We’ve been saying this for a while now: Foursquare isn’t about badges and mayorships anymore. You need only look at the company’s latest round of funding for confirmation.

Foursquare announced today that it has raised $41 million in a fourth round of funding led by private equity firm Silver Lake Partners. With the additional funds, Foursquare has time to actually build up its business by focusing more on ad operations, sales, and local search features.

Most of the investment is in the form of a multi-year loan from Silver Lake, while the rest is made up of convertible debt from VC firms including Union Square Ventures and Andreesseen Horowitz.

By going for debt funding, rather than equity, Foursquare obfuscates the debate about its value, , Bloomberg reports. Foursquare was said to be worth around $600 million during its last round in 2011, when it raised $50 million. So far, the New York City-based company has raised $112.4 million.

On his blog, Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson explains why the convertible debt funding was a good idea for existing investors this round:

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.

Foursquare made a big splash at the South by Southwest conference in 2009, when the notion of checking into locations and competing with your friends for virtual points and badges seemed fresh. But even though the company now has 33 million users and integration with 40,000 apps, its main source of revenue — ads within search — has been a disappointment. The company reportedly only made $2 million in revenue last year, an anonymous source tells Bloomberg.

With Foursquare’s newest iOS app this week, we’re already seeing the company focus more on search rather than check-ins. Expect even more relevant ads to pop up within Foursquare’s search feature as well — the company’s CEO and founder, Dennis Crowley, tells Bloomberg that it will open up ads to all of its merchant partners, as well as grow its sales team from 10 people to 40.

The company is betting that its rich location data, along with knowledge of your social connections, will make it primed for predicting where you’d like to go next. Foursquare’s chief revenue officer, Steven Rosenblatt, also notes that customers either click on an ad, or visit a display store, 3 to 5 percent of the time within 72 hours. In comparison, typical mobile ads see a click-through rate under 1 percent, according to Chitika.

“To us, this is like when Google came and revolutionized web search,” Crowley wrote on the Foursquare blog today. “Suddenly, you could find things on the internet. The real world is the same way. Four years ago when we started Foursquare, it was really hard to discover a new retro arcade that opened up on a side street, or to make sure you weren’t overlooking the best dish on the menu, or to know a good friend was just around the corner. Sometimes, we think of Foursquare as having the ability to give people superpowers for exploring the real world.”

Photo: Nan Palmero/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Foursquare wants to topple Yelp to become your go-to local search app, but something’s holding it back: Foursquare itself.

For most people, Foursquare is still that semi-creepy app that gives you badges when you check into places. But that’s the old Foursquare. Developed over the last year, the new Foursquare has quietly evolved into one of most effective and elegant local search tools out there — only no one knows it yet.

This is a problem that Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley is well-aware of. “Foursquare is much more than mayorships and badges. It’s a perception issue. We’ve definitely been phasing a lot of that stuff out,” he said while on stage at SXSW last week.

Why the shift in emphasis? Because there’s just not that much money in mayorships and check-ins. At the core of the new Foursquare is Explore, Foursquare’s local search service. Foursquare Explore is powerful and robust — so much so that I don’t even think of using services like Yelp or Google+ Local when I’m trying to find somewhere new to go. Looking for a bar that’s nearby and similar to the ones you already like? Explore shows you the way. (Explore is also very good at pointing out places even when it has no user data to go on. Just try out its new-ish log-in free web interface.)

Explore is one of the best things that’s ever happened to Foursquare.

As I noted when the app added reviews to its venue listings, Foursquare was once the app that people used when they got somewhere. Now, Foursquare wants to be the app that sends them there in the first place.

This is where the money ties in. Much of Foursquare’s revenue comes from targeted coupons, which are tied into Foursquare’s now-massive trove of location data and preferences. All those check-ins you did back in 2009 didn’t just disappear — they’re making Foursquare what is today.

With the check-in data, combined with deals with local merchants (and credit card companies like American Express, Mastercard, and Visa), Foursquare is setting the stage for its inevitable rebirth. Now it just needs get its users back.

As of last November, only about 8 million of Foursquare’s then-25 million registered members used the app once a month, according to the Wall Street Journal. That’s 32 percent — not a great number, and probably not one that’s changed all that much now that Foursquare has crossed the 30 million-user threshold.

Most friends I asked still think Foursquare is about stalking their friends, collecting badges, and being the Mayor of the local Burger King — but that couldn’t be further from reality. Foursquare is different! It’s changed! It wants you back!

And that’s the real tragedy here. While making money has traditionally been Foursquare’s biggest challenge, the more pressing one going forward is going to be shifting the perception of the service that Foursquare itself so effectively created.

Photo: Box dudes/Shutterstock

Foursquare has teamed up with Visa and Mastercard to expand its check-in deals service that lets users earn better specials by using their credit cards.

The deal, which was first reported by AdAge, is quite similar to the one Foursquare struck with American Express back in June 2011. Just connect your Visa, Mastercard, or American Express credit card to your Foursquare accounts to earn specials at select locations. When you check-in at that place and use your connected credit card, you earn the special.

The technology that is actually enabling the new deals for Foursquare is First Data’s OfferWise, which simplifies the offer redemption process. That company makes it possible to use Visa and Mastercard for check-in deals, while American Express has its own setup with Foursquare.

Foursquare also takes a cut of any transaction done with the program, so this could be a promising way to make the startup some cash. It also gives more Foursquare users more incentive to check in and see if there is a deal at the place they are shopping or eating at.

“This is going to be a pretty core part of our revenue model going forward,” Foursquare product manager Noah Weiss told AdAge.

The first deal will the expanded programs will run today at 8,000 Burger King locations in the United States. If you check in and use a connected Visa, Mastercard, or American Express card, you can get a $1 discount when you spend at least $10.

Check out what that deal looks like below.

Foursquare users with a love for space and science have a new reward today: a brand-new badge from NASA, the space agency announced today.

Starting today, Foursquare users that like NASA’s account on the service may get a Curiosity Explorer badge, based on NASA’s extraterrestrial life-seeking Mars rover, whenever they check in to a NASA visitor center, a science museum, or a planetarium.

This isn’t the first time NASA has partnered with the location-based social network. The Curiosity rover became the first device to check-in on another planet when it arrived on Mars back in October, and it routinely sends updates from the planet in the form of factoids, Mars Photos, and other discoveries. And prior to Curiosity, NASA partnered with Foursquare to provide check-ins from the International Space Station.

NASA is one of the few government agency’s that really understands how to use the social web to both educate and promote what it’s doing. And the new Curiosity badge is yet another example of that. Also, anything that makes people pay more attention to science is a good thing in my book.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple is in talks with with Foursquare to bring local data into Apple’s Maps application, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Apple has already integrated reviews and other local information from Yelp within its maps, and according to the WSJ it has also been in talks with other companies swimming with local data.

It makes sense for Apple to tap Foursquare next — the company emerged as the winner in the location check-in wars a few years ago, but now it’s positioning itself more as a local discovery service. Foursquare has a significant amount of data and more than 25 million users, but only eight million of those are active at least once a month. Foursquare desperately needs more partners and revenue, and a deal with Apple could give it room to breathe as it tries to entice users.

But while Foursquare integration would be intriguing, I’m hoping Apple is also working hard to improve the quality of its map app. Apple’s iOS 6 map app was widely criticized for the quality of its data (and it was a big reason why Google Maps for iPhone has been so popular). Ultimately, having accurate and bug-free map data is far more important than any whiz-bang social integration.

