In a three-story building in Palo Alto, Calif. — formerly occupied by Danger, the developer behind the T-Mobile Sidekick — Groupon has been trying to build out a Silicon Valley technology center, one acquisition at a time.

The pursuit was kicked off two years ago with the purchase of mobile app development shop Mob.ly. Mihir Shah, the company’s CEO, started recruiting for the social buying company, and then became the Groupon’s VP of mobile.

Since then, there has been a hodgepodge of acquisitions, including Campfire, which builds chat, calendar and media-sharing tools, as well as Zappedy, which makes a platform for merchants to redeem Internet-based offers more easily.

Last week, it continued with Adku, a low-profile San Francisco start-up that helps e-commerce retailers fine-tune their recommendation engines using external factors, such as whether it is hot or cold outside.

None of the teams have been extremely big or expensive, but Groupon insists that they already are having a major impact on the company.

That may be hard to believe in a company of more than 10,000 employees, most of which are salespeople who are not working on technology.

But Adku’s co-founder Carlos Whitt, who is joining the company along with five others from his team, said the entrepreneurial vibe in the building is “ridiculously exciting.”

“The opportunity, the innovation and entrepreneurs are all there,” he said. “It’s a good intersection.”

Still, Groupon has not been able to attract every entrepreneur it pursues. It had been actively trying to buy other social start-ups, such as Gowalla. That particular deal went to Facebook. Another would-be Groupon acquisition target, Clever Sense, was won by Google.

No matter, according to Mob.ly’s Shah, who said Groupon is actively evolving beyond a daily deals service into a company that builds a set of key marketing tools for local merchants that increases sales, cuts costs and boosts productivity.

Some of the early tools include online calendars to make it easy for spas or gyms to book appointments online, and rewards programs that allow merchants to identify loyal customers who return and spend a lot of money.

Groupon also recently revamped its merchant center, where its customers can manage their daily deals and other programs in an online dashboard.

Shah said the idea is to create a marketing suite that makes small businesses more efficient and productive.

“We never want to stand still and be a big company,” he said.

But the big question is whether those tools will be sticky enough to keep merchants coming back to offer new deals, which is where Groupon gets all of its revenue from. That’s because most of the new tools are expected to be given away for free and not generate any additional income — at least for now.

It will also have to be enough to keep away other close competitors, such as LivingSocial, Google and Amazon.

The ability to spur innovation and keep ahead of rivals will be on the minds of analysts when Groupon reports its first financial results as a publicly held company this afternoon.

Wall Street is expecting the company to report three cents per share profit on revenue of $475 million in its fourth quarter earnings, according to Thomson Reuters.

That’s up from $430 million in revenues in the third quarter and will be Groupon’s first profitable quarter in nearly two years

In particular, analysts will be listening for updates on some of the company’s core programs, such as Groupon Now, which is its mobile product that allows consumers to purchase deals minutes or hours before redeeming them based on their location. Other metrics may be shared regarding loyalty and retention programs.

This is also Groupon CEO Andrew Mason’s first big chance to speak to the investment community since the end of the company’s quiet period (which he wasn’t really good at keeping, anyway).

Groupon’s stock increased nearly three percent yesterday to close at $24.19, which is just above its IPO price of $20 a share.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today, the daily deals site confirmed it has acquired Bay Area-based Mertado, a social shopping company that helps consumers discover new products. The acquisition was first reported by TechCrunch.

In a statement provided to All Things D, Julie Mossler said: “Groupon is excited to announce it has purchased Mertado.com.”

Terms of the deal were not disclosed; however, Mossler said several members of Mertado’s staff will join Groupon, including founders Mehul Shah, Rajiv Bhat and Vijay Chittoor, who is also the CEO.

Groupon was interested in Mertado’s expertise in the social commerce space, including the launch of Mertado TV, which combined video content with products. In a post on Mertado’s Web site, the company said it was no longer accepting new registrations and will officially shut down on Feb. 28.

Going forward, it directed Mertado customers to Groupon Goods, which offers an eclectic mix of physical products for sale, like kitchen gadgets, consumer electronics and the Shake Weight.

Last month, as Liz Gannes reported, Groupon acquired Campfire Labs, which will head up the company’s social efforts. Before that, Groupon had been actively trying to buy other social start-ups such as Gowalla, which was acquired by Facebook, and Clever Sense, which went to Google.

Campfire CEO and co-founder Naveen Koorakula said his company’s full team — which I believe is seven people — would be joining Groupon to head up its social efforts. He did not disclose a price.

Groupon had been actively trying to buy other social start-ups such as Gowalla, sources had said in recent weeks. That particular deal went to Facebook. Another would-be Groupon acquisition target, Clever Sense, went to Google instead.

I’d met with Koorakula and his co-founder Sakina Arsiwala earlier this year, and they explained their still-in-progress ideas for a social messaging and collaboration platform that adapted to understand which people were relevant to a group of three to 15 people. They called it a “few-to-few” social network.

Campfire, which had named its early product Slice, was kind of like a dynamic version of Beluga — the group messaging start-up Facebook acquired in March — but Campfire was Web-based, with chat, calendar and media-sharing tools.

The company was still a ways away from launching, and working on testing the product on university campuses like Kenyon College first.

Both the Campfire and Slice sites are currently offline.

Koorakula and Arsiwala, who are a husband-and-wife team, have impressive backgrounds. Koorakula worked on search at Inktomi, Yahoo and Powerset, while Arsiwala helped internationalize YouTube and also did stints at Google proper, Yahoo and Altavista. Campfire Labs investors included SV Angel and Felicis Ventures.

Groupon spokesperson Julie Mossler said, “Campfire Labs was recently acquired to lead the social arm of Groupon. They’re great product technologists who have developed really cool stuff and technology. The Campfire team have already [proven] to be great assets at Groupon and we’ve got a few exciting projects in the works for early 2012.”

(Image via Dirk Beyer on Wikimedia Commons)

Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley sold his company, Dodgeball, to Google in 2007, but he left two years later complaining about the lack of resources devoted to his start-up by the search giant.

Crowley called the experience the “perfect storm of bad timing.”

But that sentiment has apparently shifted considerably. Now, Crowley looks back on his Google tenure as valuable — and said that he’s feeling a lot friendlier toward Google these days.

“You know when people leave a job and they say they didn’t know what they came away with after two years? That’s how I felt when I first left Google,” Crowley said in an interview with AllThingsD. “But I’ve been able to spend time with the folks at Google and reconnect with people there. And now when things come up at Foursquare, [they're] all the challenges and issues I realize I already encountered at Google.”

Could that mean even closer relations in the future?

