foursquare

Facebook announces single sign-in for mobile and Facebook Places launches discounts and promotions for checking in

Microsoft expects to sell 5 million units of Kinect in 2010

AT&T announces AT&T ForHealth to help automate health care

MySpace gets a stern warning about performance from Rupert Murdoch

Facebook Credits are now the official currency of EA social games

It's obvious that Facebook sees serious potential in mobile check-in service Foursquare: it tried to buy it for $125 million.

That didn't work. So Facebook started to get into the location game, too. It launched Facebook Places, its own geolocation service. And today, Facebook went ahead and launched a big new suite of mobile features that includes, notably, enhancements to Facebook Places that let businesses easily automate "deals" for when users check in. On the surface, given Facebook's scale, this looks like it could spell difficult times ahead for Foursquare.

Like Foursquare, Facebook's new … Read more

The first live Twitter messages from space were less than a year ago, but already astronauts have moved on to geolocation: Douglas C. Wheelock, commander of the Expedition 25 mission, earned the "NASA Explorer" badge on Foursquare for checking into the International Space Station on Friday morning.

Foursquare business development rep Eric Friedman said on the company blog that Wheelock was "the first human to ever use a location-based service from space," leaving open the possibility that aliens somewhere else in the universe may have developed their own social-networking services and consequently, as far as we … Read more

Facebook has been awarded a patent that appears to give it sweeping intellectual property jurisdiction over location-enabled social networking, something that our colleagues at BNET first noticed on Wednesday. Considering the geolocation space still does not have a single dominant player, the possession of this kind of patent may be a powerful weapon for Facebook that has broad implications for the industry.

Patent no. 7,809,805, called "Systems and methods for automatically locating web-based social network members," is extremely detailed. Among the concepts it claims are the sending and receiving of location-based status messages (what are commonly … Read more

Something's very wrong with the servers at mobile check-in start-up Foursquare, which had experienced problems on Monday morning and then ultimately crashed altogether and hadn't been resuscitated as of 8:00 p.m. PT.

Reached via e-mail, one of Foursquare's executives said the company was not yet willing to disclose the cause of the outage but promised that a postmortem blog post would explain the situation when it had been mitigated.

"The light at the end of the tunnel seems oh-so-close. Should have some good news soon!" a tweet from Foursquare's Twitter account read … Read more

Men are misunderstood.

The media, Hollywood, and various other pressure groups have painted them as feral beasts, moved to action and emotion only by the prospect of their target gender's proximity.

Two enterprising tech beings--men, as it happens--decided at South by Southwest Interactive to further this perception of male neanderthalia. Jeff Hodsdon and Danny Trinh, then both at Digg, created a service that collated all those useful Foursquare check-ins in order to inform those who might be interested of the volume of women in any one place.

They did it as a joke. They were mocking all the … Read more

Yesterday morning, thousands of New York-based users of geolocation service Foursquare received a "check-in" that had nothing to do with a friend announcing her presence at a Starbucks or a co-worker logging a breakfast meeting in midtown: It was a news alert from The Wall Street Journal, informing them that Metro-North commuter rail service was suspended due to a fire on a bridge over the Harlem River.

If you were, say, a Philadelphia-based Foursquare user who "followed" The Wall Street Journal account, you wouldn't have received the alert. Nor would it have shown up on … Read more

Music Hack Day is a recurring event in which developers take 24 hours to write music applications based on various open APIs. This weekend, Music Hack Day took place London, and a few of the results have been made available online for the general public. Most offer a minute or two of interesting musical distraction, like 7x7, a Web page that lets you create chords from notes in a matrix, and Soundwheel (warning: audio will begin playing as soon as the page loads), which warbles bass tones as you drag points around a color wheel.

But one hack seemed truly … Read more

A few months before its five ski resorts open for the season, the Colorado-based Vail Resorts has unveiled a preview of something called Epic Mix, a set of Web and mobile apps based on skiers' activity as logged by radio frequency (RF) readers around its resorts.

It'll go live when the first of Vail's resorts, Keystone, opens for the season in early November. Vail Resorts' season passes and lift tickets are already RF-enabled, but with Epic Mix, interested skiers can unlock "pins" in the manner of Foursquare badges, get ranked on a vertical-feet leaderboard, post all manner of ski-related updates to Facebook and Twitter, and--via a mobile app--see their friends' activity on the slopes in real time so that it gets way easier to meet up for beers at the lodge. There's also a kid-oriented site for children under 13, which limits sharing to the kids' parents and has its own set of kid-friendly pins.

A skier can turn off RF functionality entirely if he or she so chooses, the company explained.

Vail Resorts CEO Rob Katz said in a New York press event Monday that the company had ruled out partnerships with existing "check-in" companies, or an emulation of those services, because of the fact that he said they did not want to require any additional behavior to participate--"We don't think that works while you're on vacation," he said.

… Read more