shared 06 Sep, 2011
Foursquaropoly, A Monopoly Game Played Using Foursquare
Foursquaropoly is a mobile gaming app that combines the Foursquare API with the gameplay of the Monopoly board game (see a video demo). Players can buy and sell Foursquare check-in venues, and collect rent based on the number of check-ins at each property. The game is currently being developed by Deanna McDonald, Sean Tiraratanakul, and Jaclyn Shelton.
We previously wrote about another Foursquare-based game, World of Fourcraft.
via Betabeat
Foursquaropoly is a mobile gaming app that combines the Foursquare API with the gameplay of the Monopoly board game (see a video demo).
[read in full]shared 22 Feb, 2011
4SquareAnd7YearsAgo Knows Where You Checked-In Last Year
From the folks that brought you FlickSquare now comes 4SquareAnd7YearsAgo, a simple app that emails you with a reminder of where you’ve checked in on Foursquare from a year ago. All you need to to is sign into the app on FourSquare and the app will email you with last year’s checkins. That simple. And if you didn’t check-in on any given day the email skips.
Built at Foursquare Hack Day by Jonathan Wegener, Benny Wong and Matt Raoul the app has caught the attention of Foursquare founders as well as bloggers and industry notables.
[read in full]shared 23 Nov, 2010
Digital Communities Can Learn From “Leading Clever People”
Participant Media Model by Arts Alliance
We recently got excited about a 15 year old chart (pictured) we were presented that effectively encapsulated participation inequality. We love the level of detail beyond the typical 1:9:90 ratio (creators:editors:audience). We can only assume “1:10:100:1000:10000 rule” is too much of a mouthful to say, thus the shorthand.
It makes us stop and think about how unbelievably valuable the “catalytic creative contributor” is to any community. A digital community designer should want nothing more than to please this particularly small set of people.
[read in full]shared 04 Nov, 2010
ChatSquare Brings Chatrooms To Foursquare and Facebook Places
What happens when you add a chat room to Foursquare or Facebook Places? You get ChatSquare, of course. ChatSquare is a mobile app developed by ISraeli entrepreneur Nir Ofir. It works in the browser on iPhones and Android phones. You connect to your Foursquare or Facebook accounts and the app lets you check into places in their geo-directories and chat with anyone else there.
There are three kinds of chat rooms in ChatSquare: a chat room in a specific place, a local lobby and a global lobby.
[read in full]shared 17 Oct, 2010
Inspected Gadget: Garmin Chirp Geocaching Beacon
The Garmin Chirp is a geocacher’s delight – it sends out a wireless GPS signal to a maximum of 32 feet/10meters to alert a nearby visitor that they’re either getting warm or already on top fof the coordinates they’re seeking. It’s just over an inch long, under an ounce, waterproof, and has a battery life of one year (continuous use!). So what’s geocaching? It’s foursquare and gowalla way before either of those two existed, and more specifically, like GPS-assisted treasure hunting.
[read in full]shared 14 Sep, 2010
Ron Conway’s Confidential Investment Guide: The Tech Megatrends
Angel investors SV Angel, led by Ron Conway invests so early in startups that he looks mostly at the team and current tech trends when making investment decisions.
Last year he was focusing on real time and location startups. This year, according to a confidential report to SV Angel investors that made its way into our hands, he’s looking at a whole slew of trends.
How a startup plays into these trends is taken into consideration when SV Angel ponders an investment.
[read in full]shared 07 Sep, 2010
Blacktop Automates Place-Based Storytelling
Blacktop is an app built on top of Foursquare and Facebook Places that helps travelers capture, package, and share “trips” based on their check-in history. The user shares bits here and there while Blacktop does the heavy lifting, connecting the dots and piecing together the bigger picture. It also allows users to add comments and photos to an itinerary like Jeep’s Tripcast app, which creates context and helps tell a story.
This is a great example of a couple trends redefining travel that we wrote about last week: Sharing Trips and Curating Places.
[read in full]shared 03 Sep, 2010
Mobile First Web Second
Paramendra wrote a post last night that got me thinking about a class of apps that I’ll call “mobile first web second”. He mentions Twitter and Foursquare and I would agree that both of them are mobile first web second.
Back in the early days of Twitter, I sent and read most of my tweets via SMS. I signed up a lot of users by telling them to text “follow fredwilson” to 40404. Evan Williams said in a blog post yesterday, “46 percent of active users make mobile a regular part of their Twitter experience.” I am surprised it is not higher.
shared 28 Jun, 2010
Location: How Check-Ins Speak Louder Than Words
For the June issue of Wired UK, John Battelle put together this database of online behaviors and what they communicate. Everything from a Google search to a Foursquare check-in says something about us.
Sites like Amazon and eBay capture a lot about what we buy, whereas Google and Bing queries signal want. Facebook and Myspace present personal and group identity while the status update deliberately communicates “what I’m doing” or “what’s happening.”
So what happens when the check-in is thrown into the mix?
[read in full]shared 22 Jun, 2010
Foursquare Now Adding Nearly 100,000 Users A Week
Over the past several months, Foursquare has had a number of impressive stats for a startup. Some of them involved SXSW, some involved overall check-ins numbers, some involved deals signed. But at the end of the day, the most important metric for any service remains number of users. And Foursquare is doing pretty well there too.
The location-based service has just tweeted out that they’re now past 1.7 million users. Impressively, that’s up 100,000 users from just about a week ago.
[read in full]