Foursquare CEO Looks Beyond Mobile Handsets: Anywhere There’s A Screen, We Want To Be On It
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Google has yet to release the Mirror API that will open Google Glass as a platform, but developers of some of the more popular mobile apps today are gearing up for when wearable computing products, like Glass, will. Today, speaking at a keynote at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Dennis Crowley, CEO of social location app Foursquare, highlighted Google’s new headgear as an example of how mobile screens are evolving, and later he told TechCrunch that Foursquare is looking at how it can evolve along with that.
“Anywhere there’s a screen, we want to put our stuff on it, whether that’s on a phone, or a watch, or whatever,” he said. He also added that Foursquare hasn’t yet worked with Google Glass itself.
This week at MWC, Google did not have a formal presence at the main exhibition, but it’s been here nevertheless. Apart from the many Android device makers here — with the biggest of all, Samsung, taking stand space in multiple halls and even the train station nearby — Google had its usual Android party and there have been Google Glass sightings both at the official event and elsewhere.
Wearable computing devices like Google Glass, which make interacting with services ever more seamless, dovetail with how Foursquare is trying to make its services more automatic and easy to use, requiring less proactive input from consumers in order to function.
Crowley said that Foursquare would like to launch a new feature that builds on this concept, enhancing the “contextual awareness” (his words) introduced by like Radar. (Introduced in 2011, Radar alerts users to when they are near places that they have flagged in their app.)
“The best version of Foursquare is the one you don’t think about using,” he told TechCrunch on the sidelines of today’s keynote. “The relaunch of Radar is inevitable: it’s very important to us.”
And while for Foursquare part of reaching that goal is to be on as many platforms as possible, it’s also about integrating with other applications, furthering its own position as a platform for location services. The company already works with 40,000 developers to power location services, including Path, Instagram and Evernote. “We’re slowly starting to become the location layer for the Internet,” Crowley said.
In January, Google started to run its first hackathons, in San Francisco and New York, for developers interested in Google Glass and getting an early look at the Mirror API.
More from TechCrunch’s longer conversation with Crowley coming soon.