Photo: Nan Palmero/Flickr

Facebook has updated the “Nearby” feature on its iOS and Android mobile apps, a move that could hurt Yelp and Foursquare in the location data wars.

While Facebook basically dropped out of owning check-ins, it still wants users to depend on its apps for everything they need, including finding places to eat, drink, shop, and more. Facebook has had a Nearby feature on iOS and Android, but before it was focused on showing people nearby. (A quick scan on my phone shows that hardly any of my friends check-in, so very few show up in the feature.)

But the new Nearby gets way more powerful by using friend check-ins to power recommendations around you and show great places to visit near you, both similar to what you get out of Foursquare. It also shows off business hours of places you look at, something you’d normally use Yelp for.

The company wrote in a blog post today:

Today we’re announcing updates to Nearby in the Facebook for iOS and Android apps that make it easy to discover new places your friends like.

From the app menu, open the tab to find local spots your friends have recommended, checked into, or liked. If you’re looking for a place to eat, choose a category like Restaurants to see what’s nearby. When you find a place that looks interesting, tap to see info like friends who’ve been there and business hours.

In addition to discovering new places to visit, you can share what you think by rating or recommending places to your friends. Your own suggestions become more personalized the more you and your friends rate, recommend, and check into places.

Facebook says that the Nearby feature is still fresh, so the results will get better as more people use it. The company also said it plans to include places info from third-party services “in the near future.”

The update to Facebook’s iOS and Android apps will be available later today.

Yelp investors don’t seem particularly enthusiastic about Facebook encrouching on Yelp’s territory, as Yelp’s stock is currently down 3.5 percent in late-day trading.

Check-in and city exploration app Foursquare is making it even easier to be always in the know when your friends flit about the world — because, of course, it’s not creepy at all to keep super close tabs on your friends.

The places-centric social network today introduced a notifications option called “Always On.” The feature allows members to receive notifications for each and every check-in selected friends’ make, even when they’re not nearby.

The new option is a small addition to the service, which previously only allowed Foursquare users to receive check-in notifications for friends in the same city.

Members can visit a friend’s Foursquare profile to toggle the check-in notification to always on, as pictured below. Note that this is a feature private to friends, and that a Foursquare member can only get the always-on notifications for users who have accepted friendship requests.

Still, the implications are rather interesting. A loved one, for instance, could know that you’ve arrived safely at your destination. A friend could keep tabs on your European tour. Or a boss, if you’ve Foursquare-friended your superior, could get instantly notified when you’ve checked in somewhere scandalous.

As such, the feature reinforces the idea that Foursquare is intended to be a social networking experience shared by real friends, not just mere acquaintances. If anything, this stalker-friendly feature may inspire people to prune and fine-tune their Foursquare friends’ lists.

Photo credit: nan palmero/Flickr

If you’re tired of Travel Channel reruns, New York City-based Tripl wants to offer you a more social alternative: a simple way to follow your friends’ travels via geographical information in their social media posts.

While it won’t compete with a well-crafted Anthony Bourdain show, Tripl could let you live vicariously through your friends’ experiences, and hopefully even inspire you to travel more. The site connects to your Facebook and Foursquare accounts to collect travel information from your friends, and it gives you beautiful daily digests of their postings.

Tripl was founded in 2009 in Stockholm, Sweden with the original goal of pairing travelers with locals. It released an early version of that web application last December, but since then the company has joined  NYC’s Dreamit Ventures Summer class and has pivoted to focus more on collecting travel stories.

“You hear about tons of startups going through a pivot phase during incubators. What we’re doing is really a ‘focus’ phase, by focusing 100% of our attention on 20% of the previous product we built,” said founder and CEO Pete Sullivan in a statement today. He says that the company is avoiding getting too feature rich quickly, even though there are plenty of cool additions the team is eager to jump on.

Originally from the Greenpoint neighborhood in Brooklyn, Sullivan caught the travel bug at a young age thanks to his family’s love of international travel, he told VentureBeat in an interview several weeks ago. He continued to travel when he got older and quickly realized how much better his experiences were when he had friends in the area. That sparked the initial idea for Tripl, and it’s something that the company could still return to eventually.

For now, Tripl is focusing on social travel stories. The company aims to add support for Instagram soon and will launch an iOS app in the next few weeks.

Tripl raised $300,000 from three angel investors in Sweden last year as well as $300,000 in debt financing from High Peak Venture Partners and Quotidian Capital in March. The company has also received a private investment from a pro poker player, as well as a grant from the Swedish government.

Front photo via Shutterstock

Check-in schmeck-in. Leveling up in status, Boston-based SCVNGR has picked up $12 million in funding as part of a two-part, extra-large fund raise to help its one-year-old, burgeoning mobile payment service LevelUp become a leader in the space.

SCVNGR, which seems to scoot by on the “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” mantra of startup life, is the three year-old company that first sparred with Foursquare and others in the venue check-in space. The upstart has spent the past 18 months checking out of check-ins and into transactions with its second product LevelUp, a mobile payment system that borrows from the pay-by-phone-scan system that Starbucks first made popular.

Launched one year ago and live at more than 3,000 locations across eight U.S. cities, including Ben & Jerry’s, Coldstone, and Johnny Rockets chains, LevelUp is an iPhone and Android payment app for consumers, and a terminal and rewards system that merchants can install to process payments and run new customer or loyalty campaigns. LevelUp has plans to launch in 25 additional cities over the summer.

Ultimately, LevelUp’s approach to mobile payments steals the best parts of Starbuck’s widely popular mobile pay program — scannable codes and an attached loyalty program — for a clever, pay-by-phone QR code system that anyone with an iPhone or Android can use right out of the box.

Priebatsch on Foursquare and offloading check-ins for transactions

Wearing his trademark uniform of orange polo and jeans, SCVNGR founder and CEO Priebatsch joined me for a video Skype chat Thursday morning to discuss his company’s latest raise and to reflect on taking the off-ramp on the once traffic-congested highway of the check-in space.

The app’s convenience, and the fact that the company has begun stripping out interchange fees for merchants and adopting a pay-per-performance-only model, is why the system is seeing such rapid adoption by businesses and remarkable engagement from consumers, Priebatsch told me.

Clearly, the switch in focus from check-ins to payments was a turning point for the company. SCVNGR the check-in app still exists, and is doing well Priebatsch insists (I’m skeptical), but roughly 85 percent of the startup’s resources are now allocated to LevelUp.

“We, about a year-and-a-half ago, made this interesting and kind of aggressive decision to go after the transaction,” he said. “If you look at our biggest competitor at the time, Foursquare, they did not. They made a very different choice. And usually when you make a choice, you kind of create a rift in the space-time continuum and you only get to see the choice you made. You don’t get to look across the rift … so, for us, it’s interesting to watch Foursquare … to watch what the other remaining company in the location-based space is doing now that they have to evolve a little bit beyond the check-in because that value proposition is fuzzy.”

Priebatsch believes, of course, that SCVNGR took the right path and is headed in the more lucrative direction. He points to today’s Foursquare app revamp as proof.

“Foursquare’s most recent product update moves them to be closer and closer to Yelp,” he said. “Because they choose to stay in the check-in space, and the check-in space doesn’t add enough value to support a company of their valuation, the natural evolution has to be to become a reviews site.”

