Foursquare
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|
| Type of business | Private |
|---|---|
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Type of site
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Local search, recommender system |
| Available in | English, German, French, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Japanese, Turkish |
| Founded | New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Headquarters | New York City, New York, United States |
| Area served | Worldwide |
| Founder(s) |
Dennis Crowley Naveen Selvadurai |
| Key people |
Jeff Glueck, CEO |
| Employees | Over 200 |
| Slogan(s) | Foursquare helps you find places you’ll love, anywhere in the world. |
| Website | foursquare |
| Alexa rank |
 1,351 (September 2016[update]) |
| Registration | Optional |
| Users | 45 million |
| Launched | March 11, 2009 |
| Current status | Active |
Jeff Glueck, CEO
Dennis Crowley, Co-Founder, Executive Chairman
Foursquare is a local search-and-discovery service mobile app which provides search results for its users. The app provides personalized recommendations of places to go to near a user's current location based on users' "previous browsing history, purchases, or check-in history".
The service was created in late 2008 and launched in 2009 by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai. Crowley had previously founded the similar project Dodgeball as his graduate thesis project in the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University. Google bought Dodgeball in 2005 and shut it down in 2009, replacing it with Google Latitude. Dodgeball user interactions were based on SMS technology, rather than an application. Foursquare was the second iteration of that same idea, that people can use mobile devices to interact with their environment. Foursquare was Dodgeball reimagined to take advantage of the new smartphones, like the iPhone, which had built in GPS to better detect a user's location.
Until late July 2014, Foursquare featured a social networking layer that enabled a user to share their location with friends, via the "check in" - a user would manually tell the application when they were at a particular location using a mobile website, text messaging, or a device-specific application by selecting from a list of venues the application locates nearby. In May 2014, the company launched Swarm, a companion app to Foursquare, that reimagined the social networking and location sharing aspects of the service as a separate application. On August 7, 2014 the company launched Foursquare 8.0, the completely new version of the service which finally removed the check in and location sharing entirely, to focus entirely on local search.
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Wikipedia