Crowley declined to elaborate on the substance of his talks with Google, which, in some cases, are with business development teams.

But what about the possibility of another acquisition?

“I wouldn’t disqualify anything,” he said. “The thing that’s important to us is doing the things we want to do, which could be partnering with someone, or it could be continuing to grow the product independently.”

While that’s appropriately vague enough, what is clear is that where Foursquare goes from here is a big question going forward.

Most especially, while it still remains the cool kid at the check-in party, especially as more competitors are checking out — is the party dying down?

Foursquare now claims 15 million users, adding the last five million in just the last six months, a fact it often points to as a sign of success rather than to its aggregate number of downloads.

As a basis for comparison, the popular mobile photo-sharing app Instagram recently touted it had attracted between 14 and 15 million users, amassed in just over a year.

There is no doubt, though, that Foursquare started with a similar bang. Based in New York, the start-up first launched in 2009 as a mobile social networking site that tapped into the inherent GPS capabilities of smartphones.

It was not that unlike the idea behind Dodgeball. But this time, Crowley, along with Naveen Selvadurai, created a fast-growing mobile app that allowed users to broadcast to their friends where they were, while also earning badges and mayoral bragging rights for visiting certain locations.

It took off from there, with Crowley and Foursquare featured in splashy magazine takeouts and even in an ad for the Gap, portrayed as the toast of New York’s entrepreneur scene.

By the spring of 2010, the hot company was reported to be weighing offers from both Yahoo and Facebook, which shortly afterward introduced its own check-in function called Places.

Neither of those deals happened, and this past summer, the company raised $50 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and others.

That move sent a clear message: We’ll grow ourselves, thanks very much.

Still, despite the cash, Crowley is careful to note that he realizes that times have changed in the location space.

While he said he believes that social media is moving away from the idea of just one news feed, the growing popularity of apps such as Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and Path imply that consumers have an appetite for multiple apps.

And while data shows that consumers are becoming increasingly aware of geolocation services, it also indicates that the location-based craze hasn’t really caught on yet.

Crowley said he doesn’t put much stock in the most recent Forrester Research report on location-based services. He noted that three years ago Twitter was known as the online network for broadcasting what people had for lunch, before it became recognized as a game-changing technology tool.

That said, a handful of other location-focused companies — Hot Potato, SimpleGeo and early Foursquare competitor Gowalla, as well as Pelago, which was bought by Groupon — have all been absorbed by bigger tech companies in the past 18 months, their value less than expected by eager investors. Instead, they were bought mainly for their entrepreneurial and engineering talent rather than their product or user base.

That’s left Foursquare standing tall, but largely alone.

Crowley said that if the company had to focus on one area right now, it would be nearby discovery, fed by the database that’s been built up over the past two and a half years. He even went as far as to say there’s been a de-emphasis on the flagship “check-in” feature, citing evidence that more people are using the app to get tips without actually checking in.

Within the app, which is available on iOS, BlackBerry and Android, users can also follow friends, get tips on local venues and make to-do lists. Its most recent feature, Radar, pings users when they’re near venues they’ve indicated they want to check out, or in this case, check into.

And, with regard to Foursquare’s other high-profile feature — badge-earning — Crowley likened the whole element to the movie “The Karate Kid.”

“It’s like Mr. Miyagi having Daniel paint the fence, and later he realizes he’s been practicing karate,” Crowley said. “Badges are an important onboarding tool, but from the beginning we’ve said the important thing was data, and now we’ve gotten our users to leave all of these data signals.”

Crowley hinted at more differentiating products coming down the pipeline, and said he wouldn’t be surprised to see more consolidation and sharing among social networking apps, as well as more acquisitions within the industry.

With more than 800 million active users in Facebook’s network, Foursquare might become even more interesting to Google, which has jumped into the social networking space with Google+. Now Foursquare and Google share a common rival in Facebook, which may also help them make up their past differences.

Whether Foursquare could be the buyer, or one of those acquisitions, remains to be seen.

It’s not a big surprise that location-based services aren’t terrifically mainstream — Foursquare says it has 15 million registered users worldwide, and one-time competitor Gowalla is now fully out of the market through a deal to send some of its staff to Facebook.

That said, awareness of geolocation apps is on the rise. Thirty percent of those surveyed by Forrester said they know what geolocation applications are, versus 16 percent last year.

And geolocation app usage is getting ever so slightly more gender-balanced. Now, 37 percent of users are women, up from 22 percent in 2010.

Geolocation app users tend to be post-college adults. Forty-three percent are between the ages of 23 to 31.

Forrester’s point in all this is to look at the bright side: Money. Young, male and overshare-y is a good marketing demographic.

P.S. If you add up the pie slices above, it makes it look like 5 percent of those surveyed use geolocation apps. However, Forrester said the total number is 6 percent with rounding. 

Even Gowalla CEO Josh Williams isn’t pretending a deal for Facebook to buy the location-sharing company isn’t happening, as you can read below in an email he sent to his investors.

Both companies declined to comment on a story on Friday and over the weekend. CNN had the scoop about the social networking giant acquiring Gowalla, which I have taken to calling Not-Foursquare.

That’s because — despite its often clever approach and innovation — it never caught up with the leading social location service.

Gowalla, which changed its approach several times, had been for sale for some time, said several sources.

The Austin-based start-up has raised just under $11 million from a range of investors, including Greylock Partners, Shasta Ventures, Alsop Louie Partners and the Founders Fund, along with a batch of well-known angel investors.

But let’s put this one to bed with the email that Williams sent out after the CNN story broke Friday, which was read to me tonight, so I might not have all of it perfectly and it is missing a sentence about I-will-smack-the-leaker):

Subject: Rumors and speculation

CNN just broke the news that Gowalla has been acquired by Facebook. This story was leaked from an unknown souurce.

The ink on the deal is not dry, so our holding pattern is that we do not comment on rumors and speculation. I have another email penned that was ready to send you today, assuming you would get this news before the story was officially released.

But now it is all over Twitter, so you have likely heard. A longer email will be sent soon. Until then, I am so very grateful for what you have done to make Gowalla a success.

The second confirmation email has apparently not yet been sent, but I will try to get it when it is, along with the price.