Show me the money

LevelUp, though, has a seemingly unimpressive registered user base of just 200,000 people. Still, that’s enough to make it the second largest mobile payment network in the U.S., second only to Starbucks, at least by Priebatsch’s estimates.

Roughly 65 percent of users are active every month, about 50 percent are active every two weeks, and the average user is using LevelUp two to three times a week, he said. The mobile pay system processes $2 million a month, with an average transaction size just under $10. It’s worth noting that the LevelUp business is not yet profitable, though Priebatsch says it’s trending in that direction.

click to enlarge

LevelUp will also support 60 percent of POS systems by the end of year, he added, which should make its nationwide roll-out go all the more smoothly.

Even the city of Boston is on board. The city, looking to help its businesses level-up with citizens, has plastered subway cars with LevelUp posters (pictured right) that let consumers scan QR codes to get $5 to spend through LevelUp at local merchants.

Still, it’s hard to get a good read on LevelUp’s real health. Investor’s doubling-down on bets and new firms signing on for the mobile pay gamble are all good signs. There’s also the fact that the total volume of transactions processed through LevelUp is growing by 15 percent every seven days.

SCVNGR’s $12 million partial round includes participation from existing investors Highland Capital, Google Ventures, Balderton Capital, and new investors Continental Investors and Transmedia Capital, and brings SCVNGR’s to-date raise up to $32 million. Priebatsch said the remainder of this round will likely close in 45 days and include participation from one to two larger firms to make the total amount raised “a fair amount larger.”

SCVNGR is headquartered in Boston. The startup also has offices in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Seattle, San Diego, Chicago, New York, and San Francisco.

Fighting AIDS through Foursquare check-ins and lattes, non-profit (RED), Starbucks, and the location-based startup have partnered up for a 10-day fundraising and AIDS awareness campaign.

From June 1 to 10, Starbucks will donate $1 to the Global Fund, the recipient of (RED) money, for every Foursquare check-in at any of its locations in the U.S. and Canada. The partnership and check-in campaign, which will raise up to $250,000, aims to spread the word via social media channels around (RED)’s Rush to Zero campaign, an effort that seeks to eliminate the mother-to-child transmission of HIV by 2015.

(RED) is the non-profit founded by Bono and Bobby Shriver in 2006 to raise money for the Global Fund and fight AIDS in Africa. The organization has raised more than $190 million to date, and Starbucks has long been a RED partner having already contributed $10 million to the Global Fund.

“We are excited that through (RED)’s check-in activation with Foursquare, our customers have an easy way to help make a difference towards an AIDS free generation by 2015, a hugely important milestone in the fight against AIDS,” Starbucks public affairs executive vice president Vivek Varma said in a statement.

Foursquare says the fundraising effort is the startup’s largest non-profit check-in campaign to date. The startup will also be commemorating the proxy donations by doling out virtual (RED) Rush to Zero badges to members who participate.

Photo credit: Jennifer Van Grove

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

After launching one year ago, New York City-based Sonar unveiled a major update today that makes it easier than ever to find friends and like-minded people nearby — all with the goal of becoming a “Here-Now” mobile social network.

When it launched, the free Sonar app tapped Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare data to see how you were connected to people checked into specific locations. Today, Sonar is adding a slew of new features to build on its promising start, including “Sonar Presence,” which allows the app to run in the background and automatically alert you of interesting people nearby, and “Sonar Status,” which acts like a tweet just for friends nearby.

You’ll now be able to send private messages to people from within the Sonar app, and the company tells me it will also alert you of when your actual friends are nearby.

All of the new features serve to make Sonar even more compelling, especially compared to overly-hyped people discovery apps like Highlight and Circle.

Whereas Highlight is focused on connecting you to people actually using its app, Sonar does a better job of highlighting people that you’re connected to on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Foursquare, even if they’re not using the Sonar app. It may just be a personal thing, but Sonar fits far better into how I’d like to approach people discovery. The first time I opened the newly updated Sonar app, I found people I was connected with at some of my favorite haunts. Few apps have proven their usefulness to me so quickly.

Thanks to Sonar Presence, the app is no longer limited to finding people checked into locations. Sonar is also making a bigger push now to connect you to friends, or people you may know via an acquaintance, rather than finding complete strangers. That removes a big creep factor from social discovery, and it opens the door for you to be better organized with people you actually care about.

Getting enough data to make local recommendations has proved tough. A restaurant reviewer writing for a local newspaper might write a hundred or so reviews a year. Zagat might cover several thousand in its printed books. Yelp provides near universal coverage in the United States, but it still doesn’t have enough information to provide useful recommendations.

But American Express is sitting on top of some of the best data in the world with which to make recommendations: transaction histories of millions of cardholders. (Disclosure: I have a very tiny stake in AmEx.) I’ve been an American Express cardmember since 1993. In theory, AmEx has 18 years of data on me. (AmEx spokeswoman Charlotte Fuller declined to comment on how far back AmEx keeps transaction data.)

Last month, AmEx collected 60 data points on me from my transactions. If you view everyone of those as a check in, you realize how powerful that is. Very few companies have as much data on me. The likely suspects are Facebook, Google, Twitter, and the various ad networks. Most startups certainly don’t. And other credit card networks like Visa and MasterCard don’t own the relationship with the card holders — Citibank, Chase, Bank of America and other issuers do — so the data is spread thin.

The data that AmEx has is much higher quality than what Facebook, Google and the others have:

• It’s complete, not aspirational. On social networks, we like to project how cool and special we are. We check in at the fancy places. AmEx knows that sometimes I will eat at Taco Bell at 2 in the morning. (But I have never eaten at Applebee’s.)
• It’s validated. I walked by Commander’s Palace the other day in New Orleans. I checked in on Foursquare and posted that to Twitter and Facebook. It was a fake check in. I didn’t actually eat or drink there. AmEx knows that.
• It includes dollars spent. Not only does AmEx know I went someplace, it knows how much I spent there.
• It is harder to spam. Restaurant owners and competitors can’t manipulate their ratings given the volume of data.
• It doesn’t suffer from a sample bias like Yelp does. Everyone with an AmEx card is contributing data, not a very small subset of people.

For each transaction, AmEx knows who made it, the dollar amount, and the time. This may not seem like enough data, but if you get it in the volume that AmEx does, it gets really interesting. Although AmEx does not disclose the number of transactions on its network, last year it processed $822.2 billion in transactions. By my estimates, it is processing between 5 and 10 billion transactions a year. That’s a lot of data! By contrast, Yelp has 27.6 million reviews in its entire history, about 20% of which are spam. AmEx has 98 million cards in force. That is a lot of unique users contributing data.

In addition to the data AmEx gets from each transaction, it has relationships with cardmembers and merchants. For each card, it knows the billing address, user’s age, affinity (for example, my primary card is the Starwood AmEx) and type of card (personal, small business or corporate). For each merchant, it knows the location and typical volume. With its partnerships with Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare, AmEx is also connecting its records with social media identities.

