July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Locals know best. That’s the new mantra of community-powered hotel alternative Airbnb and the primary reason behind its acquisition of two-year-old startup Localmind, an expert at connecting inquisitive travelers to locals in the know.

Airbnb announced today that it has acquired Localmind’s technology and team for an undisclosed sum. The deal closed earlier this year. Localmind creators Lenny Rachitsky, Beau Haugh, and Nelson Gauthier have already joined the Airbnb team to work on social initiatives.

Localmind is a small, seed-funded company from San Francisco that specializes in connecting people with questions about places to people who have the answers. The startup makes iPhone and Android applications to facilitate these location-based question-and-answer exchanges. It also connects to Foursquare and uses members’ check-in history to determine how knowledgeable they are about a particular venue — such as a bar, restaurant, conference hall, or gym.

Airbnb’s pickup may seem a bit peculiar at first. What does the company want with a little startup that makes Q&A apps? Simple. Local expertise. Airbnb, as we know, is currently investing its resources to help customers find the best neighborhoods when they travel.

In November, the four-year-old company launched a featured called Neighborhoods to help travelers select destinations that match their particular tastes. The Neighborhoods launch signaled its desire to rework its booking experience around these digital brochures and expose the knowledge its cultivated from locals with insights into the personalities and styles of their towns. Neighborhoods is only live for seven destination cities, but Airbnb has said it wants to introduce the feature to additional markets around the world.

Clearly, Airbnb views Localmind as a pivotal piece to understanding neighborhoods and better connecting its travelers to locals. A spokesperson said it can’t share specifics on how Localmind’s technology will be used, but it added that “connections to authentic, local experiences are foundational to Airbnb’s offering.”

“The role of social in travel is more important than ever,” Airbnb CEO and cofounder Brian Chesky said in a statement e-mailed to VentureBeat. “We’ve seen connections shape the experience for our community, so we’re excited to have the Localmind team join us and lead this next wave of social products.”

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The Localmind application will remain operational, the Airbnb spokesperson said.

Photo credit: claydevoute/Flickr

After three-plus years, 20 million members, and 2 billion check-ins Foursquare is ready to grow up.

The social network, which lets users check-in at restaurants, retailers, and other venues, is finally incorporating paid ads into its service, like Facebook and Twitter have done.

The New York-based startup is officially kicking off a pilot period for Promoted Updates, an advertising product that builds on the release of Local Updates to give merchants a way to  reach people who may be in the mood to pop by their stores.

“This is the first time ever that we’re allowing businesses to pay to promote their business in Foursquare,” product manager Noah Weiss told me in an interview. “It’s obviously a very exciting milestone for us.”

Old Navy promotes a special on Foursquare

Promoted Updates are essentially the paid version of Local Updates, or status updates for business owners, and will run in the Explore tab inside Foursquare’s mobile applications. Foursquare first introduced Local Updates last week to give merchants a free way to disperse specials, share photos, or communicate with their existing loyal customers on Foursquare.

“We’ve been developing these two in parallel for awhile,” Weiss said. “Local Updates are really about engaging with your existing customers when they’re in the feed, when they’re nearby. [Promoted Updates] … are about showing your business more prominently, hopefully with a compelling piece of content, in the Explore tab, which is where our users go when they’re actually looking for ideas for what to do next in the real world.”

Twenty handpicked small and large merchants including Walgreens, Best Buy, Old Navy, Butter Lane, and The Standard Miami have made financial commitments to spend a minimum amount on campaigns using Promoted Updates.

During the pilot period, advertisers will work with account managers to pick the updates or specials they want to push to new audiences who will, in a perfect world, be driven to visit their stores — not their websites.

Targeting done right?

Promoted Updates will run atop Foursquare’s Explore engine, which is the company’s handcrafted mechanism for pointing people to places they may want to visit. The recommendation engine is fueled by member check-ins, tips, “likes,” lists, and so forth. Where you’ve been, where your friends have been, places similar to ones you like, where you are, and what businesses are popular right now all play a part in Explore.

A Promoted Update for The Standard Miami

“Anything that shows up [as a Promoted Update] is using all the algorithms and magic that power Explore,” Weiss said. “We’re recommending you businesses. This isn’t a display ad for an upcoming summer movie. This is: ‘hey, we think you might really want to go to Hertz because you just landed at the airport.’”

