Social location app foursquare has released a completely redesigned version that attempts to shift from making “checking in” the focus to discovering places to go, things to do and events to see.
In their third year, the company has faced some losses at the top of their team, including their head of talent acquisition, a top business development colleague, and their co-founder. Founder and CEO Dennis Crowley discusses the shakeup and the departure of co-founder Naveen Selvadurai.
Will a change in leadership at Research In Motion help change the prospects of this floundering company? The prospects do not appear good. Here’s my video report on location from Davos, Switzerland.
The first time I used Skype I was in awe. The video quality, the effortlessness it allowed me to see and hear my family far away over my laptop computer screen was magic. It was even more magical when I tried it on my iPhone — a Dick Tracy moment. And it was more impressive than FaceTime because it allowed me to talk to anyone with Skype, not just with those who had an iPhone.
Today, Skype will likely begin to be lost in the maw that is Microsoft. Sure, Microsoft still remains one of the most valuable companies this country has ever produced but aside from the XBox, it hasn’t been on the leading edge of innovation in many years. Apple, Google and companies like Facebook and Twitter are seen at the forefront of the digital age. Microsoft, in comparison, seems like the once great star athlete, a Michael Jordan attempting to regain some glory by playing minor league baseball.
The best case scenario here is that Microsoft rolls Skype into a product like Kinect, which hasn’t quite taken the world by storm, and becomes a simple, easy to use videoconferencing device for the living room, that takes us beyond just hunching over our computers to interact with our friends who are far away.
Is Facebook just an elaborate direct marketer’s masterwork? Should I think twice before using my existing Twitter account to log into various services all around the web? Should I be worried about handing my credit card over to Sony? These and other perfectly valid and simultaneously conspiracy theoretical ideas tend to float in and around my head from time to time. The big scare du-jour, is if Apple’s iPhone and Google’s mobile OS, Android, are tracking and archiving our every movement.
A journalistic tennis match on this topic took place over the course of the last few days. First, this is old news. Apple responded to congress regarding this almost a year ago. Digital forensics specialists have known you could track locations on iOS devices for some time, and have used the data to assist law enforcement. Alex Levinson, an RIT student, even published a research paper and subsequent book last December detailing data acquisition techniques for iOS products, like the iPhone and iPad. He says that Apple is not collecting the data.
The Wall Street Journal added Google to the mix, citing that Apple is not alone in the practice of collecting user information. Julia Angwin at the Journal claims that not only are Apple and Google collecting the data and storing it locally on the phone, but they actually regularly transmit their locations back to Apple and Google. The endgame? Angwin believes they’re racing to build a massive database of location information in order to tap the $2.9 billion market for location-based services. Today, Apple seemed to indicate that was part of their plan, as they revealed they’re building a crowd-sourced traffic service.
An application that wasn’t even in the app store a week ago just raised $41 million.
We’ve reached the point where simply the idea of an app is now enough to raise multi-million dollar capital. Were any of these folks around back in 2000? Certainly some lessons have been learned the first time around. Most investors and companies are avoiding the same mistakes but that hasn’t prevented plenty of head scratching deals to emerge in the last few months.
The app, called Color, is a photo sharing application that allows you to post and view images by people in the same proximity as each other.