So, until the official official yes, here’s a video interview I did with Williams in April of 2010 about the location “wars”:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111204/heres-gowalla-ceos-non-denial-denial-email-to-investors-about-facebook-acquisition/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111117/sendgrid-sends-22b-emails-for-spotify-foursquare-airbnb-and-others/ http://allthingsd.com/20111117/sendgrid-sends-22b-emails-for-spotify-foursquare-airbnb-and-others/#comments Thu, 17 Nov 2011 14:00:12 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=145101 SendGrid, the popular email delivery service that sends personalized notifications and confirmations for social applications like Foursquare, said this week it has sent 20 billion emails since launching in late 2009. Actually, make that 22 billion, according to the live count on its Web site. SendGrid’s 30,000 customers include Spotify, Airbnb, Twilio, SlideShare, Gowalla and Path.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111117/sendgrid-sends-22b-emails-for-spotify-foursquare-airbnb-and-others/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110912/gowalla-evolves-dont-call-it-a-pivot-into-social-city-guide-app/ http://allthingsd.com/20110912/gowalla-evolves-dont-call-it-a-pivot-into-social-city-guide-app/#comments Mon, 12 Sep 2011 19:04:45 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=119712 Gowalla, long-time rival to Foursquare, today announced a new direction for its social location service. The Austin, Texas-based company will attempt to offer a hybrid between a social app and a content guide, focused around local experiences.

Instead of checking in, Gowalla users will now create “stories” when they meet up to hang out together. These are basically group check-ins, as on Facebook where a user can tag multiple friends at a place. After that, any tagged person can contribute photos and other content to the story, capturing it as a communal experience.

On the flip side, visitors (who don’t even have to be logged in) will be able to visit Gowalla to see local guides that are aggregated from their friends’ “stories,” as well as highlights from local users and content from sponsors and partners. Gowalla is seeding the service with information on 60 cities that will be dynamically updated with new user entries from within their geographies.

As soon as its new app gets approved, Gowalla will be relaunching with upgrades to its iPhone, Android and Web versions (though users can continue to check in through the old versions).

Gowalla CEO Josh Williams said in an interview today at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference that he’s interested to test his hypothesis that “social content has value to observers.”

But don’t call it “the ‘p’ word — a pivot,” Williams begged. “It’s not like we’re doing a music streaming service!”

What might be difficult about this transition is that Gowalla is setting itself up to serve two separate audiences: Content creators and content consumers — groups whose interests and motivations may be quite different. For instance, I could see the new Gowalla guides being really interesting when I travel, but perhaps less so in my home city. There will also be a delicate dance between aggregating public “stories” and those that are published to friends only.

Williams said Gowalla has about two million registered users, with hundreds of thousands of them having used the service in the last couple weeks.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110912/gowalla-evolves-dont-call-it-a-pivot-into-social-city-guide-app/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110622/new-banjo-social-discovery-app-uses-other-peoples-check-ins/ http://allthingsd.com/20110622/new-banjo-social-discovery-app-uses-other-peoples-check-ins/#comments Wed, 22 Jun 2011 12:00:34 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=89347 A new start-up called Banjo is today launching a local discovery app that aggregates location-based information from various social Web services.

Banjo and similar companies like Sonar.me are building on top of the small but growing treasure trove of location info from sources like Foursquare, which make user check-ins available to developers through APIs.

Banjo users can see updates from their friends and other people nearby on social networks like Foursquare, Gowalla, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook Places. Banjo itself is not a check-in service, but rather a layer on top of these other social networks.

Banjo users don’t have to be in the near vicinity of other users to see their updates, and they don’t necessarily have to be their friends. They can see the locations of the nearest 16 people to them at any one time.

If you’re in the middle of nowhere, the list of 16 people might include someone miles away. Banjo CEO Damien Patton says this “elastic radius” is a key feature of his service, because Banjo won’t have the loneliness problem of other location aggregators like Color.

And Banjo users can key in any random place to find out what’s going on there. So if you’re going to Paris next week, you could see what people there are doing and saying now, while you’re planning your trip.

It will be interesting to see how users of location-based services react to services like Banjo. Even though their updates may be semipublic by design, users don’t necessarily realize who can see where they are, and how that data can be transformed when it’s aggregated and mapped. We discussed that issue in a video interview with Patton that’s embedded above.

Banjo, which will be available for both iPhone and Android at launch, is backed by BlueRun Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Patton, a former Nascar mechanic and manufacturing entrepreneur, attracted the attention of VCs last summer when he won a Google-sponsored hackathon with an HTML5 location-based graffiti app called SweetGeo.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110622/new-banjo-social-discovery-app-uses-other-peoples-check-ins/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110411/groupon-hires-one-of-its-own-investors-in-growth-spurt/ http://allthingsd.com/20110411/groupon-hires-one-of-its-own-investors-in-growth-spurt/#comments Mon, 11 Apr 2011 19:44:49 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://emoney.allthingsd.com/?p=4380 Groupon is aggressively hiring–so much so, it has stolen away one of the partners from its own investors. David Thacker, an associate partner at Greylock Partners, is joining Groupon’s product management team in Palo Alto, according to an amicably worded blog post on Greylock’s site. Thacker led investments in Gowalla and 1000 Memories. While that’s one down, Groupon is still on the hunt for a new COO.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110411/groupon-hires-one-of-its-own-investors-in-growth-spurt/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110208/tello-customer-service-ratings-review/ http://allthingsd.com/20110208/tello-customer-service-ratings-review/#comments Tue, 08 Feb 2011 22:54:14 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/?p=1636 Call it a flair for the dramatic or a love of telling and hearing juicy stories. Whatever the reason, people have a tendency to talk more about their bad customer-service experiences than the good ones.

This week, I tested Tello (Tello.com), a new customer-service website and mobile app that encourages users to chime in on their customer-service experiences, good or bad. Businesses, or specific employees at those businesses, can be rated with a thumbs up or thumbs down and a detailed comment.

Tello was released in the Apple App Store this week, but I got special permission to test it early. It’s currently available for use at Tello.com, on other devices via mobile browsers at m.tello.com or as a native app on Apple’s iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. Tello’s founder and CEO, Joe Beninato, said an Android app is due out this spring.

At first glance, Tello seems to be another location-based service like Foursquare or Gowalla, which encourage people to “check in” while they’re at a specific place to find friends who are checked in there, or to earn badges and titles for checking in there more than anyone else. Broader review sites like Yelp let people comment on various aspects of a place or experience. But people using these services aren’t rating customer service specifically.

On the upside, Tello’s narrow scope means people know they’re reading solely about customer service, without hearing numerous details about other aspects of a business.

Screen for rating an employee

A rating as seen on Tello

The downside to Tello is that it can be hard to sum up an entire experience without considering other factors involved. If someone visits the new Italian restaurant down the street and its ambiance and food are outstanding, yet the wait staff is deplorable, a thumbs up or thumbs down doesn’t tell the whole story. For expert complainers, or people who like more space for expressing their opinions, Tello may seem too succinct. Its app and home page display portions of comments along with user ratings, so if you waxed on for a thousand words about a hotel’s poor Wi-Fi, bad lighting and slow room service, most people wouldn’t see those remarks at a glance.

