Foursquare Redesigns Its Venue Pages For The Web To Capitalize On Its 50M Monthly Unique Visitors
Foursquare recently raised another round of funding, with the announcement coming just a few days after it released its latest iOS app redesign. Today, the company has launched redesigned venue pages, to fit in with what they did last year on the web with its homepage, focusing on explore and discover functionality. The changes are to capitalize on the traffic that Foursquare gets from its now #1 referrer on the web, Google, which traffic has doubled from over the past year. This is an important play for Foursquare, as its competing with Google’s own Local product, Yelp….and it seems like Facebook too, after its redesign today for local business pages. Foursquare’s lead engineer for the web, Mike Singleton, told me that the site now gets over 50M unique visitors on the web, which is 17M more than actually use its app. That means that Foursquare is quietly breaking through as a place for information about venues, its most prized asset: People are coming from Google for different reasons, ...
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Yelp Partners With Locu, Allowing Businesses To Post Menus, Daily Specials & Photos To Yelp In Real Time
Local business data provider Locu is announcing a partnership with Yelp today, in order to help update Yelp’s menus and other listings data with Locu’s real-time information directly from businesses. This will allow restaurants on Locu to distribute their menus and daily specials to Yelp, but it will also help Locu further expand into other verticals beyond restaurants alone. The move comes on the heels of Locu’s partnership earlier this spring with WordPress maker Automattic, which allowed restaurants to more easily add their Locu-powered menus to their WordPress blogs. The company has also been busy rolling support for other third parties, including OpenTable, TripAdvisor and CitySearch. The startup, backed by $4 million in Series A funding, extracts data from business websites then makes it available in a structured format, including via its API. Business owners who claim their pre-populated Locu profile, or who sign up for the service on their own, will have access to edit the ...
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Rhapsody Wasn't Happy, So Open Source Music Service Napster.fm Changes Its Name To Peer.fm
Last week, we told you about an open source alternative to music services such as Rdio and Spotify, called Napster.fm. The name alone got our attention, and after using it, there were a few features that were reminiscent of its predecessor, which made it even cooler. Today, the service is changing its name to Peer.fm to steer clear of legal issues, since Best Buy acquired the service and brand and shipped it over to Rhapsody in 2011, or whatever is left of it. Other than that, its been business as usual for its creator, Ryan Lester. Lester tell us that he’s had nearly 100k visitors to the site, with over 59,000 users actually trying out its features. Right now, nearly 1,500 users are registered and getting all of the benefits that come with that, including its social functionality that allows you to share tracks and playlists with friends. Most of the traffic is coming from outside of the United States, 64%, with areas of the world that don’t have access to Spotify bringing the heaviest ...
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Larry Page: Google's Focus On Constant Iteration Will Shift Toward Big Bets Like Google Fiber And Glass
During today’s Google Q1 2013 earnings call, CEO Larry Page gave us a rundown on exactly what the company has been up to in this quarter, as well as some insight on how he’s currently running the company. Page took over from Eric Schmidt in early 2011, and since then has started bringing all of the company’s services together, under the umbrella of helping people get access to information quickly. Page discussed Google’s current “big bets,” which are Chrome, YouTube and Android as the mature products that are important to continue innovating on. However, Page made it clear that as CEO of the company, it’s his job to focus on the future. He said: “Companies tend to get comfortable doing what they’ve always done, with only a few minor tweaks. It’s only natural to work on the things you know. Minor changes make things obsolete.” It was very interesting to hear Page gloss over its search, advertising and business offerings. Interestingly, he didn’t even mention Google+. ...
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Google Picks Twilio As The First Voice And Messaging API Through Its Cloud Platform And App Engine
Twilio today is taking one more step in its bid to become the most ubiquitous voice and messaging API available to developers: it is announcing a partnership with Google’s Cloud Platform. This makes it the first time that a voice and messaging API-based solution has been integrated with the Google App Engine, giving developers on the platform — some 250,000 active, with 1 million registered apps at Google’s last count — the ability to integrate voice and messaging services into their web and mobile apps by way of a few lines of code. The added functionality will sweeten the deal for developers, which Google hopes will attract them to its platform instead of opting for platform-as-a-service competitors like Amazon Web Services, Parse or Microsoft’s Azure platform. For its part, Twilio was already integrated with all three of those, as well as Sendgrid to offer similar services, according to Lynda Smith, CMO at Twilio. Integrations like these are a sign of the times: developers are ...
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