Promotional results will be denoted by a “Promoted” label, and Foursquare has set rules to ensure that its users aren’t overexposed to messages and see a good variety of sponsored content while they’re browsing for new venues to visit.

“Mobile and location-based advertising has a great deal of potential,” Altimeter Group digital advertising and media analyst Rebecca Lieb told me. “We’re already seeing national brands such as Walgreens and American Express experiment with Foursquare as a marketing platform.”

Lieb said that Foursquare’s ability to harness behavioral data in addition to location data will be key to the success of the units.

“It’s important to bear in mind that proximity isn’t everything,” she said. “For example, if a user frequently checks into health food venues and never into fast-food chains, promoting a nearby McDonald’s to that user helps neither the advertiser or the Foursquare user experience.”

Exploring new territory

First and foremost, Foursquare will need to drive its member to use the Explore tab. The company’s mantra of late has been that it’s no longer a check-in service, but a utility that makes the real world easier to use. Now, Foursquare hopes to sell advertisers on its ability to drive people into their stores, a selling point that Facebook’s Sponsored Stories or Twitter’s Promoted Tweets can’t compete with.

But that’s all predicated on the notion that people actually use Foursquare to find new places. Weiss, of course, insisted they do. Usage of Explore has seen twice as many place queries happening since Foursquare released a dramatically redesigned version of its app in early June.

Peggy Gartin, a frequent user of Foursquare’s application and a craft beer connoisseur, said she hardly ever visits the Explore tab. The San Diegan primarily uses Foursquare to check in to places, compete for mayorships, and curate a list of top-notch beer bars. Gartin usually opens the Foursquare application when she’s ready to check in, not when she’s in search of something new to eat or drink.

“I use Foursquare as a way of recording a decision — not making one,” she said.

But Gartin does appreciate Foursquare specials and finds friends’ recommendations an appealing aspect of the experience. If Foursquare were to show her a Promoted Update that featured a business that a friend recommended, sold a product she enjoys, and also included a special, then she would find value in the ad, she said.

Gartin’s remarks shed light on why Foursquare has chosen to limit the release of its ad product to just 20 merchants. Foursquare will use the pilot phase to test the effectiveness of the units, get a reading on what’s resonating with users, and better understand how it can serve national chains and small business owners before building out a self-service platform, Weiss said.

Also still in flux is what and how Foursquare will charge for the units. The standard pay-per-click or CPM models may not be a good fit because Foursquare wishes the ads to drive foot traffic, not web traffic.

“[Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley] has always said that we’ll do it when we’re ready, and we’ll do it in a way that we think makes for a better experience for users,” said Weiss. “The timing now feels right … the product is in a place where it makes a lot of sense for merchants who want to drive customers into their stores and for users who are looking for inspiration about something to try out.”

Photo credit: Sint Smeding/Flickr

The next evolution of the Internet or so-called “3.0” is supposed to be semantic, smart if you will. Smart, automated social tools were all hyped to go viral at this year’s SXSW conference several days ago. These tools promise to turn us, via our smartphones, into all knowing masters of our environment, prompting us to meet new friends at IRL serendipitous moments. But, instead, the big story turned out to be the short lifespan of these apps. All of these Location Based Services (LBS) apps focus on hooking into your friends on Facebook, Linked-In, and Twitter and alerting you when “real” friends entered your “geo bubble” of life. They also suggest new friends or friends of friends that you should meet.

The technology worked – I was alerted to many people that I should meet who “liked” the same stuff on Facebook; but that turned out to be boring, as our common interests turned out to be only fan pages for TV shows or bands. I was also alerted that friends were nearby. Alas, friends that I wanted to see I had already texted or rendezvoused with.

In fact, these apps didn’t fly with the social early adopters at the show for an important reason: They caused smartphone batteries to die, leaving attendees at a social conference without the ability to be digitally social. No tweets, texts, photos, or profile updates get pushed when your iPhone goes dark. The problem at hand with LBS apps is that they require the GPS radio to run nearly full-time, have a clear view of the sky to get a signal, and report back to a server their location.