Part of Tello’s appeal is that it offers a peek in on customer-service experiences around the country, so before I flew to California this week I took a look at Tello to see what businesses are getting good ratings out there. Only a relatively small group of beta testers were using Tello when I was testing it, limiting the number of rated businesses. But this will improve as more people use the service.

The Tello app uses GPS to recognize a user’s location and then displays a list of nearby businesses; nearby, in this case, is defined as within two-tenths of a mile. If people type in the name of a business and search, this broadens the location range search to within five miles.

On a few occasions, including a trip to my Washington, D.C., neighborhood’s independent coffee shop, a Greek restaurant and a Potbelly Sandwich Shop, I came up empty handed when I looked for reviews of these places. Mr. Beninato explained this was because some aspects of the search engine weren’t finalized at the time I was testing, and in one case, I was too far away from the business. Sure enough, after a final update, I had better luck finding businesses. A business can be manually added to Tello by selecting a plus icon and typing in details including the business’s name and address.

The Tello mobile app

As for rating individual employees, on most occasions, I didn’t think to ask the name of the person who helped me at the business so I could comment on their service. I did catch the name of a terrific waitress at the Greek restaurant because she signed the bill with a smiley face. In that case, I was able to make a specific comment about an employee, rather than a general comment about the restaurant. I gave Mara a thumbs up and commented she took time to make useful wine suggestions in the midst of a bustling evening with every table filled. The more I used Tello, the more I started to notice employees’ names.

After using Tello over a period of time, each user builds up a personalized page of ratings, which is helpful for remembering which places are worth a return visit and which ones to avoid. Any Tello rating is, by default, instantly shared on the Tello.com site as well as to users of the app; it can be posted out to Facebook and Twitter in the same step.

Tello aspires to be more than the destination where happy customers go to cheer or wronged customers go to whine. An option on the screen where ratings comments are entered lets users request a reply from a business if they had a bad experience. When someone selects this option, Tello contacts the user via email and asks how he or she wants to be contacted by the business—email or phone—so the business has a chance to fix things.

Starting this spring, Tello plans to roll out new features aimed at businesses that will allow them to claim their business on Tello by going through a verification process. They will then be automatically notified of bad experiences so they can decide how to handle a customer’s problems. And in the future, customers who rate businesses might be able to receive coupons.

Another new feature due out this spring will let businesses add lists of employees for Tello users to see, which may help them remember who served them or how to spell an employee’s name. Employees who receive good ratings could be acknowledged and rewarded by their employers, motivating them to work harder.

Though Tello is just getting started, it could be an incredibly helpful service through which satisfied customers get to tell friends about their experiences—or disappointed customers get to complain with a chance of actually being heard. Just know that Tello’s thumbs up or thumbs down ratings don’t allow for much ambiguity.

Watch a video with Katherine Boehret on Tello at WSJ.com/PersonalTech. Write to her at katie.boehret@wsj.com

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110208/tello-customer-service-ratings-review/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101229/video-greylocks-reid-hoffman-and-david-sze-on-the-future-of-social/ http://allthingsd.com/20101229/video-greylocks-reid-hoffman-and-david-sze-on-the-future-of-social/#comments Wed, 29 Dec 2010 19:39:49 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=1718 Reid Hoffman’s cute line about the future is, “it’s always sooner and stranger than you think.”

Hoffman, a PayPal Mafia member and the incredibly connected co-founder of LinkedIn, has been an early investor in just about every important social Web (formerly Web 2.0) start-up: Facebook, Zynga, Flickr, Friendster. (As a rare exception, Hoffman didn’t get in on Twitter early, but has a small piece through its purchase of Mixer Labs.)

Hoffman recently joined Greylock Partners, where he was given a $20 million seed-stage investment fund to play with. (Announced in September, the Greylock Discovery Fund had closed nine investments as of the time we filmed this video a few weeks back. Update: The total is now 15 Discovery Fund investments.)

Hoffman’s partner in crime at Greylock is David Sze, whose investments include Facebook, LinkedIn and Pandora.

During a visit to Greylock’s shiny new Sand Hill Road office, I set the video camera rolling to ask Hoffman and Sze to look into their crystal balls and predict what the social Web has in store. They tag-teamed that first question with barely a pause in the 11-minute conversation captured here.

Here are some of Hoffman and Sze’s predictions and observations:

• As investors in Gowalla and Facebook, they’re both bullish on location-based services, with Hoffman using his “sooner and stranger than you think” line to explain when location-sharing could become a mainstream activity.
• “People are still learning that participating with your real identity and data about you in these public networks is actually very beneficial,” said Hoffman. He asserted that “the empowerment of the individual increases the liquidity of the individual.”
• Sze is looking forward to “the integration of physical and virtual experiences,” citing examples like Fitbit and virtual gaming.
• Hoffman on the two most important aspects of online privacy: “People want upsides, and people want to not be ambushed.”
• Sze said he thinks the social Web has successfully countered societal “fear of the computer isolating us.” Technology is “a much more powerful way to connect us than not,” he said.
• Hoffman proposed that the social layer can create broader engagement in a way that changes entire categories of businesses, using the obvious example of gaming and Zynga, but also citing recent Greylock investment Airbnb, where there’s a social aspect within the system of deciding to whom you rent your home.
• Sze is interested in observing and investing in more examples of using network effects to improve work, mentioning the examples of LiveOps and Mechanical Turk.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101229/video-greylocks-reid-hoffman-and-david-sze-on-the-future-of-social/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101115/topguest-checks-in-with-2-million-series-a-round-and-peter-thiel-as-advisor/ http://allthingsd.com/20101115/topguest-checks-in-with-2-million-series-a-round-and-peter-thiel-as-advisor/#comments Mon, 15 Nov 2010 15:33:57 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=37263

Topguest, a check-in loyalty service that was founded just five months ago, has gotten $2 million in Series A funding, as well as nabbing well-known Facebook investor Peter Thiel as an adviser.

Investors in the round include: Thiel’s Founders Fund, as well as angels such as Ron Conway, Keith Rabois, Jeff Clavier and Naval Ravikant.

Topguest is exiting its beta phase today with partners that include Virgin America, Hilton, Wyndham Worldwide, Kimpton and others.

Using Topguest, those companies can offer deals, making large travel and hospitality loyalty programs social by plugging them into smartphones and geolocation.