Here are some of the things that AmEx could do with all of these data:

• Recommend restaurants based on other restaurants you’ve visited. People who regularly go to Applebee’s might get more chain restaurants, people who eat at fancy places will get more fancy places.
• Make recommendations based on budget. Unlike local sites that rely on users to give price ranges, AmEx knows what the typical transactions are.
• Separate “locals” places from “tourist” places. Because AmEx knows your billing ZIP code, it can determine whether you live in the area or are just visiting. Taking this a step further, AmEx could distinguish between neighborhood places and finer places. The fact that I keep spending money at a place three blocks from where I live isn’t surprising. But if I keep going back to the same place 20 miles away, that place is probably very good.
• Make recommendations for expense account places. Because AmEx knows corporate cards vs. personal cards, it can make recommendations for a fancy business dinner.
• Tell me what businesses are open on a holiday. It’s Memorial Day and I don’t know what’s open. By collecting and analyzing real-time swipe data, AmEx could tell me where I can go. (Presumably businesses that are swiping transactions are open.)

AmEx knows me well enough to know what I typically buy. It uses this to figure out fraud. I recently tried to make a $245 purchase at Brookstone. Buying overpriced crap doesn’t fit my profile, so AmEx rejected the charge. (Charges for $500 and $1,500 on Amazon fly through.) When you’ve got money on the line, you have to invest in good algorithms.

I would love to see AmEx use all of its data and algorithms to help me make decisions on where to spend my money.

AmEx clearly sees the value in it, too.

“Data is going to be the driving force of commerce going forward,” Dan Schulman, AmEx’s Group President for Enterprise Growth told me back in January. “In many ways, the data associated with making a transaction may very will be more valuable than the value that you get as a financial services company from helping to complete that transaction.”

So why doesn’t it move faster? My sense is that the company is worried about getting too far ahead of consumers. It’s also hyper-concerned about privacy.

“We need to make it clear that while we definitely look at data as a tool to better service our customers and deliver value in new and innovative ways, we have strong privacy policies in place to inform customers of how and when we use their information, as well as offer them the ability to opt-out of ANY information sharing,” Fuller said. I’ve asked AmEx executives at various levels for data and the answer is always the same: no.

Like any large data set, this one has limitations. When I was walking through this concept with someone I know at AmEx, she said that algorithms based on AmEx data would never recommend Peter Luger’s steak house, because Peter Luger’s doesn’t accept any credit cards. That’s not ideal, but the ability to get recommendations without doing all of the work Yelp requires is still highly valuable.

AmEx also does not currently have SKU-level data. It knows I spent $39.95 at Amazon on April 16 but not that I bought the Le Creuset Stoneware Fruit/Pasta Bowl, Casiss. With SKU-level data, AmEx likely would have allowed the Brookstone charge to go through, knowing that Pan Am cufflinks fit with my profile as an aviation buff. AmEx could even have recommended them based on my earlier purchase of Concorde cufflinks.

Large retailers like Amazon are unlikely to share SKU-level data with transaction processors. That data is too valuable. But smaller retailers might. At a much smaller scale, that’s what the small businesses that use Square Register are doing. Square knows that when I’m in San Francisco, I have a fugazetta empanada at El Porteno. Square should be able to recommend other places I would like when I’m traveling.

This can all be done without me writing a single review. Watch what I do, not what I say I do.

[Image credit: paul prescott/Shutterstock]

While the usefulness of the location sharing app Foursquare may be dubious, one thing is certain: the company has so far lacked a real revenue source.

So it’s not at all surprising (and in fact a bit heartening) to learn that Foursquare is checking in to a new venture: coupons. Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley made the announcement in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.

Appearing in a July update of the Foursquare app, the coupons will take the form of personalized offers from local vendors, who will pay Foursquare for their placement.

The move, on the whole, makes sense. Foursquare, on the retailer end, has always been all about encouraging consumers to make repeat visits, a highly-desired thing for pretty much any business.

The plan, however, isn’t the first of its kind. Last year Foursquare announced that it was working with American Express  to offer discounts to cardholders when they checked into the locations of participating merchants.

But the company’s new plans are a bit more ambitious. With personalized coupons, it appears that Foursquare is finally nearing the point where it can monetize all the data its been collecting over the past three years. Foursquare’s 20 million users have checked in two billion times, so the company is clearly in possession of a lot of information.

But Foursquare faces some real hurdles, not the least of which is that most people are still not crazy about the idea of location sharing as a whole. That, Crowley hopes, may get better with time.

“People are still warming to the idea of location sharing. We are inventing this category, or really pushing it forward,” he told WSJ.

Crowley himself  ”lost his mobile couponing virginity” way back in 2008, before Foursquare was even launched. At the time the Crowely noted one of the biggest problems with the concept. “Mobile couponing isn’t a bad idea (I’m actually seeing it in a lot of mobile biz plans these days), its just so hard to execute because of a venue’s employees (the people behind the bar, cash register or counter),” he wrote on Flickr.

With Foursquare’s latest efforts, Crowley may have just found a way around that.

Photo via Flickr: MissMessie, Dennis Crowley

Checking in to the power of nostalgia, Foursquare is bringing members’ past location moments back to life with a reworked history page that doubles as a check-in time machine.

Friday, Foursquare has remodeled the web-based version of the history page to let members take a journey down memory lane. The improved page now includes search, and time, place, and people filters for letting people rediscover their favorite venues or the places they visited while on vacation.

“You can easily jump to all your past check-ins from any month or year, and even filter them by who you were with, what type of place you were at, or which neighborhood, city, or country you were in. We’ll show you your check-in photos, comments, and friends who were there,” Foursquare explained in a blog post.

click to enlarge

The history page incorporates some of the same of elements of Facebook Timeline, the social network’s storybook-take on the personal profile. The page includes a map of all check-ins, weaves photos, friends, and comments prominently into the experience, and will eventually allow people to enhance their past by adding tips or creating lists.

I’ve written before about the power in remembering the past and the role of location in memories, specifically as it pertains to Foursquare and its battle to prove to the public that there’s more to check-ins than points and badges.

“To moms, dads, uncles, aunts, kids, sisters, brothers, and you and me, location has meaning, but only in its ability to enhance a story, not to win some virtual badge,” I wrote. “It’s this approach to location, as a behind-the-scenes memory assistant, that will resonate with mainstream social media audiences,” I said, giving a nod to Facebook and Timeline.

With the new history page, Foursquare is wisely following in Facebook’s footsteps and helping its users better understand the why behind each check-in, photo, tip, or comment.

A Foursquare spokesperson said the company does not have immediate plans to carry the features over to mobile.

Photo credit: Bashed/Flickr

Foursquare’s place check-in is moving into new territory Tuesday. Online food ordering and delivery service Delivery.com is integrating with Foursquare so that customers can virtually check in to a businesses when they place an online order.

Through the integration, the appropriately named food and beverage delivery service will enable its customers to connect to Foursquare to not only check-in when they order on the web, but also view food hotspots, sort results by check-ins, see venue photos, reviews, and tips, and leave tips of their own.

“Shopping online has been a singular type of business,” Delivery.com CEO Jed Kleckner told VentureBeat. “There is a need and interest on the part of the consumer to understand what other people have to say about things they want to purchase … we can provide that depth.”

Delivery.com is very much a competitor to popular food ordering sites such as GrubHub and Seamless, and has 500,000 users, supports 10,000 merchants, and operates in more than 50 U.S. cities. But it has grander ambitions and hopes to assist all merchants in the perishable goods category. To that end, the company recently expanded to include online grocery shopping and already allows ordering from wine and liquor stores.

“[Foursquare integration] educates the consumer and enriches the Delivery.com experience for our existing customer base,” Kleckner said of Tuesday’s site-wide release.

