FourSquare’s Dennis Crowley On Running The Boston Marathon!

by Kyle in Everywhere Else, Interviews, New York, TechCrunch Disrupt, Videos
0 Comments 0 Like 1,602

FourSquare,Dennis Crowley,Boston Marathon,Boston Bomber,TechCrunch Disrupt 2013Before Monday April 15th FourSquare founder Dennis Crowley was looking forward to running the Boston Marathon with his girlfriend and family. They would take a quick jaunt up from New York, have a great time and get some great exercise. Obviously, as a co-founder of FourSquare, Crowley is a busy guy so he seemed to be looking forward to just having fun.

Also as co-founder of FourSquare he wanted to take advantage of their technology throughout the race. “I set up FourSquare to automatically check me in as I passed each mile marker”.

As the events of April 15th took a turn for the worst, Crowley was still informing his social media followers via FourSquare that everything was A-Ok. As we all know cell phone service was shut down, but luckily Crowley tells TechCrunch’s Colleen Taylor that he was able to get a few texts and tweets out.

Sure Crowey’s phone was still passing check points but people were worried about how he was actually doing.

Before Taylor and Crowley turned to talking about FourSquare and rumors of buyouts and their latest round of funding, they talked about the Boston Marathon. Check out our video below.

More coverage from TechCrunch Disrupt NYC 2013, brought to you by videojuice.co here at nibletz.com

 

sneakers

Seattle Startup Zulily’s Valuation Reaches $1 Billion Dollars

by Kyle in Everywhere Else, Funding, Seattle, Startup News, Startups
Comments Off on Seattle Startup Zulily’s Valuation Reaches $1 Billion Dollars 0 Like 3,382

Zulily,Seattle startup,startup,startups, billion dollar valuation,square,foursquare, instagramBack in September we brought you this interview with Zulily co-founder Darrell Cavens. Zulily is an online marketplace featuring daily deals for kids,mom’s and women. The company started out with just kids stuff and then expanded and started offering women’s clothing and accessories along with housewares.

It was announced on Thursday that the Seattle based startup has raised $85 million dollars from Andreessen Horowitz, one of the top valley venture capital firms that holds interests in companies like Instagram and Skype.

Jeff Jordan the former CEO of Open Table and partner at Andreessen Horowitz, characterized Zulily as an example of “e-commerce 2.0″ in a blog post.  He also said that Zulily was part of a renaissance in innovation among e-commerce players.

That wasn’t all that attracted Andreessen Horowitz to Zulily. The company’s founding team that’s already had tremendous success in the e-commerce arena in a niche market. Mark Vardon and Darrell Cavens were also the team behind Blue Nile which is the largest online retailer of certified diamonds and other fine jewelry. Jordan also cited the fact that Cavens was the head of both technology and marketing, ” a combination of functions I had never encountered before as an internet executive”, he wrote in the blog post.

Zulily has been very successful in carrying goods from lesser known designers who lacked distribution and then spun it into a business with over 10 million customers to date.

Last year Zulily raised $43 million dollars at a valuation of $750 million dollars. Although they didn’t report a valuation with today’s round, Business Insider quotes Fortune’s Dan Primack valuing the company at $1 billion dollars.  This puts Zulily in the same company as other startups like Square, FourSquare and Airbnb.

Linkage:

Check out Zulily here

Here’s our interview with Zulily

Source: BI

Are you coming to “everywhere else”?, you should.

 

Foursquare 5.0 Brings Complete Redesign, Available For Android And iOS

by Elijah Ketchum in Android, Apple, Featured, iOS, Mobile
Comments Off on Foursquare 5.0 Brings Complete Redesign, Available For Android And iOS 0 Like 1,744

 

The completely redesigned, new version of Foursquare that we have been hearing about for so long is finally here today–and it is awesome. Foursquare is still Foursquare. Meaning you still check-in, you still can explore, you still compete for mayorships with your friends and complete strangers. However, the way Foursquare goes about this puts a bigger emphasis on finding you new things to do.

It all starts with the design. As soon as you open the app for Android, you will notice that it has the brand new ICS themed layout that we’re starting to see with more and more apps. In the iOS version, the same idea is present only in the standard row of tabs on the bottom of the screen. In the same direction that both Facebook and Google+ have gone, Foursquare is also enlarging all of the photos in the app, making it a more visual experience than ever. This works hand-in-hand with the new Facebook Timeline integration, which inevitably makes Foursquare look like a native part of Timeline when posts are viewed on Facebook. The whole thing just feels like that “modern social network” that all of the top social giants seem to be heading towards these days.

The Explore feature now remembers the places that you often go and the places you mark as a favorite, and suggests them to you. For example, right now my Foursquare app knows that it is Thursday afternoon, so it reads “Suggestions for Thursday afternoon.” Under that line, it shows a lot of my favorite lunch places, starting with Chipotle Mexican Grill. And to be honest, I could go for some Chipotle right now, which is exactly the reaction that Foursquare was looking for with their new app.

You can view your stats in a beautiful new grid layout, that shows your friends, check-ins, mayorships, and trophies as well. It looks really good, and is definitely the best Foursquare experience yet. In my opinion, this update is exactly what Foursquare needed to renew its novelty feel, keep users coming back, and bring back users that have parted ways. Grab the update for Android in the link below, and the update for iOS is available at the iTunes link below.

Play Store link

iTunes link

FourSquare Finally Reaches 20 Million, 2 Billion Check Ins And A Million New Sign Ups Per Month

by Kyle in Mobile,
Comments Off on FourSquare Finally Reaches 20 Million, 2 Billion Check Ins And A Million New Sign Ups Per Month 0 Like 1,232

FourSquare, which was the breakout app at South By Southwest in 2009 has just released their latest numbers. According to FourSquare they now have 20 million registered users. Those users have accounted for 2 billion checkins over all and they’re seeing growth of about a million users per month.

In contrast, Instagram, which was just purchased by Facebook for $1 billion dollars last week, has 40 million users and has only been around since October of 2010. Pinterest, which released in private beta in March of 2010 has an estimated 17.8 million registered users as of March 2012, according to comscore.  Google+ reportedly has 61 million active users. So in comparison to the hot up and coming social networks Foursquare is in the rear view mirror.

Today was 4 Square day and the company used a special check in not to thank their users:

In 2010, foursquare fans declared April 16 4sqDay (4/4^2 – nerds after our own heart!). Two years and two billion check-ins later, you’re still why we get out of bed each day. Thanks to all 20 million of you for making us part of your lives. Happy 4sqDay!

More after the break
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New Revelations Of Naveen Selvadurai Separation From Foursquare

by Nick Tippmann in Featured, Mobile, Startups
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On Sunday we reported Naveen Seladurai one of the co-founders of Foursquare had left the company.  We believed the statements made by both Foursquare and Naveen in their respective blogs.  However, Business Insider is telling a different story how things went down and the new story is quite different than what was told to the public at first. Originally, we were led to believe he left under his own will as he wrote,

More after the break…  Read More…