When you’re using your smartphone for navigation, your windshield and roof barely block the signal, and typically your cigarette lighter adapter keeps the juices flowing during this peak power usage. When your phone is in your pocket or purse, your body acts as a Faraday cage, blocking GPS signals from reaching it as it struggles to get a position.

I like to say that GPS stops at the door. (Full disclosure: I run a company that’s betting WiFi and Bluetooth will steal the market from GPS for location-based apps.) Companies like Google are taking rolling carts with sophisticated WiFi measuring gear through airports and malls, using the retailers’ access points to physically map them into a virtualized GPS. This enables the Android Maps application to move the blue dot to about the same spot in which you stand. This results with WiFi working much like the GPS satellite system does to the Maps application on your smartphone when you’re outside.

But life is more than your virtual representation as a blue dot. Inside, maps are boring. I can find the bathroom with signs, and the registration desk via arrows. Instead, think of the potential for radio waves as triggers for actions to occur in your phone, or in the cloud – making intelligent decisions automatically while your phone sits in your pocket.  And unlike GPS, which requires a clear view of the sky, Bluetooth and WiFi radios inside your phone work inside the confines of your walls and halls.

Your smartphone has WiFi, which normally requires you to connect to an access point, and Bluetooth which requires pairing to another device to communicate. Using these same radios without the need for connecting, when you walk into a specific space, your dating app could alert you to a suitable match (after you enable ice-breaking in-room digital serendipity), or your social networking or business app could let you know when a friend or to-be customer is within eyesight. Maybe your mobile phone calls could get routed to a landline for drop-free calling. All without compromising your smartphone battery. Now that is true social and smart innovation.

Dave Mathews is a inventor and founder of NeuAer, an open proximity platform that enable apps to become smart via low-power radio waves already found on devices in your environment.

[SXSW image credit:  Kevin Krejci/Flickr]

Location-based social network Gowalla is, as of today, no longer available to the public. The company was recently purchased by social networking giant Facebook.

Gowalla’s website now loads to a page that says, “”Thank you for going out with Gowalla. It was a pleasure to journey with you around the world. Download your check-ins, photos, and lists here soon.”

It’s an appropriate time to take the service completely offline as well. The company launched at South-By-Southwest, an interactive conference, in 2009. The conference known for helping mobile and social companies get off the ground – Twitter and Foursquare got their starts here –is taking place this week in Austin, Texas. The company went through ups and downs, however, changing direction from a sociallocation-sharing network to social travel.

Facebook, which often acquires companies for talent, purchased Gowalla in early December 2011. Co-founder Josh Williams explained in a blog post that he and fellow co-founder Scott Raymond met Facebook at its developer conference f8. They found a fit and soon thereafter Gowalla was purchased. The Gowalla team is working on Facebook’s Timeline feature, and its employees have been relocated to Facebook’s California offices. Existing data from Gowalla’s services will not be transferred or owned by Facebook.

Gowalla’s contact and help pages are still available for users.

Image from Gowalla

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Highlight, the location-based app stripping the serendipity out of meeting someone, is launching new features today inspired by the popular upcoming event South-By-South-West.

“South-By-South-West is kind of a preview of what the world would be like if everyone had Highlight,” said Highlight chief executive Paul Davidson.

Highlight, which launched in January, allows you to see people — friends or strangers — who have been physically close to you at any point in the day. It senses only those who have the app installed and sends both users a notification when they are in close proximity to one another. When it first launched, it provided a timeline of these “events” and allowed you to review a profile of that individual with data supplied by their social networks. It was a fairly lightweight, albeit somewhat creepy, way of knowing more about your surroundings.

The new features today, however, make the app much more interactive. South-By-South-West (SXSW) is a conference that attracts the kind of people clued-in to the mobile app ecosystem. Davidson, who is headed down to the event, imagined it as an opportunity to “be in a world fast-forwarded” to a time when everyone owned Highlight.

First off, the interface has changed a bit. If you’re passing so many people at one time, you may want to know who is still around. Now, the timeline shows not just who has passed you in a given day and when, but those who remain close are pushed to the top of the list and say “now” next to their listing. In a place like SXSW where people are specifically looking to make connections, this will be handy. In the real world, however, it might have the “you’re standing too close to me” awkward effect, especially if you’re a slight acquaintance with someone. Situations could arise such as, “Saw you were in Starbucks for the last half hour, why didn’t you say hey?”