Foursquare platform evangelist Akshay Patil confirmed with VentureBeat that this is the first time a site of this size has enabled virtual check-ins. But in disappointing news to those looking to stay inside and still ramp up Foursquare cred, Delivery.com Foursquare check-ins won’t count toward points, mayorships, or badges. Check-ins will, however, feed into and enhance the data pool that powers Foursquare’s Explore discovery tool, we’re told.

The data exchange is one that could add infinite value to the Delivery.com experience, and the site could also experience a healthy network effect where new customers are pulled in from the messages pushed out by those checking-in at check out.

Founded in 2004, Delivery.com is based in New York and has roughly 50 employees. The company has raised an undisclosed sum of venture capital.

Photo credit: spike55151/Flickr

A single minute may be barely enough time to construct a rational thought, but it’s time enough for social media denizens to inundate the web with their status updates, tweets, checkins, and photos.

Every 60 seconds in social media, two million videos are viewed on YouTube, 700,000 messages are delivered by way of Facebook, 175,000 tweets are fired off into the ether, and 2,000 Foursquare check-ins tell the world where we are.

If the volume of all this social media activity doesn’t astound you, perhaps a visual representation of the data will put things into prospective.

Social Jumpstart, a social media resource for small business, has created an infographic, shared exclusively with VentureBeat, to add color to the wealth of publicly available data on the hottest social networks and applications of our day.

We already knew that the web is in a tizzy over Pinterest, that Twitter is the talk of the town (and television networks), and that Facebook is the belle of the Internet ball. But when considered together, one thing seems clear: social media has taken over the world. Whether we’re using our 1,440 minutes each day wisely, however, is a question probably best left unanswered.

Note: A Stumbleupon representative told VentureBeat the company now does 25,000 stumbles in a minute.

Photo credit: ladymixy_uk/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Companies are increasingly looking to tap into the real time nature of the social web and respond directly to customers based on their location and intent. New York’s LocalResponse was one of the the first to turn check-ins into an opportunity for direct marketing. Today its rolling out its Pro Dashboard, an analytical tool the company was using in house.

To get a sense of how LocalResponse works, let’s look at one of its customers, Walgreens. The company scans through public posts from Twitter, Foursquare, and Facebook. If someone writes, “Just stopped in Walgreen” on Twitter or actually checks into the location on Foursquare, LocalResponse will respond to them with what’s on sale or a special offer.

“Our bookings in January exceeded our revenue for all of last year,” founder Nihal Mehta told VentureBeat. “We’re looking to double our staff this year and stay cash flow positive. The goal is to reach profitablity by the end of 2012.”

Analytics for social media marketing are an increasingly crowded field. Everyone from Radian6 to Buddy Media is promising to help brands get the best return on investment as they pour dollars into the relatively uncharted waters of social media marketing. LocalResponse is hoping to diversify its revenue stream by offering direct marketing, analytics, and mobile ad re-targeting.

Since its already tracking location and intent across 500 million pieces of content a day, Mehta says it made sense to help publishers serve up mobile ads. “If you check into a park and Tweet out that you’re hungry, we can make sure your phone shows you an ad for Taco Bell the next time you log onto the web.”

Right now LocalResponse is working with around a hundred brands, including big names like Coca-Cola, GE, GM, and McDonalds. “The big brands are playing the field right now and using a lot of different companies to see what works best in the social media marketing space,” says Mehta. “That’s a challenge, but of course we feel confident that our product will stand out in the end.”

Chances are that the insights gathered from one-and-a-half billion check-ins and 15 million tips are better than your own eyes and ears at sleuthing out the best places to eat, drink and see nearby or afar. At least that’s the logic and science behind Foursquare Explore, a popular recommendation feature migrating from mobile to web today.

Foursquare is the New York-based location-sharing startup that popularized the place check-in. But spend a few minutes talking to Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley and you’ll soon realize that the startup, as he sees it, is in the business of building software that makes the real world easier to use. And that’s where Explore — first introduced in the company’s mobile apps in March 2011 — comes in.

Explore on the web, rolling out to users now, is a personalized search engine for places that gives you Foursquare’s best picks for where to go, whatever your fancy. The feature is powered by the startup’s always-expanding, massive check-in and tips repository. It even factors in your personal preferences and your friends’ previous activities.

“There are place recommendations out there are one-size-fits-all,” Foursquare’s head of product Alex Rainert told VentureBeat. “But we have data to help you find the places you might like,” he added, indicating that the places Foursquare recommends via Explore are unique to each user. “The more you check in, the smarter it gets.”

You can “explore” by browsing through food, coffee, nightlife, shopping, arts and outdoors categories, or by searching for something more specific, like “vegan food,” or something far more ambiguous, say “fun.” The results are ranked by their likelihood to please.

The web-based version of Explore nicely complements the mobile version, and comes with a few enhancements. Web searches via Explore, for instance, are not limited to nearby results, meaning you can search anywhere in the world and plan ahead for future trips.

The web interface also awards the searcher with more real-estate for visual discovery and additional context. A large map at the right should help you quickly pinpoint venue locations, while a left-hand venue menu provides detailed venue snippets and allows for one-click place-saving to to-do lists (fun fact: Foursquare members have created more than 500,000 to-do lists).

“Explore is part of the virtuous circle of location-based content that we’re trying to design products around,” Rainert said.

That circle, as Rainert described it, is the lifecycle that starts with the person discovering location-based content of interest and ends with her finding that content when its most relevant. The cycle has you discovering a new place or activity via Explore, saving that place to a to-do list and then receiving a notification when you’re nearby (with Radar), and it’s a process that the startup would like to see uninterrupted as you jump between web and mobile applications.

And while the mobile applications have consistently been top priority for the startup, the company is finding that its latest redesign has opened the door for creating even richer experiences specifically for its growing population of web visitors. Foursquare’s website now sees about a million visitors each day, Rainert said.

The company is so committed to cross-platform place discovery that it recently hired Andrew Hogue, a former Google senior engineer, to the lead its search and data team and improve the Explore experience.

“We want people to think of Foursquare as a place to store all the things they want to do,” Rainert stressed.

It’s not in the same league as Facebook or a Twitter, or even half the size of Instagram, but GetGlue’s highly-specialized social network for entertainment watchers could be on its way to superstardom.

On GetGlue, more than two million die-hard entertainment fans check-in to television shows and movies, over the web or from mobile devices, to share their enthusiasm and get rewards for their viewing behaviors. Seventy five major television networks have already taken notice, and now investors are doubling-down, placing a $12 million bet on the startup’s chances at mainstream fame.

“2011 was a year where we were doing a lot of innovation in the social TV space,” GetGlue founder and CEO Alex Iskold told VentureBeat. “With this financing, we can continue to play a market-defining role as social television goes mainstream.”

But what is social television, exactly? It’s a niche section of social networking dedicated entirely to (usually influential) entertainment enthusiasts, and the networks and brands that want to reach them.

The space started to take shape in late 2009 and early 2010 with the launch of GetGlue and several other similarly purposed services such as Philo (shutdown after being acquired by Local Response), Miso and Comcast’s Turnerfish, all of which proffer a second screen application experience for entertainment-sharing and chatter. Social television has since evolved to include network-branded applications around popular shows. And, perhaps the biggest sign of a genre-in-the-making, Yahoo acquired television-tagging application IntoNow just a few months after it launched.

