The start-up Foursquare may be about to cash in one some serious dough. Yahoo may be ready to put up $100 million to buy it. Business Insider reports that a source close to bankers involved has told them about the deal that may or may not be about to go down.
However, while a source close to Yahoo confirmed that Yahoo is interested in Foursquare, the search engine giant is interested in many different ventures right now, so it may not be anything to get too excited about.
But Foursquare may not be ready to go to the first bidder – the CEO and co-founder Dennis Crowley has been meeting with all the big names recently, from Apple, to Facebook and Twitter. Foursquare appears to be quite the hot commodity right now.
So, what’s it all about? It’s a pretty neat application that you can use with a mobile phone to help you explore your city. It seems to be mainly US-based, but there are some other worldwide cities where it is beginning to catch on (as evidenced by the number of Japanese users visible in the live feed). It’s possible to link to your address book, Facebook, and Twitter account, to instantly have a huge list of contacts to tap into.
Foursquare will automatically list thousands (well, depending on how many places it has in its database) of places based on a user’s GPS coordinates. Then you can read and leave tips on places you visit around town “and don’t skip on the details; inside information is one of Foursquare’s best features,” advises the company’s intro video. It’s also possible to add locations to Foursquare, and glean suggestions for things to do, or things to avoid.
Its main drawback is its US-centric quality. Users in other parts of the world can’t have as much fun with the application, since there is very little data available for their cities (with the exception of the major ones like London, Paris and Tokyo).
Says Business Insider writer Nicolas Carlson on the proposed acquisition: “A Foursquare acquisition makes tons of sense for Yahoo, where product executives believe that paradigm of Web pages could soon go away, to be replaced by a universe of service built on Internet-connected devices in, around, and outside the home. It would be a relatively cheap way for Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz to show employees and Wall Street that she’s serious about innovating.”
VentureBeat.com’s Owen Thomas speculates that Foursquare is trying to scare the other venture capital firms that are interested in it, with the looming Yahoo buy-out, into raising their bids, which are currently around $80 million.
It will be interesting to see what develops, and see just how much money Foursquare can milk out of these companies. Maybe if a bigger company acquires it, and it really takes off, Foursquare could truly become a worldwide application.
Kaila Krayewski is a freelance journalist with a passion for all things internet. Having worked for nearly two years as the public relations manager for an internation search engine optimization company, and publishing hundreds of articles (how-to, informational, and otherwise) on SEO, she knows a thing or two about the field. Furthermore, having just started up her own website blondetraveler.com, she is doing her best to keep one step ahead of the search engines in order to keep the traffic flowing.
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Tags: Foursquare, location-based search, Yahoo
