Foursquare

AT&T has a problem. The wireless carrier's subscriber growth is significantly slowing and its exclusive hold on the iPhone in the U.S. may come to an end in 2010.

Sure, AT&T can go back to the iPhone trough, hoping that the forthcoming iPhone 4G will prop up its sales. But that's not going to help the company as it struggles with the blessing and curse of heavy data usage the iPhone has imposed on its network.

What AT&T really needs is a software story, and Foursquare may be a good place … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Nestled inside the badges that were handed to attendees at Facebook's F8 developer conference here on Wednesday were what looked like little paper dog tags emblazoned with Facebook's logo. These are part of something calls "Facebook Presence," which at this point is little more than a gimmick for the hordes of techies here.

But it calls up the possibility that when Facebook finally makes a concrete move into the hot "geolocation" space, it may look something like this.

Here's how the RFID-enabled "Presence" works. The tokens contains a number, which … Read more

In an unusual move for a venture firm chasing a hot start-up, Andreessen Horowitz said it has dropped out of the race to be an investor in social location company Foursquare.

In an interview Monday night, Ben Horowitz, partner in the high-profile VC outfit he helms with Marc Andreessen, said enough was enough related to the intense press and other machinations around the deal, which has included talks to be acquired by Yahoo.

"We withdrew our funding offer to Foursquare and we are out," said Horowitz in an interview with BoomTown. "This is playing out too much … Read more

Late last week, I earned the coveted "Pizzaiolo" badge on Foursquare.

A true indicator of potential cholesterol problems down the road, the Pizzaiolo badge is awarded when a user of the mobile social-networking site has "checked in" to 20 different pizzerias. I don't publicly broadcast most of my Foursquare check-ins to Facebook or Twitter, but am more than happy to share when I've earned a badge. So the Pizzaiolo badge went straight into my Facebook news feed, where my younger brother promptly commented on the item to indicate that it made him suddenly want … Read more

You have to give Yahoo an A for effort, if perhaps the ultimate grade in its ongoing quest to buy hot mobile start-up Foursquare is an F.

While its founder Dennis Crowley--who controls a large chunk of the shares of the start-up--has so far turned down several $100 million-plus offers from Yahoo, sources said its new head of mergers and acquisitions Andrew Siegel is back in New York today still trying to convince him to sell.

So far, especially because the effort has dragged on for a while now and Yahoo has not made an overwhelming show of financial might, … Read more

Here's some bad news for folks who were expecting iPad media subscriptions to be cheaper than the real thing. A report from The Wall Street Journal (on itself), points at a monthly price tag that costs more than it would to actually get the newspaper delivered to your house every day. So much for cheap, digital delivery.

We also talk about the alleged Twitter hacker who leaked those Twitter internal documents last year; getting busted by the FBI; as well as GoDaddy no longer selling .cn domain names in China. Tune in to hear more about these stores and … Read more

Microsoft's Bing Maps tool will soon feature tips and comments from location-based networking service Foursquare.

Don't panic: This won't broadcast your location to anyone hunting around on Bing Maps. It will, however, pull up the quick "tips" that Foursquare users can attach to a given business or other venue, like the one I saw when I "checked in" to a restaurant last night and was greeted with "Love, love, love the Brussels sprouts."

A new Silverlight-based tool will pull in the Foursquare features to Bing Maps. This and other Bing updates … Read more

On this week's Digital City, we discover some new fallout from the no-Flash-on-the-iPad issue, then spend some quality time with the long-delayed superthin Adamo XPS laptop.

We do a quick survey to find out where we've earned foursquare mayorships (here's a hint: they're all bars), and then check the official office March Madness standings in our office pool. Let's just say that coin-flipping to pick his teams may not have been Scott's finest moment.

Finally, we've got some more video games to give away. This week, it's racing game MotoGP 09/10 … Read more

We already knew that in the heated battle among location-based social-networking start-ups, Foursquare already had Ashton Kutcher on its team. Turns out it also has "Jersey Shore" star "DJ Pauly D," one of a handful of MTV and VH1 celebrities who are featured in a new marketing campaign that MTV Networks has inked with the pumped-up Foursquare.

(Serious question: Has this start-up jumped the shark already?)

The partnership tests a new kind of Foursquare account known as "Celebrity Mode," in which a prominent Foursquare user (ahem, Ashton) can choose to share "check-ins" … Read more