Get the latest scoop (and events!) in your city with Voice Media Group and Foursquare
Want the latest in arts, culture, food, and events in your city? Foursquare has partnered with Voice Media Group to bring you expert local tips and event details from their publications, including the Village Voice in New York, LA Weekly, the Denver Westword, the Phoenix New Times, the Houston Press, the Dallas Observer, the St. Louis Riverfront Times, the Miami New Times, the Minneapolis City Pages, the New Times Broward Palm Beach, and OC Weekly.
Be sure to like their pages to get tons of “Best of” tips, and check in at the spots they recommend to earn badges in each city that level up the more you explore.
And, rolling out soon, you’ll also be able to see all the events from Voice Places when you’re looking for things to do with Foursquare Explore. So in addition to movies, concerts, and sports events, you’ll see other events like poetry readings, museum events, variety shows, art openings, and more.
Pop in your mouth guards and dig up your finest trash talk – the NHL season starts this Saturday!
You can put away those video games and highlights from last season – the NHL is back in action! The first puck of the 2013 National Hockey League’s season will drop on Saturday, January 19.
To add to the anticipation, the NHL and five of the teams are offering specials and launching badges of their own (with more on the way!). When you’re at the home arena for one of these teams, be sure to keep an eye out for specials – you might win tickets to the next game, team swag, or concessions! For example:
- New York Islanders fans who check in at Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum will get a free t-shirt when they spend $50 in the Team Store, a free fleece when they spend $100, and two tickets to a future game if they spend $150.
- Colorado Avalanche fans can push their check-ins to Twitter for a chance to win tickets to an upcoming Avs game.
- Washington Capitals fans can check in at the Verizon Center and share their check-ins on Twitter for a chance to win an autographed puck from a Washington Capitals player.
- Carolina Hurricanes fans who check in to PNC Arena and share their check-ins to Twitter will be entered for a chance to win a team-autographed jersey.
- Vancouver Canucks fans will receive 50% off at the team store. And anyone who shares their check-in to Twitter will be entered to win a Canucks home jersey.
Will Sidney Crosby stay healthy this year? Will King Henrik continue his reign? And will the L.A. Kings be able to avoid the effects of their seven-month-long Stanley Cup hangover? Only time will tell. Now go support your team, check in, and enjoy the game!
What the last 500,000,000 check-ins look like! (And what they show about the future of Foursquare)
Everyday, millions of people around the world open up our app to discover amazing places around them. They check in at new restaurants that are opening up in their neighborhoods, their favorite dive bars for happy hour, and cozy local bookstores that are still going strong. With every check-in, people are recording all the places they love to go. Plotted out as half a billion points on a map, they start to look pretty amazing:
Click here to take a closer look at the map. It’s particularly neat when you start zooming in, because it really shows the life of cities across the world – you can see city centers (Moscow looks like a spider!), perfectly outlined islands like Oahu, the thin line of the Golden Gate Bridge, the walking paths of Central Park, and even the airport runways at Atlanta’s International Airport and the ferry routes in Istanbul.
At Foursquare, those half billion points (generated from check-ins over the last three months) are also at the heart of three important things we’re doing as a company:
1. Creating amazing personalized recommendations
What makes Foursquare Explore so powerful is that all those check-ins you see aren’t just single points – they’re links between all the other places people have been, too. For example, when we see that a bunch of locals tend to check in to the same tucked-away taqueria after going to a nearby theater, they’re helping us understand the relationship between those two places. So, when someone new to the neighborhood is leaving that theater, Explore can recommend amazing tacos they might otherwise have missed out on.
And when we add check-ins from you, your friends, and people with similar tastes to the mix, our suggestions become even more personalized. If we see that you and your friends check in at breweries and beer gardens often, we know the perfect bars to recommend when you land in a new city, because we know where aficionados like you tend to go. We like to think of it as our version of Google PageRank for the real world – we’re working to understand the billions of invisible connections between places so we can make amazing recommendations.
2. Building a powerful location layer for the world
Those points are also an amazing visualization of the ever-expanding, ever-improving database of tens of millions of places that powers Foursquare Explore. It illustrates why, when you open up the app, no matter where you are in the world, you can discover rich information about all the places around you.
Because our location database is based on millions of check-ins every day, it’s incredibly reliable and up-to-date. That’s why everyone from Instagram and Bing to Flickr, Quora, Path, Soundtracking, Evernote, Garmin, and thousands of other developers use our location information to power their apps. Over 100 million people a month see Foursquare’s location information through our partners.
