Submitted by: Nishant Singh (E058)

Foursquare

Co-founders of foursquare are deciding how to respond to competitive threats

and scale up the organization.
Foursquare was a location-based online service that allowed users to "check
in" to a location using an application on a smartphone. Foursquare kept track
of a user's check-ins, shared them with users' friends, and unlocked
"Specials" that gave users discounts at nearby locations. Within a year and a
half of its founding the company had 45 employees and over 5 million users
and was valued in excess of $100 million.
However, many competitors, including Facebook, Twitter, and Yelp, developed
competitive services requiring foursquare responding.
Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai developed a facility of location-based
online social application that allowed the users check in facility by using a
smart phone application.
Foursquare has its headquarter in the New York City and aims to keep track of
users check-ins, sharing with friends status, and unlock specials that
consist of various discounts to the users at nearby locations.
Foursquare offer modified recommendations and agreement based on where
you and your friends have been. It gives city guides facility for mobile devices
that dont include any social feature.
Crowley along with Alex Rainert in New York Universitys Interactive
Telecommunication Program in 2002 wrote a thesis in order to develop a
social city-guide platform called Dodgeball, which permitted the users to
share their locations by sending address in the text message to Dodgeballs
servers.
API (application program interface) service of Foursquare was far better than
Twitter because they were positioning its own applications to interact with the
service unlike Twitter whose API was used by third party developers to create
applications.