Users check in with their existing services–such as Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook Places and Gowalla–in order to get benefits such as air miles for your Virgin Elevate account and hotel points for Hilton HHonors.

Topguest is competing in a crowded market, where a lot of such services are offering many kinds of deals.

The San Francisco start-up is most like another service aimed at retailers called Shopkick, where you get points when you check in to its mobile app.

Topguest said the differentiator is that it links into geolocation services already in use, instead of requiring another different check-in and offers points in already existing loyalty programs.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101115/topguest-checks-in-with-2-million-series-a-round-and-peter-thiel-as-advisor/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101104/not-many-americans-use-location-based-services/ http://allthingsd.com/20101104/not-many-americans-use-location-based-services/#comments Thu, 04 Nov 2010 18:30:48 +0000 Beth Callaghan http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=32062 Facebook Places, Foursquare and Gowalla are all hot products in the much-hyped location-based social space, but according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, only one percent of Americans use location-based services on any given day. Not surprisingly, the highest concentration of users can be found in adults between 18 and 29–with eight percent–and adults who use their mobile phones online–with seven percent.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101104/not-many-americans-use-location-based-services/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20100830/scvngrs-seth-priebatsch-talks-about-geo-location-wars-facebook-places-and-more/ http://allthingsd.com/20100830/scvngrs-seth-priebatsch-talks-about-geo-location-wars-facebook-places-and-more/#comments Mon, 30 Aug 2010 16:00:09 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=33047

Last week, SCVNGR integrated its third-party social geolocation game service into the Facebook Places mega-location offering.

As it turned out, BoomTown was in Beantown–as in Boston–for a lovely wedding, so I took some prenuptial time to visit SCVNGR’s HQ in Cambridge, Mass., to talk to its founder, Seth Priebatsch.

In the launch last week, SCVNGR was one of a series of start-ups in the geolocation arena–such as Foursquare and Gowalla–that announced their cooperation with the giant social networking site’s effort to include their services into the offering using its social graph APIs.

SCVNGR’s take in the geolocation race is to allow users to do check-ins, complete challenges and earn points for rewards on mobile devices such as Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone and Google (GOOG) Android devices.

The idea came from an entrepreneur competition the high-energy Priebasch won as a freshman at Princeton University, which he left soon after to found SCVNGR.

It has raised about $5 million in funding from venture outfits such as Highland Capital Partners and Google Ventures–an investment that only adds to the irony here, since the search giant itself is about to launch a new social service to compete with Facebook.

Here is the video interview with Priebatsch, as well as a tour of SCVNGR’s HQ, in which we talk all about this and also how he hopes to differentiate his service from the pack:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100830/scvngrs-seth-priebatsch-talks-about-geo-location-wars-facebook-places-and-more/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20100827/resistance-is-futile-scvngr-integrates-with-facebook-places/ http://allthingsd.com/20100827/resistance-is-futile-scvngr-integrates-with-facebook-places/#comments Fri, 27 Aug 2010 14:00:28 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=32975

SCVNGR, the mobile-social game, seems to be one of the first of many third-party social games to integrate with Facebook’s new Places location feature.

In the launch last week, a series of start-ups in the geolocation arena announced their cooperation with the social networking site’s effort to include their services into the offering using its social graph APIs.

As BoomTown wrote about the appearance of several of these companies at the event:

Up trotted Gowalla’s CTO and Co-founder Scott Raymond, who showed off Gowalla and Facebook integration.

Then a Foursquare exec–not [Founder and CEO Dennis] Crowley, who has apparently checked in at a Chipolte in New York at the time of the places launch–loped up to say how great it all is. Just great! Really! Frankly, what else would the Foursquares say at this point.

Next: Yelp dude. Great! Just great! Integration! Check-in and pull your Facebook friends into the Yelp app.

Of course, it would not be a set without Booyah’s Keith Lee. Loves it! Fun! Just great!

This felt like a slow-moving version of invasion of the geo-location snatchers, a parade of glassy-eyed hostages, some scurvy mates walking the platform plank. Aaaaarrrr.

All joking aside, given the power of Facebook, these companies need to piggyback on its location efforts.

SCVNGR’s take in the geolocation race is to allow users to check in, complete challenges and earn points for rewards.

It has raised about $5 million in funding from venture outfits such as Highland Capital Partners and Google Ventures–an investment that only adds to the irony here, since Google (GOOG) itself is about to launch a new social service to compete with Facebook.

Here is the press release from SCVNGR, which is located in the Boston area:

SCVNGR Launches Facebook® Places Integration

SCVNGR Check-ins and Challenges Can be Posted To Facebook and Shared with Friends

Boston–August 27, 2010–SCVNGR, the mobile-social game all about going places, doing challenges, earning points and unlocking awesome rewards, announced its integration with Facebook Places today. SCVNGR is among the first location-based mobile games to build and launch with the Facebook Places feature of the Graph API.

Starting today, activity completed on SCVNGR–such as checking in and doing challenges at your favorite places–can be tied to physical locations, integrated with Facebook Places, and shared with friends on Facebook. Photos snapped and shared as part of playing SCVNGR can now be streamed in your location-based activity feed.

Similarly, social activity happening at that place on Facebook will stream back to users via their SCVNGR app for the most up-to-date social snapshot of what’s going on around them. The integration introduces the fun of doing challenges and unlocking rewards on SCVNGR to the hundreds of millions of people on Facebook.

“What Facebook brings to the location-based space is nothing short of phenomenal,” said Seth Priebatsch, SCVNGR’s Chief Ninja. “It adds huge scale by bringing social location features to more than 500 million people. SCVNGR is leveraging this to distribute our premium social gaming content–people doing fun and interesting challenges at places, building such challenges and earning rewards–directly through the social graph.”

SCVNGR is as much a mobile social game as it is a full-fledged mobile gaming platform. Users, businesses and enterprises build on the game layer by adding challenges and rewards to their favorite places. Everyone who plays SCVNGR can also build SCVNGR. This makes the game layer fun, unique and in a state of constant flux, where users build (and re-build) the game at places all across the United States. By integrating with Facebook Places, SCVNGR is tying this game layer directly to the social layer by tapping into the world’s largest social platform.

You can play SCVNGR anywhere in the U.S. via the free SCVNGR app for Android or iPhone. To grab the app, start playing and unlock awesome rewards, visit www.scvngr.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100827/resistance-is-futile-scvngr-integrates-with-facebook-places/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100818/facebook-places-review/ http://allthingsd.com/20100818/facebook-places-review/#comments Thu, 19 Aug 2010 00:31:03 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://ptech.allthingsd.com/?p=1473 The 800-pound gorilla of social networks, Facebook, is jumping into the location game.

