, pictures and people. Enter a phrase like, “games my friends play,” and you’ll get a list of content spit back out at you based on the connections that you’ve already made within Facebook.

Sound familiar? That’s because it is — Google is trying to do this exact same thing with Search Plus Your World. The way that Google+ works, if you or your friends +1 content on Google+, it’ll show up within your Google search results. The idea is, adding that social element into the mix makes users more apt to click on the content.

But Google’s problem is that Google+ isn’t as widely adopted or used as much as Facebook is. Facebook has the one-billion-strong network of users to suggest content to one another.

This also bodes ill for companies like Yelp, Foursquare and even the small startup Path, all of which aim to serve up recommendations to users based on their history of ratings, “Likes,” visits, etc. That’s problematic for these smaller companies, all of which work on vastly smaller data sets than Facebook’s gigantic network.

Looking for something that isn’t on Facebook? There’s an answer to that, too. Facebook has partnered with Microsoft’s Bing search engine to serve up any Web content that isn’t shared within the social network. Yet another slap in the face to Google there.

But ultimately that isn’t Facebook’s goal. Facebook wants to keep users inside Facebook to find things. The more stuff we share, use and look for inside of Facebook, the less often we’ll have to leave the network.

Good luck with that, Mark.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130115/graph-search-facebooks-way-of-keeping-you-inside-of-facebook/feed/ 27 http://allthingsd.com/20121230/johnny-foursquare-no-more-johnny-f-has-checked-in-at-a-new-privacy-policy/ http://allthingsd.com/20121230/johnny-foursquare-no-more-johnny-f-has-checked-in-at-a-new-privacy-policy/#comments Sun, 30 Dec 2012 16:42:02 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=281380 Foursquare told users via email that as of Jan. 28 it will show their full names by default, instead of first name/last initial, and that business locations will be able to see more than the current three-hour history of their visitors’ check-ins. Both privacy policy changes make the service more friendly to businesses, and the first clears up inconsistency in how names were displayed throughout the product. The company is trying to be uber-careful about rolling out privacy changes in light of other services’ recent screwups.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121230/johnny-foursquare-no-more-johnny-f-has-checked-in-at-a-new-privacy-policy/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121224/paths-personal-take-on-social-discovery/ http://allthingsd.com/20121224/paths-personal-take-on-social-discovery/#comments Mon, 24 Dec 2012 17:00:07 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=280402 Path, the small-scale “personal network” that limits users to 150 friends, released a much-lauded feature last week, a slick search function that allows users to comb through the history of their network to find different items of interest.

It was widely praised, mostly because, hey, search is fun! And the user interface is pretty slick.

Perhaps lesser noticed, however, was a side effect of searching through your Path history — a social discovery mechanism.

The “nearby” search option lets you find your past entries on locations, well, nearby. So if you’re a San Franciscan who last checked in to a restaurant in, say, Los Angeles, about a year ago, you can run that nearby search next time you’re down in Los Angeles to rediscover and potentially revisit said eatery.

Or, as Path CEO Dave Morin told me, it “reduces the friction of remembering an event.”

That’s all well and good if you like to eat at the same places all the time. But competing takes on discovery from the likes of Foursquare, Yelp, Spindle, Facebook and Google offer other, more feature-rich signals, and the ability to discover new experiences rather than rediscover old stuff you’ve already done.

Moreover, almost all of those competitors draw on far larger data sets than Path currently offers with its five million users. Mining the history of activities of of the masses serves up many more potential opportunities to visit new places.

Here’s where Path deviates: Using search, we can scan back through the history of our friend’s experiences, browsing some of the many places they’ve checked in, and sorting it by city, by keyword, by theme. Within that history, Morin’s philosophy goes, we’re able to find some of the best restaurants, bars, or areas of interest — not, mind you, due to the many signals that the other services rely upon, but because our network of Path pals have visited them.

“Maybe the question isn’t necessarily, ‘Is this the best data set to find a restaurant?’ Morin said. “Maybe the question is, ‘Have my closest friends’ — you know, the ones you’ve befriended on Path — “‘decided to go to these restaurants?’”

It’s a curious approach, and a bit charming, considering it’s somewhat backward from most of the other sites working on discovery. The sample set, by the nature of the network, is smaller by design. And less choice, in Morin’s opinion, makes for better results in the context of Path.

I’m not sure I totally buy that quite yet, however. I wonder, between the Paths, the Foursquares and the Facebooks of the world, just how many folks remember to check in to locations via Path. As always, it runs up against the problem of “Do we need another social network?” by perhaps not being the go-to app for checking in.