Whether mainstream viewers want to take part in these back-channel behaviors is questionable. There’s more than enough evidence to support the idea. After all, a growing number of TV watchers are multitaskers who use their tablets or smartphones for additional stimulation. But it’s taken GetGlue, one of the leaders in the space, more than two years to get to two million members. We’re talking small potatoes compared to Facebook’s 800 million members or the 15 million users of photo-sharing sensation Instagram.

GetGlue’s small user base could be a bit misleading. Application users are an extremely active bunch. Altogether, they have engaged with GetGlue more than 350 million times by checking-in to content, or leaving a rating or review. And the startup saw hockey-sticky growth in check-ins in 2011 — with the exception of December — Iskold said. In November 2011 alone, GetGlue had almost 20 million check-ins.

It’s enough activity that major television networks have run upwards of 680 badge and sticker-style promotions around their shows on the service. And more than 30 networks have embedded GetGlue check-in functionality into their own second-screen applications. The startup made money in 2011 with show sponsorships, said Iskold. Big brands such as Pepsi, HTC, Coke and the Gap all sponsored GetGlue show rewards and content (usually involving the same shows that they were already sponsoring on television).

GetGlue, which released a new version of its flagship iPhone app and revamped its website Monday, will focus its 2012 road map on personalizing the entertainment guide for the user, introducing more supplemental show content and working to allow networks to better customize their experience, Iskold said.

So could this be the breakout year for social television and GetGlue? We’ll be watching (pun intended).

GetGlue’s $12 million round of financing was led by New York-based RHO Ventures. Investors in the startup’s previous $6 million Series C round — Time Warner, RE Ventures and Union Ventures — all re-upped in the new round.

What is Foursquare? The answer is far more complex than it should be. The startup’s purpose in life is so muddled that it now finds itself in the midst of a self-imposed identity crisis that could cause it to fall victim to Facebook.

“The biggest misconception about Foursquare is that it is a check-in service,” founder Dennis Crowley told me in a recent in-depth interview. “We’re most interested in taking the data from check-ins to model what’s happening in the real world, and help people find new things … the data is more important than the check-in.”

What does that mean? In Crowley’s mind it means that every check-in contributes to a growing pool of information that will make Foursquare a transformative way to experience the offline world.

Crowley boils down Foursquare’s grand vision to this: “We’re making software that makes the real world easier to use.”

Nonsense, you might say: Foursquare is a check-in service, something that primarily lets people “check in” to restaurants, bars and other venues that they frequent.

You’d be right — to an extent. Foursquare popularized the act of checking into a venue (or an inanimate object) to share your location with friends. And in doing so, it’s become branded as nothing more than check-in service. It’s a label the startup scoffs at and loathes.

Worse still, Foursquare’s claim to fame could wind up making the company itself check in to an early grave.

Why? Because regular folks can’t relate to explicit location-sharing — only six percent of online adults are open to using geolocation apps — and points and badges aren’t compelling enough reasons to warrant a change in their behaviors. To moms, dads, uncles, aunts, kids, sisters, brothers, and you and me, location has meaning, but only in its ability to enhance a story, not to win some virtual badge.

Last year’s family trip to Disneyland, for instance, is a special occasion that brings joy in its remembrance. The kids eating cotton candy by Cinderella’s castle (and getting sticky hands in the process), nearly losing your lunch on the Matterhorn, your husband getting drenched on Splash Mountain: These are all poignant memories that you can cherish for a lifetime. Location is a huge part of this story, not because you remembered to check in to the rides, but because your location is the fabric that weaves each moment into a cohesive tale.

This is what makes Foursquare vulnerable to Facebook, even though Facebook got out of the check-in business months ago. Now that Facebook Timeline has finally rolled out to the social network’s more than 800 million members, the scrapbooking feature provides people with a rich lens for looking back at all the good times they’ve shared by way of Facebook. Tagging your location on a photo or status update becomes a way to add color to each and every experience. And because Facebook Timeline collects all of these tags and plots them on an interactive map, it’s offering you a way to go back in time and soak in the past.

It’s this approach to location, as a behind-the-scenes memory assistant, that will resonate with mainstream social media audiences. And Facebook knows it.

“[The check-in] is cool, but it’s only part of the equation,” Facebook Timeline product manager Sam Lessin told me. “I think that use case will certainly still power serendipity, but it’s only part of the story. We’re in the early stages of location being an awesome story-telling medium.”

When you add a location to a status update or photo, you know that you’re adding something of substance to your Timeline and your map, Lessin said. He believes that this notion will compel users to go back and add locations to past moments in an effort to create a more complete storybook.

Timeline lives up to its potential as the digital equivalent of the scrapbook, and it’s changed the way I use Facebook. Now, a moment worth remembering in real life is one that I also want chronicled on my Timeline, and so I make it a point to post a photo or status update, and add a location tag. If I’m already doing that on Facebook, why would I also want to check in on Foursquare?

The answer is a lot less clear than used it to be, and that’s extremely problematic for Foursquare, because it’s pretty much the last man standing with skin in the check-in game. One-time challenger Gowalla did little for the location-sharing cause and needed to pivot to make sense of location, but that didn’t really work either. Bizzy busted out of the “check out” business a few months back. (“Who?” you say. Exactly.) Brightkite died long ago, Yelp seems to have lost interest in its copycat check-in feature, and even Facebook once tried and failed at check-ins.

Full disclosure: I am the same reporter who predicted that Foursquare would be the next Twitter more than two years ago. I would still argue that I’m right in many ways, so I asked Crowley to explain what he means by “software that makes the real world easier to use.”

He speaks of the company’s Explore feature, which makes use of check-in and tips data to help you find nearby venues that you should try.

And then there’s Radar, Foursquare’s first attempt at predicting what you should be doing right now. Radar, which works on iOS 5 devices, is an opt-in, always-on feature that, when enabled, will automatically alert you when friends are checked in nearby or when you’re close to a venue on one of your to-do lists.

Radar, Crowley insists, is by far the company’s most ambitious project and is still very early stage. He envisions it as a way for you discover something interesting nearby without ever needing to open the app. So, in theory, you will be able to walk around your town or a foreign city, just as you normally would, and get suggestions for new things to do.

“[With Radar on], the app is waking up and saying, ‘Hey, Dennis, this is something you want to pay attention to,’” Crowley said. “We have enough data and users to make this stuff happen. We know which places are popular Thursday morning or Tuesday night, and we can help you out when you’re out of context.”

Where does the check-in fit into all this? It’s an explicit action that powers these place recommendations, but it’s no longer the core of the Foursquare experience, Crowley said. Enough power users have contributed enough data — more than a billion check-ins to date — to create content and recommendations that are useful for more passive users: those who just want to consume information.

In fact, he said, Foursquare is seeing a growing percentage of users open the app on a regular basis and not check in. They’re using the app to find stuff nearby, he added, and that’s perfectly okay with him.

The startup’s “Oprah moment,” Crowley said, will be when people realize that they can rediscover their own neighborhoods. But it’s an epiphany that needs to happen sooner rather than later.

“We have to go through this rite of passage,” Crowley said of the company’s perception problem. He likens the growing pains to Twitter’s similar battle a few years back, when it was then hazed by the press and considered just a purveyor of pointless babble.

“We’re building stuff that no one has built before, and it’s going to be a big deal. This time next year, a lot of these issues will have gone away,” Crowley said.