On Wednesday, it announced a new, optional service for its 500 million members called Places, which allows you to check in to various places you go, and share that information with your Facebook friends, complete with maps and comments and the Facebook thumbs-up “like” feature.

I’ve been testing the new service, and found it easy to use and reliable, with mostly logical privacy controls, an issue on which Facebook has been bruised in the past.

Companies began to build location-based social networks shortly after smartphones began to include social-networking apps and the ability to pinpoint your location.

These services let you and your network “friends” know if you were in the same area, so you could get together. They also let merchants entice you with coupons or ads. All you had to do was use your smartphone to “check in” an establishment.

These location-based networks, notably Foursquare, have grown fast. Especially in a recession, many users appreciate offers to save money. There also is money to be made by the merchants.

But these networks are controversial. Though most have privacy controls, they are accused of eroding privacy by allowing others to know exactly where you are at any time. They also raise issues about giving such information to merchants.

Fourquare also has turned off some potential users with a big overlay of game-like features, like earning points and badges for visiting places, and even the ability to become the “mayor” of, say, a bar you frequent.

On the Facebook app, you initially can check in to Places only if you have Apple’s iPhone, though you can use a site at touch.facebook.com via your browser on other phones and laptops that can track your location and support HTML 5 technology.

Facebook Places on the iPhone.

In the past week or so, my colleague Katherine Boehret and I have used Facebook Places to check in with iPhones around our home base of Washington, D.C., at stores, bars, restaurants and even our office. I also was able to check in, or “tag,” other Facebook members with me, like my visiting son and daughter-in-law. All of these tests went well, but I was surprised by one odd thing: I could check myself into nearby places even if I wasn’t there.

At each location, Places lets you see your friends and other Facebook members (even if they’re not your friends), who are nearby, a feature called “People Here Now.”

Minors are excluded from seeing anyone except their friends. We couldn’t test this “Here Now” feature because, in the pre-release stage, there weren’t enough people with the new service to be nearby.

These check-ins were posted on our Facebook pages (though, for this test, they could only be seen by the handful of others with pre-release access to the service), and people could comment.

One reason Facebook has launched Places, surely, is to compete with location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla. Those services already can link up with Facebook and tap its huge member base, a potential threat to the larger social network.

Facebook says it is adding Places merely to enrich the social experience it already provides. The company says its users already post status messages that say things like: “at Starbucks in Harvard Square with Susan and Jeff.” Now, they can tap a new Places icon in the Facebook app on their iPhones and do this more easily, complete with a map. “We’re just building a new way for people to share that information in an engaging way,” says one Facebook official.

Facebook says it isn’t monetizing the service, at least not at first, but may consider ways for companies to make use of the data “down the line.”

Users won’t receive ads or offers, at least initially. But if a merchant already has a Facebook page, some will be able to display your check-ins from the start, though visible only to your friends. Facebook says it has no plans to add game-like features to Places, though third-party developers might.

In addition to testing Places around town, I paid close attention to its privacy features, to judge how much control Facebook is offering users over who gets to see where they are. My conclusion is that the controls are decent, but could be a bit better. You can control how public your Places information is on Facebook’s privacy settings screen, in the Sharing section. The default for Places is “Friends Only,” unless you expressed a preference to share things with everyone. That’s a good thing, in my view. You can change this to broaden it to, say, friends of friends, or even everyone. Or, you can limit it, so that, for instance, only certain people can see your location, or certain people can’t.

Facebook also allows you to bar others from checking you in, and lets you hide yourself from others’ “Here Now” listings, though you can’t customize this latter setting by, say, allowing only some people to know you’re nearby.

In my tests, these settings worked fine. But I wished a couple of other settings were available. For example, you can’t keep check-in notices off your Facebook page, unless you broadly block other kinds of status updates. And you can’t block merchants from including your check-ins at their establishments on their Facebook pages. Also, while Places omits some annoying aspects of its competitors, like the game features, it’s more stripped down and leaves out some attractive features others include. Foursquare has a feature that lets you leave suggestions about a location. And Gowalla has a “trips” feature that lets users string together places they’ve been into recommended tours.

Overall, I found Places a good enhancement to Facebook and one that will likely make the booming social network even more attractive to some.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos at walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100818/facebook-places-review/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100818/liveblogging-the-geo-location-announcement-oh-the-facebook-places-that-youll-go-and-perhaps-foursquares-dennis-crowley/ http://allthingsd.com/20100818/liveblogging-the-geo-location-announcement-oh-the-facebook-places-that-youll-go-and-perhaps-foursquares-dennis-crowley/#comments Wed, 18 Aug 2010 23:28:42 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=32420

BoomTown motored on down the lovely Highway 280 in Silicon Valley to Facebook to hear execs talk about a new geo-location feature the powerful social networking site is rolling out today.

And, the new name of the service, which will be deeply integrated into its current update system, as I reported earlier, will be “Places.”

The service seems to be basic and useful–it is reviewed here by Walt Mossberg–allowing people to post their location on the Wall of their Facebook profile, much as you might a photo or video.

There will be no games, no mayors and no special discounts either in Facebook Places–just plain and simple checking in and, presumably, taking names.

Privacy is a big focus of the launch of Places, which will allow users to decline to be placed by others.

The $100 million question is how much Facebook will allow the integration of other competing services including Foursquare.

A lot, it seems, as sources said Foursquare Founder and CEO Dennis Crowley was invited to appear for the announcements, perhaps to minimize the idea that this is a Foursquare-killer.

It’s not. Today.

4:30 pm PT: Of course, I and a badillion other reporters arrived on time, to 1050 Page Mill Road in Palo Alto, Calif. in a mass of media force that would probably better be deployed on more weighty topics than the particulars of checking in from some hip dive bar in the Mission neighborhood of San Francisco.

After some waiting, we were finally bussed–or perhaps the better word is geo-located–to the actual HQ of Facebook nearby, and shepherded (just like sheep that we are!) into its cafeteria.

Except it had been duded up like a tiki lounge with palm trees and a driftwood stage. I felt as though I was suddenly on an episode of “Gilligan’s Island.” Cue Ginger for her big song number with the coconut bra!

Hey, Skipper…

5:18 pm: That skipper would be CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who was–as usual–dressed in jeans and a t-shirt and was endearingly awkward as always. It’s kind of touching that Zuckerberg still tries to have the just-us-guys posture, despite all the fame and fortune.

He quickly announced Facebook Places, across the U.S. tomorrow, on an Apple (AAPL) iPhone app and a mobile Web site.

