Foursquare adds even more data on where you are

Technology giants such as Facebook and Google, as well as telecom companies such as AT & T, T-Mobile and Sprint, are facing repeated criticism for concealing information about the location of their users and reused them for advertising and other purposes. But one of the biggest names tracking location data continues to fly relatively under the radar: Foursquare.

In recent years, the company, better known for its eponymous city guide and its social media recording application, Swarm, has become a central location data for users, working with more than 150,000 partners, from AccuWeather to Samsung, through TripAdvisor, to deepen its understanding of exactly what phones go and what it says about their owners.

In a press release, Foursquare said it currently has "a measured audience of more than 100 million monthly devices in the United States." And his understanding of users' real-time back and forth is only getting clearer. On Friday, Foursquare announced that it has acquired Placed, which determines the effectiveness of certain advertising campaigns by tracking users' movements in real time with Snapchat Snap. Placed helps to locate in real time nearly 6 million active users per month through apps that pay users or offer other types of rewards in exchange for access to their data. The Wall Street Journal.

If you think you are not using Foursquare, you probably are wrong. Foursquare localization technology powers Uber parts, Twitter geo tags, Snapchat-based location filters, location sharing in WeChat, some TouchTunes notifications, elements of Apple Maps, and more. As Foursquare says itself: "If that tells you where, it's probably built on Foursquare."

Although the company's footprint is already significant – CEO Jeff Glueck said last year that only Facebook and Google were competing with Foursquare in terms of data accuracy – Foursquare's ambitions are even greater. "Over the next 10 years, it will be unthinkable to think that at one point, our phones, watches, cameras, cars and badistants did not recognize our movements and reacted with precision and context", wrote Glueck in a press release released the acquisition.

Currently, Foursquare uses all of this data to help businesses target their demographic and interest groups and determine the impact of advertising campaigns on in-store visits, among other things. The company said that its understanding of the real-time locations of millions of phones had helped Subway determine the impact of physical coupons on store visits and segment users into custom audience categories based on types of locations that they visit regularly, according to the Foursquare website.

An example on the site illustrates how Foursquare can learn more about the habits of an individual user. For a man aged 45 to 49, located in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, Foursquare can use data on shops, bars and other buildings regularly visited by humans to badign "personas", which can then be used by advertisers to target the user. more efficiently. Because Foursquare can tell the man who went to the AT & T stadium between 7 pm and 10:30 pm and He stopped at Harry's Sports Bar last week. Foursquare has designated him as a "sports enthusiast". Similarly, Foursquare states that this man's visit to Pepper's Grill between 5 pm and 6:30 pm is his second trip to the establishment this week. – confirms the character of "Casual Diner".

The man is also referred to as a "super saver" because of his visits to the local dollar store and the Shopper Town warehouse; "The Coffee Drinker" thanks to the top in a "local bakery cafe", which was combined with data showing that he "also frequents Joe's Coffee twice a week" and a "small business owner" while he was going to a store called "Dave's" Auto Repair "every day between 8:30 am and 2:30 pm.

Foursquare claims that its acquisition of Placed (which will soon be called "Placed powered by Foursquare") will strengthen Placed's ability to fulfill its mission as a kind of offline Google Analytics by offering marketers a more complete view of upcoming events. millions of users.

Foursquare has not answered any questions regarding the transaction.

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