The app will also now allow you to search for individuals. In the past, Highlight only gave you a run-down of the people you’d seen in your history with the app. Now, if you feel like you’ve seen a person before (I swear I know that guy from somewhere…) you can search your history for his information and where you might have met. Social profiles are also new to the Highlight app, directing people out of the app and onto someone’s Facebook or Twitter for more information.

But while Highlight has prided itself of not being a relationship builder, just an information provider.

“There’s no friend model, there’s no way to remember people, there’s no social currency, and that’s really weird for a social app,” said Davidson. “But it makes sense because it’s not an app to stay in touch with each other.”

Its newest feature, however, seems to change all of that.

People inherently want to remember others, and so Davidson has found people need a way to express to passers-by that they are interested in them. Davidson’s main issue here was finding the right language for such a button. When he first launched the app, he explained the world as a “bizarre-o version of Facebook,” where people do want to stalk and get to know a person without shaking their hand, but while liking or poking someone seems innocuous, it wasn’t the right verbiage.

“‘Poke’ is definitely not right, ‘favorite’ is definitely not right…’bookmarking’ is weird and kind of creepy,” he explained.

So he settled on the app’s namesake — highlighting people. You can click a button and “highlight” an individual to let them know you’re interested in them. Highlights are totally public and those you’ve highlighted are viewable on your profile, as well as a list of those who highlighted you. We asked Davidson if he thought people might use this as an insecure way of hooking up, and while he agreed it was a possibility, he said that wasn’t the intention of the app.

“There’s not really much precedent for this, it’s kind of a way to say people who you haven’t met seem interesting..in sort of way in a lightweight way,” he said, “Like a public endorsement of sorts. I think it’s going to add a lot to the whole ecosystem.”

While SXSW was the inspiration for these changes, Davidson says they were designed to work in any small town where the population isn’t as dense.

Highlight was founded in January 2012, and recently received a round of funding from Benchmark Capital, the same venture firm Davidson for which he served as entrepreneur-in-residence. The app is available worldwide.

Photo via 1000 Words / Shutterstock.com

VentureBeat is holding its second annual MobileSummit this April 2-3 in Sausalito, Calif. The invitation-only event will debate the five key business and technology challenges facing the mobile industry today, and participants — 180 mobile executives, investors, and policymakers — will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of themobile industry. You can find out more at our Mobile Summit site.

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?

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Popular location check-in application Foursquare just launched a new “Foursquare for Business” page to encourage businesses and brands to claim venues and create partnerships.

With millions of consumers checking in to locations around the world, Foursquare has quickly become another marketing tool for companies. Previously, Foursquare had a less-than-stellar set of pages explaining how a business may claim a venue.

With today’s launch, the new page, dubbed “Quick Start Guide,” is much more dynamic, interactive and spotlight how a business or brand can attract customers using Foursquare. For example, rather than just claiming your venue, the company now explores several different types of campaigns that can be run, such as a Mayor Special, Frequency Special or Count Special to name a few. The guide also talks about how to promote specials, redeem them, and track venue stats.

Foursquare isn’t the only one who is trying to get businesses and brands to claim venues or create badges, competitors Gowalla and Scvngr also have a business page. While the basic copy is similar, one wonders if the new interactive and flashy Foursquare business pages are what’s needed. Though recent reports of bugs in Blackberry app versions won’t help to prove that the company is a legitimate business tool.

Foursquare, based in New York City and founded in 2009, has raised more than $21 million in funding. It currently has more than 40 employees in its hometown and a new engineering office that it’s opening in San Francisco.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

CloudMade, a company that provides mapping data to 16,200 application developers, just announced that it has acquired German startup OneStepAhead.

I last spoke to CloudMade chief executive Juha Christensen when the company raised its second round of funding in July. At the time, he acknowledged that there are competitors (such as SimpleGeo) offering tools to create location apps, but he said CloudMade offers more than detailed data to power “hundreds of thousands of apps in different verticals.”

Yesterday, Christensen told me OneStepAhead’s technology advances that goal by managing the way mapping data is downloaded onto phones. That means CloudMade developers will be able to build apps where more of the data is stored on phones, so users can access maps when they’re offline. They’ll also use less mobile data since they’re not downloading maps again and again. OneStepAhead (which was self-funded) is based in Stuttgart, Germany, so that gives CloudMade an office near the German auto industry, which Christensen said has created a big market for location apps in that country.