He talked about deciding to finally launch Places after a dinner out with his girlfriend, when, deploying a test version, they realized another Facebook exec, Chris Cox and his fiance were nearby at another restaurant.

It was an earth-shaking moment, implied Zuckerberg.

Ahem, knock, knock…that’s Foursquare! Have you heard of it?

Yes, Facebook has been ogling the hot New York location start-up for a year, which is precisely why we are all here.

5:28 pm: Michael Sharon, the product manager of Places gave us a little run-through of the service, which was about what you would expect.

Foursquare except cleaner. Booyah except no games. Gowalla except, well, not Gowalla.

What’s important is that it is very integrated into Facebook’s current features, such as the Wall and status updates. Which is the right thing to do since Facebook has no business being all trendy.

The plains are covered with the bodies of pioneers, as they say, so what Facebook Places is, essentially, is a fast follow.

Sharon moved onto privacy, the big gorilla in the room. You have to opt-in and agree and click here and default to off and you can only tag your friends and you can also block them too.

Also, per Woody Allen’s “Bananas,” all Facebook citizens will be required to change their underwear every half-hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside, so we can check.

Next, lots of info about APIs, so partners can also be part of Facebook’s geo-locating universe.

Up trotted Gowalla’s CTO and Co-founder Scott Raymond, who showed off Gowalla and Facebook integration.

Then a Foursquare exec–not Crowley, who has apparently checked in at a Chipolte in New York at the time of the places launch–loped up to say how great it all is. Just great! Really! Frankly, what else would the Foursquares say at this point.

Next: Yelp dude. Great! Just great! Integration! Check-in and pull your Facebook friends into the Yelp app.

Of course, it would not be a set without Booyah’s Keith Lee. Loves it! Fun! Just great!

This felt like a slow-moving version of invasion of the geo-location snatchers, a parade of glassy-eyed hostages, some scurvy mates walking the platform plank. Aaaaarrrr.

5:50 pm: Finally, Facebook’s product head Chris Cox, who is perhaps one of the more fetching geeks out there, bounded onstage to be all fetching and smart.

He talked about places like home, work and, um, bars. Well, actually, community locations, quoting Ray Oldenburg.

I was honestly not really listening to him at all, because I was riveted on his new haircut, which is just like the buzzed one Vince got on “Entourage” this season.

Errant thought: Those guys on “Entourage” would never check in from a bar! They are totally busy getting their groove on with the ladies–even Johnny Drama–and chillaxing with the doobies and tequila!

When I checked in again mentally, Cox was still chattering away about some glowing phone that tells you everything that happened in that bar forever and ever, since everyone was checking in and memorializing the place over time.

Good god, isn’t it enough that Facebook has all those drunkey-drunk photos from college students nationwide.

No! It wants it all! Yay, all our our drunkey-drunk moments will now be preserved in check-ins for all eternity!

Honey, remember when I ended up in the gutter here? Fun times for our grandkids to unearth one day!

5:58 pm: The Skipper Zuckerberg was back to moderate the Q&A.

Privacy questions about making private places public. If a lot of people are there, it becomes public.

Next: What up with monetization with deals? Zuckerberg notes that Places is at its starting point and “certainly you can imagine these things in the future.”

There was a question about how Places started. Well, IMHO, the moment when Facebook saw Foursquare’s innovation and freaked out.

A very goofy question about what happens when drunkey-drunk places shut down and all those memories are gone, which made me wonder if the reporter asking was drunkey-drunk.

“That’s not a problem we can solve,” said Cox.

Good answer.

Now, the Skipper wants to show us a Facebook custom, which made me suddenly nervous. Sacrifice of the media? No, just some switch-pulling thing.

There was apparently also another tradition–for a six-year-old company, that is–of hitting some gong.

Aha, it’s “The Gong Show.”

Geo-locate that.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100818/liveblogging-the-geo-location-announcement-oh-the-facebook-places-that-youll-go-and-perhaps-foursquares-dennis-crowley/feed/ 8 http://allthingsd.com/20100818/will-facebook-debut-a-foursquare-lite-location-feature-or-a-real-competitor-or-what/ http://allthingsd.com/20100818/will-facebook-debut-a-foursquare-lite-location-feature-or-a-real-competitor-or-what/#comments Wed, 18 Aug 2010 12:11:14 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=32361

Later today, as BoomTown previously reported, Facebook is likely to show off what it has been working on for a while now in the geo-location arena.

We’ll see whassup at 4:30 pm PT, when Facebook will hold a “news event” at the social-networking powerhouse’s HQ in Silicon Valley. (I will be liveblogging from it, natch.)

While most agree that the unveiling of the powerful social-networking site’s geo-location plans will have big impact, it will be much more interesting to see precisely what Facebook will do and how it innovates.

The company has certainly been talking about some sort of location feature for a long time–even as start-ups such as Foursquare and Booyah have grown like gangbusters–so much so that it has become a mini-waiting game in Silicon Valley.

But how Facebook integrates the hot trend into what it has built rather than bought–Facebook considered buying the New York-based Foursquare–is full of all kinds of complexities and possible sand traps.

Here is what I think it might–and should–show off:

NO PLAYING GAMES

There is plenty of that kind of silliness offered by others, and the badge, mayorships and general gaming is not really Facebook’s style.

In fact, gimmickry, which eventually becomes tiresome, is not really one of the tools in Facebook’s arsenal. Creating features–such as the Wall–that have become daily helpers is the ticket here.

In fact, it would be great if Facebook could go radically useful with a check-in feature, which would be for the rest of us who are not interested in broadcasting our presence at New York clubs into the wee hours.

Still, it would be nice to get all kinds of offers and freebies for using the service and giving up even more personal information to the hungry maw of this–still–Mark Zuckerberg production.

SEAMLESS THIRD-PARTY AGGREGATION

A must, given Facebook is all about integration and coordination for its users. It has already easily welcomed in all kinds of third-party services, and it must give developers on its platform geo-location capabilities.

So, any Facebook offering would need to integrate all the current location services, both on the Web site and in its mobile app.

That said, it is also important that Facebook also has a strong and effective offering of its own.

PLEASE MARK, I WANT SOME MORE

Location-sharing needs to be more than location-sharing, IMHO.

That’s because check-ins can become as inane as some Twitter posts.

In my bedroom! Now, in my bathroom! Now, in my kitchen. Hey from the 7-11! Aaaaaagh!

In fact, what is most useful about Foursquare is a part the service seems to give little attention to–user-generated info about various places.

Facebook could give truly helpful on-the-go info if it did a good job here, letting me know–for example–that I need to avoid the shrimp-puff appetizer at all costs or alerting me to the joys of some esoteric spa service.