Still, it’s novel. And the search function works quite well. Now we’ll see if it keeps users active, engaged and checking in.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121224/paths-personal-take-on-social-discovery/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20121219/demand-a-plan-tech-leaders-sign-onto-mayors-effort-to-end-gun-violence/ http://allthingsd.com/20121219/demand-a-plan-tech-leaders-sign-onto-mayors-effort-to-end-gun-violence/#comments Wed, 19 Dec 2012 16:35:53 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=279245 This morning, a large group of Silicon Valley and New York tech leaders signed a full-page advertisement in the New York Times for Demand A Plan, a mayor’s organization pressing for gun safety in the wake of the recent tragic school shooting in Connecticut.

“It’s Time. Demand a Plan to End Gun Violence,” reads the ad, which was signed by a plethora of major digital players.

They include, in part: Lerer Venture’s Ken Lerer (who organized the effort); SV Angel’s Ron Conway, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, Skype President Tony Bates, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, adviser Bill Campbell, Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley, Findery’s Caterina Fake, Emerson Collective’s Laurene Jobs, Code Advisors’ Quincy Smith, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams and Zuckerberg Media’s Randi Zuckerberg.

In addition, there is a large-scale social media effort under way for Demand a Plan, which signee and venture capitalist Fred Wilson likens on his blog to other Internet-wide campaigns.

“Like the PIPA/SOPA efforts last year, this effort is diverse, distributed, chaotic, and hopefully effective and powerful,” he wrote.

Here’s the ad itself:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121219/demand-a-plan-tech-leaders-sign-onto-mayors-effort-to-end-gun-violence/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121217/apple-in-talks-with-foursquare-about-data-sharing-deal/ http://allthingsd.com/20121217/apple-in-talks-with-foursquare-about-data-sharing-deal/#comments Tue, 18 Dec 2012 03:17:52 +0000 Jessica E. Lessin and Spencer E. Ante http://allthingsd.com/?p=278717 Apple Inc. is in early discussions to integrate local data from Foursquare Labs Inc. into its mapping application, according to people familiar with the talks, as the company continues to build an arsenal of local data to try to take on Google Inc.

The talks, which took place in recent weeks and involve Apple senior vice president Eddy Cue, are the latest sign of Apple’s plans to more tightly integrate local services into the iPhone and iPad. The discussions with New York-based Foursquare come as Apple has been talking to a number of companies that collect local data to improve its new mapping product.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121217/apple-in-talks-with-foursquare-about-data-sharing-deal/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20121217/facebook-push-into-crowded-territory-again-with-local-discovery-update/ http://allthingsd.com/20121217/facebook-push-into-crowded-territory-again-with-local-discovery-update/#comments Tue, 18 Dec 2012 00:00:36 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=278665 If at first you don’t succeed … well, you know how that goes.

As does Facebook, which is pushing hard into local discovery territory with Nearby, an updated feature inside its mobile app that offers suggestions on businesses and places of interest you may want to check out.

Nearby functions best by taking cues mined straight from your Facebook account — stuff you “Like,” stuff your friends have “Liked,” places you’ve checked in to, etc. The relevance argument here is that Facebook has a wealth of user data to draw upon for recommendations, perhaps more than Yelp or Foursquare.

It’s not entirely new ground. Facebook tried this sort of thing more than two years ago with Places, the company’s supposed Foursquare killer. Check in to joints, find friends, meet up and so on.

Surprise! Facebook didn’t kill Foursquare, nor did Yelp suddenly vanish. Foursquare has grown to upward of 20 million registered users, while Yelp went public and is growing by the day with overseas acquisitions. (Now, while they’re not dead, parsing Foursquare’s and Yelp’s business models and long-term prospects is another discussion entirely.)

So what’s different in round two? For one, it’s a heck of a lot nicer than the original effort. It’s personalized, it’s more robust, and all of your Facebook activity really does help fuel it.

In other words, it’s an actual discovery mechanism.

It’s probably going to be a whole lot better, considering Facebook acquired location-based services experts Gowalla, helmed by the very smart (and exceedingly pleasant, I may add) Josh Williams, almost a year ago to date.

But, you know, there’s the whole problem of intent to consider. Does my “Liking” a Facebook page for a business mean I’m inclined to visit them, or purchase anything from them? That’s the case that Facebook’s marketing department is trying to make to both SMBs and big brands right now, with mixed results.

Google, on the other hand, has this sort of thing pretty much nailed. Intent is built directly into how a Google search works. Looking for a restaurant address and times? Google it. On the move and looking for something to nosh? There’s a local discovery bar built into the Google.com homepage when you’re viewing on your mobile browser. In other words, ask Google and ye shall receive.

I’m curious, too, to see how often Facebook users swipe sideways in the app to dig through their tabs and find Nearby. I know I spend most of my time checking my News Feed from the app, rather than messing with other things. We’ll see if other folks use it differently.

Also of note: Facebook recommends you update your profile with lots more relevant information to make Nearby work better. Not too shabby of a way to collect more user data through the power of subtle suggestion, eh Facebook? Nice try.

Expect the new feature to come in an app update Monday afternoon.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121217/facebook-push-into-crowded-territory-again-with-local-discovery-update/feed/ 2