Menlo Park, Calif.-based CloudMade has raised $15.7 million from Greylock Partners and Sunstone Capital. Its cofounder Steve Coast also cofounded the community mapping project OpenStreetMap, and CloudMade draws its data from its project. You can see some of the apps built on its platform at this website.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Shopping startup Retailigence says it’s creating a “bridge” connecting real-world “brick-and-mortar” stores with mobile and web applications. Now the Palo Alto, Calif. company has enlisted some well-known investors to fund its efforts: Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Dave McClure’s 500 Startups fund.

Retailigence takes inventory data from both sophisticated software (like that offered by SAP and NetSuite) and basic spreadsheets, then makes the information available through an application programming interface (API) to developers of location-based apps, shopping apps, and so on. So if a location check-in app is trying to lure you to a nearby store with the promise of a hot new product, it can use Retailigence to track whether that product is actually in stock.

In addition to DFJ and 500 Startups, ZIG Capital, Global Brain Corporation, and various angel investors participated in Retailigence’s $1.5 million seed round. The company was incubated at the Founder Institute.

Another hot startup called Milo.com offers shoppers a way to see what’s in stock on the shelves of nearby stores. It sounds like Retailigence isn’t trying to compete directly with Milo, but rather to provide the data for similar applications.

[image via Flickr/Fen Branklin]

Founded by Andrew Graham and John Warner in 2003, the duo originally envisioned a location-based app for tourism that would trigger relevant content when a visitor passed a certain location. But realizing that GPS on cell phones was still very much in a nascent stage, and that out-of-towners are not among the earliest of adopters, they shifted their focus to a demographic that is always eager to adopt new tech: Athletes.

The application, launched in February of 2006 and dubbed BiM Active, is purchased by an over-the-air download and costs a monthly subscription of $5.99 to $9.99 depending on the carrier. Once purchased, BiM Active tracks a runner or biker via GPS and calculates distance, speed, caloric burn, route, elevation, weather, degree of difficulty and allows you to wirelessly upload all this content all the data a central server, so you can show off your monster run to fellow enthusiasts. The program can also be used by snowboarders, hikers, rowers — pretty much any activity where it’s helpful to know how far you traveled and how quickly you did it.

The program gives some easy branding opportunities for companies in the same space. Currently, the program can be found at the Runner’s World website with the Runner’s World brand slapped on top. The company hopes to reach out and strike further sponsorships deals with other athletically-inclined brands.

Bones in Motion was, according to co-founder Andrew Graham, “one of the first LBS apps to go up on Sprint and Verizon. The carriers were looking for a very friendly face to put on location-based technology, something not so Big Brother.” The program has also garnered a couple of awards, winning the Navteq Global LBS Challenge in 2005, and the Brew Developer’s Award in 2007. The company has received only angel funding up until this point, with no institutional support, though Graham says that the company has been offered term sheets. However, Graham says, “Our next big carrier deployment will mean we’ll be able to cover 75 percent of the US subscriber base, so we’ll be getting to the point where it makes sense to get institutional support.”

Compared to what’s already on market, the most obvious advantage of BiM Active is price. A basic GPS unit for bicyclists from Garmin starts at around $250, or around 41 months of service from BiM Active. However, there are several things that may give hardcore athletes pause. BiM uses United States Geological Survey data, supplemented by GPS, to track altitude which is accurate to 10-20 meters. Garmin and others use barometric pressure combined with GPS to give altitude readings, which are accurate to about 3 meters. BiM Active also doesn’t have support for via Bluetooth heart rate monitors such as those put out by Alive Technolgies or Polar, which any athlete in training is going to want to see (though the application does support imported heart rate data from third-party applications). While runners probably won’t mind keeping their phone on an arm strap or pants pocket, bicyclists like to mount GPS units on their handlebars for easy viewing, something that may be difficult with a cell phone. Also worrying is that traditional GPS units are weather-proofed; cell phones, as I can personally attest to, are not.

Still, as GPS continues to appear on more and more cell phones, location-based apps that help track fitness training are going to become more popular, and Bones in Motion is well-positioned to be at the forefront of that particular niche.