So what we have here are two fundamentally different approaches to location: Foursquare is taking the scientific route, while Facebook is traveling down the emotional path. Both takes are quite compelling, but now that Facebook Timeline is live for all, Foursquare’s clock is ticking.

Image via giaomeng/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google recently revealed its social network Google+ will support check-ins for businesses providing discounts through their Google Places page. Today, the capability was launched, but only through the Google+ Android application.

The social network is purposefully getting outfitted with as many Google features as the company can pack into it. Larry Page noted after Google’s quarter three earnings that the Google+ team feels as if it has delivered the “plus,” but is now sewing in the Google. Recently, Google+ and YouTube were paired together for those who wanted to share what videos they were watching with their circles. The Google+ mobile app also recently received search functionality.

This new Google+ feature allows owners to promote their businesses not just on the Google Places page, but through the social network. Google Places lets business owners enter information about their companies, which then turn up in Google searches. On these pages, businesses can offer discounts that must be of good quality, or Google will remove them. Some of these offers must be redeemed at a specific location, think restaurants. When you offer a discount, now, you can force a buyer to check-in to that physical location on the Google+ mobile app to get the deal. Those who do check-in can opt to keep the check-in private, share with specific circles or make the action public.

Google’s intentions were originally uncovered by Mike Blumenthal was surfing the company’s Places help pages when he discovered a couple paragraphs on the launch. They read:

If your customers have to visit your locations in order to do business with you, you can request that they check-in on Google+ in order to redeem your offers. They can choose to share the check-in publicly or with some of their circles, which helps spread the word about your business on Google+. They can also choose to keep their check-in private and still redeem an offer.

If your customers do not have to visit your location, for example if you serve homes or businesses by delivery or by callouts, you can keep this option off (set to “No”) and customers will not be asked to check-in when they redeem offers. We use the Service Areas and Location Settings setting on your listing to determine if you have a service area for offers that have already been created. When you create new offers, you can choose whether to allow a check-in during redemption.

Google confirmed the move to VentureBeat and Marissa Mayer elaborated at technology conference Le Web saying, ““We think there are interesting ways we can monetize this, but also ways to help our users safe money.”

Ah, Google, ever advertising conscious.

[Hat tip and photo via MarketingLand]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Location service Foursquare is showing off its new coat of paint. The company today unveiled a website redesign with a whole new experience for people sitting at their desks. What started as a check-in game all of a sudden seems a lot more like a formidable business in the making.

The fun of Foursquare has long been the ability to check in at destinations using a mobile phone and share location information with friends, but the revamped website brings the sharing and discovery to millions more users who are surfing the web from their desktop computers. As Foursquare wrote  in a blog post today:

It shows everything interesting nearby – your friends, places that are trending (in yellow), places on your lists (green), places with Specials (orange), and places that are popular (blue). You can even drag the map around or zoom in and out and all the interesting places update automatically.

The new Foursquare desktop has an activity feed with pictures and checking from friends, and it also shows suggested restaurants nearby. The app knows what time it is, so suggestions change from breakfast to dinner, if it’s 6pm, as opposed to 8am.

We previously reported that Foursquare is moving beyond the check in, as the location service continues to grow and mature, adding users like mad. At last month’s Web 2.0 Summit, co-founder and chief executive officer Dennis Crowley said there had been more than 10 million downloads of its mobile apps.

The blog post also says that more than 1 million people per day are visiting Foursquare’s website already to get information. The redesign will help visitors to track their favorite bands, celebrities and brands right on Foursquare’s site.

The redesign is also supposed to make the iPad experience superior to anything Foursquare has offered before.

Crowley first created the location-based service Dodgeball, which was sold to Google, but the project failed to thrive within the organization. Today Foursquare is the category leader in location services, alongside such rivals as Gowalla, and Loopt, but neither have Foursquare’s traction, and none have yet to come up with a desktop experience that blends so seamlessly with the mobile app. Now that Foursquare has tipped its hand, expect competing offers in the not-too distant future.

Using iOS 5′s new region monitoring functionality, the Radar feature sends alerts to users about things they are interested in whenever they are physically near the area. For instance, if a group of your friends are at the bar next door to you, Radar will shoot you a message letting you know. It also sends you alerts for things on all the Foursquare To-Do list you follow. The Foursquare app doesn’t have to be open for Radar to work, either.

“Radar is a big step in the direction of Foursquare’s vision,” wrote Foursquare Head of Product Alex Rainert on the company’s blog.

Not only does Radar add a new level of social interaction for its users, but the feature also has huge implications for Foursquare merchants. Local business owners now have a new tool to promote their venues and special deals that doesn’t rely entirely on people opting in — provided that users turn on Radar via their iOS device.

While Radar does add a lot to the user experience, it could take a long time to actually provide significant value, according to Nicholas Holland, CEO of Interactive development and marketing firm CentreSource.

“Basically, Foursquare is a hindsight service for the majority of people. You go somewhere and then think about checking in. With Radar, they have to be proactive. So, asking people to use your service in a new mental state is a challenge,” Holland said in an interview with VentureBeat.

Prior to Radar, users needed to physically check in to locations in order to see alerts about friends in the area or tips added to a To-Do list.

Holland said the Radar feature might require Foursquare to add some additional prompts to help users catch on to the benefits. But ultimately, Radar’s fate ultimately depends on “clever use cases”, he added. “If they abuse with advertising, it’s DOA. But since (Radar) is optional, it will start with early adopters and live/die by their experience.”

Foursquare said it plans to release the Radar feature on its other mobile apps in the future.

Image via Foursquare

The revision enhances the privacy of Foursquare users who want to share their locations at all times.

“A lot of people love checking in to their homes on foursquare. They want to be Mayor of their house, or they may want their friends to know they made it home safe after a night out, or they may be tracking the time they wake up every morning with a quick check-in. It’s obviously an important part of your day,” Foursquare said on its blog.

Previously, venues that were categorized as “homes” only showed up in the “nearby places” list if you were friends with the creator of the venue, if you’d checked in there before, or if you searched for it specifically by name.

As part of the revisions, Foursquare has also decided to hide personal addresses on the venue page unless you’re friends with the person viewing the information. Additionally, the company only allows friends to see the location pin placed on the venue page’s map listing.

Foursquare also did a massive sweep of its venue database and re-categorized several venues as homes to make sure everyone gets the benefits of these new privacy filters.

Image via Agent X Comics

Check-in growth on Foursquare has nearly tripled in a year, going from around 200 million in July 2010 to almost 750 million in June 2011. The company claims the one billionth check-in occurred last week, but no additional details were given on who checked in or where it happened.

“Growth has been outstanding the past few months,” Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley told VentureBeat in an email. “And as the product matures, we expect to see growth accelerating. We still have lots of work to do.”

One billion check-ins isn’t the only thing Foursquare is announcing today, as it also released a new versions of its iPhone and Android apps. The biggest addition appears to be the Lists feature, which was previously announced and allows users to create and share their favorite locations with friends.

On top of all that, Foursquare quietly added the very welcome ability to hide home addresses to its privacy features. We’re sure Foursquare’s more than 10 million users will appreciate the privacy updates along with the new mobile apps.

Foursquare also shared a video of what one week’s of check-ins looks like on the service. Enjoy.

The update pulls in conversations about different kinds of entertainment (TV shows, movies, games, etc.) from around the Web and surfaces the most interesting pieces.