Best of all, it would be nice if this info were not generated just by my friends, but by everyone. Because my friends are really boring.

WHAT HAPPENS ON FACEBOOK CHECK-IN, STAYS ON FACEBOOK CHECK-IN

Facebook has a long-running and much-deserved reputation for not treating privacy issues with enough concern and care.

While it is one thing to have a status update that you are enjoying 43 cold ones by the Jersey Shore with Snooki, it is quite another to geo-locate your trashy sojourn without a terrific level of control.

And, of course, controls that are comprehensible and easy to use.

Thus, some rules:

Any location service must be opt-in only.

Any location service must be set to private to start and allow users to change settings with each update.

Check-ins must be verified, so people cannot lie and manipulate the system.

The entire Facebook community of 500 million users must know exactly where Mark Zuckerberg is at every moment–wait, that’s just my secret wish.

Well, not a wish: All Facebook execs should publicly and actively be using the check-in services to let us all know that everyone is on the exact same page.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100818/will-facebook-debut-a-foursquare-lite-location-feature-or-a-real-competitor-or-what/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100701/loco-about-location-or-just-plain-crazy/ http://allthingsd.com/20100701/loco-about-location-or-just-plain-crazy/#comments Thu, 01 Jul 2010 16:14:46 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=30138

After the much anticipated news yesterday that Foursquare would finally grab a big piece of change from the powerful Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz–$20 million simoleons, in fact–BoomTown was much entertained by two very different blog post that went up about the deal.

The first was by one of the hot social location start-up’s early VCs, well-known New York investor Fred Wilson of Union Square Partners.

In a post on his blog A VC, titled “Some Thoughts on Foursquare,” Wilson disagreed with my assessment that the deal to fund the company–which included acquisition interest from Yahoo (YHOO) and Facebook–was “a very long and decidedly strange funding journey” and that it came “after a series of missteps and switchbacks over what’s next for Foursquare.”

His essential argument about what he thinks of as criticism on my part: Wrong!

Wrote Wilson:

“The conversations with potential acquirers were very beneficial to the founders and the company in many ways. It helped them to understand what the risks of going it alone were versus the risks of selling….And it allowed the founders to develop close working relationships with some of the most important Internet companies who can not only be acquirers but also distribution partners and monetization partners.”

Okay, I’ll bite. It’s all been a terrific learning experience for Foursquare’s young management team, especially its CEO, Dennis Crowley. Like college but without the tests and, instead of forking it out, you get handed a big pile of money at the end!

Plus you meet all these nice people along the way, who–even if they don’t scoop you up in a big acquisition hug today–are now super good pals who might also hand you a pile of money tomorrow.

Maybe so, but that does not mean they didn’t wince at the process they got drawn into.

Actually, from numerous interviews with all the players involved, even those who like Crowley and think there is something innovative at Foursquare, pretty much everyone thought the whole process a tad sloppy, a bit arrogant, a lot noisy and, perhaps most of all, gave everyone a little too much time to consider the many competitive challenges the company faced.

Does that matter? Probably not, as everyone in the Internet business is very much used to VCs and others treating entrepreneurs as delicate hothouse flowers who must be revered, coddled and indulged in their noble quest to bring us all kinds of cool stuff, such as the ability to check in from my garage.

And, of course, some of them deserve that attention and petting up and down, transforming into digital geese laying golden eggs for all.

But some definitely do not. Because for every Facebook, there is a plethora of not so successful companies that get quickly and copiously feted and then hit the inevitable wall.

Slide, run by an extraordinarily gifted entrepreneur, Max Levchin, is a good case in point. After its $50 million funding in early 2008, the company was valued at $550 million and seemed ready to take over the widget universe.

It was, if you recall, very hot.

But things cooled and Slide has since regrouped. It is now plugging away at the tough part of building its social entertainment business into a real business.

Perhaps not as hot, where the real heat is.

And, that’s the underlying point Microsoft (MSFT) Director of Social Engagements Mark Drapeau seemed to be making in his post, “It’s About Trust: Thoughts on Location-Based Services, Especially FourSquare.”

His premise: Who knows yet who is going to succeed in the geo-location space.

Wrote Drapeau:

“I don’t necessarily see why FourSquare or Gowalla or even Facebook will necessarily be the market leader. People generally speak of these three as if they’re predetermined….Deploying the app and making it cool isn’t the real challenge. Building trust among the user base is.”

While you can easily dismiss any complaint from a Microsoft dude–who even admitted to a frustrating experience of trying to reach Crowley to do a small deal–you still cannot ignore the simple idea that these fundings are all crapshoots a lot of the time.

Which is why I do agree with Wilson in a way about his bromide about taking time to deliberate big decisions:

“So the moral of this story, if you will, is don’t let conventional wisdom force you into making decisions you don’t need to make and you aren’t ready to make, particularly about very big decisions that you will be living with the rest of your life.”

Indeed, but let’s perhaps take it one step further:

Don’t let Silicon Valley conventional wisdom force you into making mountains out of molehills too early, particularly very big mountains that you will be waiting to form for the rest of your life.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100701/loco-about-location-or-just-plain-crazy/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20100526/booyah-ceo-keith-lee-talks-about-social-gaming-moolah-and-more-with-accels-jim-breyer-as-sidekick/ http://allthingsd.com/20100526/booyah-ceo-keith-lee-talks-about-social-gaming-moolah-and-more-with-accels-jim-breyer-as-sidekick/#comments Wed, 26 May 2010 12:15:19 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=28843

Earlier this week, BoomTown motored on down to the HQ of Booyah in downtown Palo Alto, Calif., for a chat with its CEO and co-founder, Keith Lee.

Also there: Jim Breyer, the Accel Partners moneybags who recently joined the board of the mobile social gaming start-up, forking over $20 million in new funding for the privilege.

Best known for its MyTown iPhone app, now with upward of two million users, Booyah is made up of a team of gaming industry veterans, especially from Blizzard Entertainment, which is now part of Activision Blizzard (ATVI).

Started in 2008, the company had previously raised $9 million in venture funding, mostly from the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers $100 million iFund, as well as from DAG Ventures.

MyTown, which is about to come out with a new version, is one of the most popular and innovative location-based social games on Apple (AAPL) mobile devices.

That compares with other social check-in services, such as Foursquare (just over one million users) and Gowalla (250,000).

MyTown is slightly different from these services, though, focusing on gaming in its check-ins and virtual goods versus emphasis on a discovery element.

Lee and Breyer talk about all this and more in the video of my interview, which includes a short tour of Booyah’s Silicon Valley HQ (it is soon moving to San Francisco):

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