[adambratt]

They still get millions of location updates every 15 minutes. I don't remember the exact number as it has been a couple years since I talked with people using their data but it is much much higher than you would expect.

They don't need you to "check-in" when they are grabbing your location every 15 minutes in the background. They've also built APIs into ad networks that ping their location database with coordinates millions of times a day to find relevant ads. There's thousands of apps using ad networks that funnel location data back to 4sq.

Techies may have abandoned them, but they still have a ton of middle America thinking that 4sq is cool. My mom for example.

On another note, 3-4 years ago I had access to a large anonymized bank/credit card transaction database from a well known company. It had about 1-2% of all transactions in the US by our estimates. When we modeled the quarterly sales of Walmart compared to it we found that it was incredibly accurate going back 5 years, even with 1/50th of the US population.

[scottmcdot]

> On another note, 3-4 years ago I had access to a large anonymized bank/credit card transaction database from a well known company. It had about 1-2% of all transactions in the US by our estimates. When we modeled the quarterly sales of Walmart compared to it we found that it was incredibly accurate going back 5 years, even with 1/50th of the US population

I used to work for an Australian consultancy "Quantium" who are doing exactly this and scale transaction data using national statistics data [1] - page 13

[1] http://blog.abs.gov.au/Blog/natstats.NSF/dx/Wade%20Tubman.pd...

[blizkreeg]

The things you could do with even a fraction of data at volume.

[caseysoftware]

Some Capital One employees had the same thought and hijacked their data to make $4.4M over ~15 months:

> "The SEC sued colleagues Nan Huang and Bonan Huang in January 2015 alleging they made hundreds, if not thousands, of keyword searches on their company's private database for sales data on at least 170 publicly traded companies from November 2013 to January 2015."

Ref: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-sec-capital-one-fin-inside...

It seems like the biggest problem was misusing non-public Capital One data. Imagine if a personal finance app made that part of their business model and got scale.

Something like Mint could front a powerful consumer investment strategy..

[adambratt]

Exactly, it's really easy to look at the consumer value of 4sq and shrug them off without realizing their database has incredibly valuable data.

Another similar company who is making a ton of money off data on the backend is Shazam.

[mintplant]

Could you elaborate on Shazam? Is it that they're selling data on who is listening to what?

[adambratt]

There's a great article on it that I'm struggling to find. But essentially, the Shazam app and related apps built on their tech are used as a massive A/B testing tool now by artists. Roll out 3 versions of the same song to 3 similar cities in the Midwest and see where it gets the most shazam lookups.

If I recall correctly a few years back they were doing $100m a year by basically being able to give everyone in the music industry insight into what's the most popular and upcoming songs in every major city.

However, with the popularity of Spotify I'm guessing they're losing a lot of market share in the mass music metrics space.

[abalone]

> They don't need you to "check-in" when they are grabbing your location every 15 minutes in the background.

If they are tracking users who are not actively using the app then that is just plain creepy and wrong. Are you saying Foursquare tracks background location to thus day for users who installed it and tried it out once a few years ago? That would explain the database value but it's Creep City.

Operating systems should expire those background privileges for apps that fall into disuse (or do they already?)

[tim333]

On the iPhone you can go to "location services" and see a list of who's tracking you. I just did and there are 8 that say "always". You can turn it on and off but few people including myself bother much.

[jorvi]

Foursquare has been pretty much unused in The Netherlands, as it is a small but important market as they are rich to the max. If your service doesn't succeed or sell in The Netherlands, it's usually indicative to your service at large.