Speaking at All Things Digital’s D: Dive Into Mobile conference on Tuesday, Foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley offered a number of tidbits about what might be next for the company’s product and business.
While Foursquare continues to gain traction with big brands, Crowley ultimately sees the company’s main business as serving local merchants and “build[ing] software that makes people’s experience in the real world better.”
Continuing, Crowley said, “I think the business model is being able to create and sell tools to local merchants that they’ve never had before.” That started with the (free) analytics tools the company revealed earlier this year, but several years down the line, it could mean merchants having screens that tell them the loyalty levels of each individual customer and acting accordingly.
Intriguingly, Crowley said that he sees companies like Groupon — which have monetized to a level far beyond Foursquare — as partners and not competitors. For example, “deals [could] get sweeter based on the stats behind them,” such as the number of times someone has been to a given location or the number of friends they’ve checked in there with, he added.
The checkin that fuels those types of opportunities could also change in nature. Asked about the idea of passive checkins, Crowley said the company is experimenting with it and will “have the product prepared for it” once technical hurdles like proximity and battery life (location in the background is a significant drain on batteries) are overcome.
One final fun tidbit of note: Crowley wanted to name Dodgeball — his first location-based startup that was sold to Google (and ultimately shut down) — Foursquare, but the domain name was taken.
More About: dennis crowley, foursquare
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