More hype in social networking fantasy land, 4square worth $100M!!!!

If you haven't heard of foursquare you're lucky, its just another worthless "social networking" company that lets others know exactly where you are and what the fuck you are doing because that's the most important thing today. After this $20 million in venture capital the company is valued at nearly $100 Million dollars. One of the co-founders was quoted saying that people expect it to become a $1 billion dollar company soon.....

How these companies are valued at these inflated prices is beyond me.


Just to let you know, yahoo offered them $125 Million a couple of months ago and they gladly turned it down.



Foursquare Raises $20 Million in Venture Capital
By JENNA WORTHAM
Published: June 29, 2010


Foursquare, the social networking service that allows users to broadcast their location to friends from a mobile phone, announced on Tuesday that it had raised $20 million from venture capitalists.

Since it was introduced last March, Foursquare has amassed more than 1.8 million users and says it is adding new ones at the rate of roughly 10,000 a day.

Dennis Crowley, who founded the company with a fellow entrepreneur, Naveen Selvadurai, said the fresh cash would largely be used to develop its technology infrastructure, expand its staff of nearly 30 employees and relocate to office space in New York, where the company is based.

“The capital goes to building out our team and bringing on people we need to meet engineering needs,” Mr. Crowley said.

Foursquare previously raised $1.35 million in cash from a well-known list of financiers, including O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Union Square Ventures, which has financed Web companies like Twitter, Tumblr and Etsy. The new investment places the company’s valuation at $95 million.

The most recent round of fund-raising involved earlier investors and added a new partner, Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm led by the Internet pioneer Marc Andreessen, who co-founded Netscape, and his business partner, Ben Horowitz. Mr. Horowitz said that his firm zeroed in on Foursquare because of the vast market potential for mobile services and applications.

“There are already over 200 million smartphones out there and growing fast,” he said. “We’d like to see them build out the company to capture that opportunity.”

Earlier this year, the Web was ablaze with speculation that Foursquare was involved in serious acquisition talks with Facebook and Yahoo.

But Mr. Crowley said the company decided it was too soon to sell. “We’ve got this robust and ambitious road map,” he said. “I really feel that we haven’t gotten far enough through it and we’re still scratching the surface for opportunities.”

A big part of Foursquare’s appeal is that it turns location-sharing into a game that lets users compete for points, badges and “mayor” status at bars and restaurants. Mr. Crowley said the rewards players received could be a valuable marketing tool for local businesses and advertisers.

“We’re really after connecting local merchants with their best customers,” Mr. Crowley said. “The opportunity here is much larger than we originally thought.”

Since its introduction last year, Foursquare has established partnerships with more than 10,000 businesses, including Starbucks, Bravo TV, Zagat’s and The New York Times Company.

The interest in Foursquare goes beyond the simple appeal of allowing users to figure out where their friends are migrating for happy hour, said Charles S. Golvin, an analyst with Forrester Research.

The goal is more targeted advertising. “The big audiences already out there on the Web are fairly well addressed,” said Mr. Golvin. “Hyperlocal is where the next big wave of mobile advertising opportunity is, because it ties into that belief that location is going to be a big enabler for marketers to more deeply engage with their customers.”

But Foursquare is not the only mobile company hoping to make money from advertisers eager to understand more about the habits and behavior of consumers, said Jeanine Sterling, a senior industry analyst at Frost & Sullivan. In addition to rivals start-ups like Loopt, MyTown, Gowalla and BrightKite, Google has been aggressively promoting its mobile social network, Google Latitude, and Facebook is expected to introduce location features at some point as well.

“It’s a very real threat,” Ms. Sterling said. “But Facebook and Google have their own vulnerabilities, too. Foursquare can position itself as offering capabilities and features that Facebook can’t provide, such as privacy.”

 

Why did VC firms dump so much money into these social networking sites again? It's not like those ads are going to be guarantee hits.

 

this is huge market for phone company, cash flow from data fee on cellphone is huge.

I like the new iphone 4's video face time, this is very nicely done by Apple.

 

Just wondering - is there anyone who's NOT an entrepreneur in America these days?

 

Wow and I thought it won't get more retarded than crazed twitter lunatics.

 

With all this "connectedness", especially amongst the young folk, I can't help but think something good will come of it all.
Maybe that's a wish, but it's a good wish.

 

I have a family member that is very close with Dennis, and 4 Square. My recommendation was to sell, but that was the trader in me.

The attention they are getting is pretty ridiculous. Dennis is literally treated like a rock star.

Note: Years ago Dennis made an phone application called Dodge-Ball that Google bought from him (millions), but then Google lost interest and pretty much let it die. I think that has influenced why he decided not to sell. More power to them; hard to pass up 'that' kind of money.

 

4square database is worth much more than $125M.

It has potential to kick Google's ass provided it doesn't get bought.

 

I was just looking at my FB profile which I turn on and off and there was this young chick down my street who I talked to a few times, I knew her sister and checked out her profile (for some reason FB now keeps popping her profile in my face ! ) , she is barely 18 and has something like get this 690 friends on her profile! The older sister had 400 friends, no wonder I wasted my time with her !

Today's teenagers are just an insane bunch, those people on FB are just giving themselves away to advertisers so they can be even better exploited. Sheeples it's so pathetic.