Gadgetory

I'm ellis hamburger with the verge here at South by Southwest on a roof with foursquare CEO dennis crowley how's it going Dennis yeah well I go doing very well things so it's been a few years since you guys made a big splash at South by Southwest what's changed for you guys since then uh well for us I mean we launched four years ago and you know we're a big company now we've got 160 people across three offices we've got 30 million people using our products and it's just like four squares big now and so we came down here for years ago just to introduce what we were doing and really just to see if anyone even thought it was interesting like hey if we take game mechanics an overlay it with the real world with check-ins like is that something you guys like and to come back four years later and to still see you know all these places trending with hundreds of check-ins like it's awesome for us seems like you guys have started to really focus on recommendations and I mean I found an amazing coffee shop yesterday yes oh that's great like when did you kind of start to think that maybe that's where you need to dad actually we um we started thinking about that when we were still doing dodgeball while we're at Google and we had all this check at him when I say all this check and data without well it wasn't a lot it was probably you know tens of thousands of check-ins as opposed to the three billion we have with with Foursquare but we always knew that there was really good data in the signal that you know these place these people go to these types of places and this is where their friends go and these are the places they go back to and you know we knew we wanted to do that with Foursquare we just knew it was very difficult to get on a lot of that check in data in order to do that and so that was one of the big original ideas of foursquare it's like you know let's try to turn it into a game initially to see if we can get people to give us a lot of that a lot of that data and then we'll be able to kind of flip the switch on it and it took us a couple years to do it before it's like you know all those check-ins that you thought you were just giving us as part of this game well it turns out that you know they go into this recommendation engine and you've basically been telling us what you like for the last two years and now we can tell you guys like the places that we think you would like and the places that your friends like and I know you guys this week launched an update so it makes it even easier to check in you know maybe from ten seconds to more like three yeah what was kind of the impetus battalion behind making a move like that i mean our people having check-in fatigue or you just try to make it as easy as possible to provide that data do you guys even if it means you know taking the check and experience for 15 seconds down to 10 seconds it's great and then a lot of the work that we're doing now you know trying to like understand the passive signals that come from your phone like you know can we do things where we buzz your phone and we remind you to check in or we just automatically check you in if you you know if you've been in the convention center for for 10 minutes or so if your phone's been there I can we take those signals and turn those signals into an easier way for people to share I think that's one of the big questions of our age is how to not be annoying with push notifications yeah yeah is that is that in part a hardware limitation because let's say on iOS you can't be constantly pinging to see what somebody's up to or or is it something that you guys kind of need to work on with with science and algorithms um it's a you know like the background location stuff is a little bit tricky just because um it drains the battery very quickly this is true on iphone it's true on Android and so you know we launched a feature in 2008 2011 called called radar and the idea is like you turn radar on and as you just walk through the city foursquare just tells you about the things are interesting and it works but like it might not be worth the you know the forty percent battery trade-off that you get from it but we like I think we all recognize internally as a company like this is the direction that all this stuff is going you know there's a great example that I reference all the time like I've left the office back in New York at like nine o'clock once and then as soon as I you know as soon as I leave the office and as soon as my phone was two blocks north like Foursquare can sniff that out it's like oh you're on the move and you're heading in this direction did you know that five of your friends are checked in at the karaoke place three blocks away and it buzzes and I look at my phone Mike of course I want to know that and of course I want to stop by just for a second so here at South by people discovery apps have been popular and you keep seeing iterations but nothing that really makes a whole lot of sense like well won't buzz your phone because this person knows your cousin and you also like madmen like because that worker is are we going to reach a point where this is really valuable for people that you don't know or is it just on foursquare where you want to find people that you do now yeah it's good it's tricky right because I'm you have to sniff out someone's context and so you can't just be buzzing people all the time about every little thing that we think might be interesting so one of the things that we're getting good at is like recognizing hey in this city in this neighborhood are you a local REO Taurus is your phone spend a lot of time in austin well no but it spends a lot it's been four days a year and so like Foursquare has like it can it understands which neighborhoods I know about and so if I can go outside of those neighborhoods maybe that's when it turns to dial up it's like now we're going to start telling you more aggressively about the things that you know are interesting in this neighborhood but once you get back to someplace familiar it just turns the dial down a little bit we're here at South by this year where's Foursquare next year that's not by what does it look like so you guys update the app every two weeks it could be a leader animal from a u.s. perspective it's hard to tell because we're always doing so much work there but you know like a big part of the the Foursquare journey has been telling the story to people as it evolved that's why we come down here every year because it's like a different chapter of what we're doing in 2009 it was you know points and badges and in 2011 we showed what we were doing with the Explorer recommendation engine and the MX deals for the first time and you know now I think people are starting to really understand like the personalized local search and the social maps aspect of it and i think a year from now that'll be a lot more commonplace at the same time i'm still psyched that I can pull up my phone at any moment and see that hey there are 600 people checked in at the driskill and there are 200 people checking the convened Convention Center and use that as a guide for where to go next like that that's always a lot of fun thanks so much for coming out with us Dennis yeah thank you for having me appreciate it