“Usually, conversation about entertainment is drowned out by lots of noise,” said GetGlue founder and CEO Alex Iskold. “The new features we’ve added brings people only the most relevant and interesting  conversations in real-time.”

With the update, users land on the conversation stream after every check-in. That stream shows both recent check-ins from friends who are watching the same show as well as interesting check-ins from everyone else.

GetGlue has also added a Friend Leaderboard feature for every show, movie, artist, book or topic. which shows users a list of their top 10 friends around any piece of content ranked by the number of check-ins. It basically adds an element of competition while also surfaces new content. The new features will also be available on Android in the future, according to the company.

The new updates brings GetGlue into closer competition with services like Miso as well as differentiates itself from check-in services like Foursquare, which just added a way for users to check in to movies and concerts.

GetGlue has 1.5 million users and the company recorded 11.5 million check-ins in August. The number of check-ins through the application has increased 130% between May and August, according to the company.

New York, N.Y.-based company has received funding from Union Square Ventures, RRE Ventures, TimeWarner Investments and a number of prominent angel investors. The company raised $6 million in December last year.

The company announced a partnership with DirecTV Thursday that will allow its users to easily find and share what they’re watching via a DirecTV set-top box when checking in from the Miso iPhone app.

“We thought the cable and MSO (satellites) were the most natural paths because that’s where most people are watching TV”, Miso CEO Somrat Niyogi told VentureBeat. “This is a big step for us, but we have more to come for users.”

Miso’s service, which has about 200,000 users to date, works by allowing people to check-in, rate, comment, earn badges and complete quizzes while watching things on television. Right now, users have to search from a list of programs to find what they’re currently watching.

The new DirecTV integration, however, lets Miso users see the exact show they’re watching so they will no longer have to manually search from a list of programs — provided that the iPhone is connected to the same wi-fi network as the set-top box. The new functionality is available as of today.

One of the first questions I asked Niyogi, who I initially interviewed over a year ago, had to do with when Miso would add functionality that allowed its users to automate the check-in process when watching television — especially while viewing on streaming services like Netflix and Hulu.

“We haven’t gone that [automated check-in] route because we all have our guilty pleasures (Jersey Shore?) that we don’t want anyone to know we watch. Some people want that to remain private,” he told me.

But, that doesn’t mean the company won’t explore automated features in the future, he added.

Niyogi said the company plans to roll out support in the future for additional content service providers (like Comcast, AT&T Uverse and Dish Network) as well as many popular set-top boxes (such as Boxee, Roku and Apple TV).

Founded in March 2010, the San Francisco, California-based startup has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Google Ventures, Keith Rabois, YouTube cofounder Jawed Karim, and early Google employees Georges Harik, Richard Chen, Thomas Korte, and Kurt Abrahamson. It faces competition in the marketplace from similar services like GetGlue, SnappyTV and Foursquare.

For those of you who don’t have DirecTV service, we’ve embedded a demo video of Miso’s set-top box integration below.

The company will eliminate the use of virtual items within Gowalla that users could attain by checking in to different locations. Also gone is the note taking feature, which Williams hinted may return further down the line.

Williams said Gowalla’s feature reassessment addressed things about the service that weren’t working. For instance, he reveals that fewer than half a percent of Gowalla’s active community makes use of virtual items.

“As Gowalla has grown we’ve added many new features to the product. Some have had great success. Others haven’t worked out as well as we’d hoped. After the two-plus years of consistent feedback and amazing experiences, we believe this is an opportune time to prune the branches that were twisted in order to focus on the experience we desire to cultivate,” Williams wrote. “This has led us to some difficult decisions.”

Arguably, Gowalla’s announcement signals a win for top location-based social network competitor Foursquare — and just days after Facebook removed its own location-based Places feature. check-in features.

Founded in 2007, the Austin, Texas-based startup has $10.5 million total funding from Greylock Partners, Shasta Ventures, Maples Investments, Founders Fund, Alsop Louie Partners and others.

The Facebook Places feature was unveiled a year ago and let users “check-in” to various locations. Many saw this as a serious threat to other social location services like Foursquare and Gowalla because Facebook has an incredible number of users. But by October you could already see that the feature wasn’t catching on, with only 6% of Facebook users trying the service.

As an alternative to the Places feature, Facebook will optionally add a location to status updates or pictures. But adding a location to a status is clearly not the same as checking in and getting the benefits of knowing where your friends are. So really, Facebook has folded the check-in the game in favor of a broad location idea that many users will likely not try. (Just as they didn’t try Places.)

Foursquare has to be happy about this, though the company declined to say anything about the death of Places. It did use the opportunity to toot its own horn.

“Far from concentrating on what others are doing, we’re 100 percent focused on continuing to build an amazing product that changes the way people experience the world around them,” a Foursquare spokesperson told VentureBeat.

The New York-based Foursquare has been on a bit of a roll with a slew of announcements the past few months. A week ago, the startup added the ability to check into events with friends, and in mid-July it partnered with several daily deals sites to offer better deals to customers who checked in.

As of July, Foursquare has more than 10 million users and has had more than half a million businesses sign up to offer specials. The company recently raised a $50 million funding round with a valuation of $600 million.

Personally, I never used Places because I already had Foursquare for check-ins. Another reason I wasn’t attracted to Places was because there are many people on Facebook I don’t know well enough to share my location with. My Foursquare friends, however, are people I’m comfortable with knowing my whereabouts.

What do you think of the death of Facebook Places?

The new check-in feature means time-specific events such as movies, concerts and sports games will all be treated the same way as locations. So, in addition to checking in to a specific venue (a.k.a. location) using Foursquare on a mobile device, people can now choose the event itself.

For example, when attending a Titans Football game in Nashville, I can check in to the specific game and not just “LP Field.” The location data will automatically be included in the update.

Many people already treat events as if they were venues, but the new support for events should give people an added layer of interaction. Facebook has had this type of functionality for quite a while now.

The company said it will enable event check-ins for over 50,000 venues, and each event will appear a few hours before it begins. Foursquare already has partnerships set up with ESPN, Movietickets.com and Songkick.

I would imagine those partnerships could easily extend to television networks in the future — should Foursquare decide to go that deep into event-like check-ins. It also begs the question of where this new check-in feature leaves services like Miso and GetGlue, which specialize in check-ins for entertainment viewing.

“Our service is centered around more than just checking in,” said Miso CEO Somrat Niyogi. His company provides a service (which has about 200,000 users) that allows people to check-in, rate, comment and complete quizes while watching things on television, or as he calls it “the second screen at home”.

“In terms of our space (business), I don’t think Foursquare’s new feature will affect us at all,” Niyogi said, adding that Miso is less concerned with the experience when people are out and about — more focused on the experience while sitting at home. “For GetGlue, where all they do is checking in and giving our rewards, I think they’re going to have more of a challenge.”

While fewer people may end up using services like Miso and GetGlue when in the movie theater, ultimately it’ll come down to how innovative those companies are in the future, Niyogi said.

“For the companies that are just strictly relying on check-ins of movies and such, they are probably screwed,” he said. “You’ve got to differentiate your service.”

The New York-based startup received a new $50 million round of funding in June to hire additional engineers and expand its platform beyond location-based services. Foursquare has raised a total of $71.4 million to date.

The image above is a screenshot of an event check-in using Foursquare’s iPhone app.