3. Connecting people with the places they visit
Part of understanding where people go is helping them connect with the places they love. If you like a cafe in your neighborhood, or a boutique shoe store, we want to build tools so they can keep you up to date with their latest menu items, shipments, and sales. And if you’re looking for a museum to go to this weekend, we want them to be able to share their latest exhibits and special admission hours with you. Through our tools for businesses, we want to help you strengthen your connections with local merchants, and help you discover ones we think you’ll love.
We have a lot planned for the coming months. Want to see what we’re building? Download Foursquare here.
This weekend, give back to your community and unlock the Inaugural Service badge
Looking for a way to give back to your community? January 19 is the National Day of Service, and there are thousands of events across the country where you can honor the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. by volunteering. We’ve partnered with the Presidential Inaugural Committee to recognize Americans who are taking part in the National Day of Service this Saturday by awarding our first-ever volunteer service badge.
Unlocking the badge is simple:
- Find an event near you.
- Volunteer at the event on January 19.
- Check in!
If you’re heading to Washington, D.C. on January 21 to join the inauguration celebration, you’ll also unlock the badge when you check in at the National Mall. Thanks to everyone who’s giving back this weekend!
Settle the score once and for all – how indie were you in 2012?
Connect your Foursquare account to this neat little app and with just the click of a button, you’ll see where you fall on the scale of more-or-less mainstream to oh-so indie.
All the info from the adventures you share, now sitting pretty on your friends’ phones
Now when your friends tap on check-ins that you’ve shared on Facebook or Twitter from their phones, they’ll see a pretty new page with all the details of your check-in – the address, photos, badges, points, comments, and likes.
Your Foursquare friends can easily like or comment on your check-in right from the web view. Or, they can open up the Foursquare app to learn more about the place or see what other friends are up to.
If you build it, they will come. Check out all the cool new things you can do with Foursquare! #hackathon
Over the weekend, over 200 hackers came together in NYC, SF, and around the world as part of the 2013 Foursquare Hackathon to build more than eighty creative, useful, and clever apps that utilize our API. We were especially impressed by the strong showings at non-official sites in Madison, WI (hosted by Snowshoe), Myrtle Beach, SC (hosted by CoWork MYR), Tokyo, and Los Angeles. Thanks to everyone for coming out!
Foursquare Grand Prize winner:
Gym Shamer allows you to set personal fitness goals and then connects to Foursquare to track your check-ins at the gym. If you don’t meet your goal, Gym Shamer will tweet and post to Facebook on your behalf, letting all your friends know (don’t worry, we know you’ll meet yours!). The app was built in NYC by Tal Flanchraych and Volkan Unsal, who have won not only the famed Foursquare title belt (!), but also a video date with Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley. High fives to both of them!
Droptask allows you to get the skinny on the wait at that restaurant you’re heading to, or the line outside your favorite bar, without leaving the comfort of your home. You can leave tasks at places on Foursquare for others complete, and reward the people who help you out. For creating the best hack using both the Foursquare and Twilio APIs, Twilio is turning SF-based Yufei Liu and Meekal Bajaj into custom action figures!
NASDAQ Grand Prize winner:
Reward Board allows businesses on Foursquare to display real-time check-ins on a monitor in their store or restaurant. Reward Board also shows the current mayor, and a site-specific leaderboard. Business managers can set up tiered rewards and specials for customers to unlock, and even hook up a thermal printer to automatically print receipts. A few of the Reward Board creators Joe Clarke, Mikkel Green, Kevin Young, and Rocky Dohmen will be flown from Myrtle Beach, SC to New York City later this year to ring the NASDAQ bell (and get their faces on TV!). Plus, their app will be featured on the Times Square billboard.
Mashery Grand Prize winner:
Couch Cachet Too tired to go out? Couch Cachet is a tongue-in-cheek app that helps you live vicariously through Foursquare. Using the Mashery API, this little hack finds cool things going on and trending spots near you, and checks you in (note: checking in when you’re not at actually at a place is against the Foursquare House Rules!). And to complete the illusion, Couch Cachet will also share appropriate tweets and Instagram photos. Your friends will be none the wiser. The NYC team of Brian Fountain, Justin Isaf, Harlie Levine, and Christopher Kennedy will receive tickets to SXSW Interactive and will be featured in the Mashery Circus Mashimus.
Jury Prize winners
- FlashSquare is Snapchat meets Foursquare. Check in at a place and upload a photo for your friends and others who check in to discover. But it’ll only be visible to you for five seconds!
- FourPass makes it easy for you to store all your loyalty cards and access them quickly when you check in at the corresponding place.
- Join Me! finds friends nearby once you check in and allows you to send them a message, or you can incentivize them to join you by sending them a “gift.”
- Trending Alerts is an app for Android that allows you to see what’s trending nearby, and receive a message (similar to Google Alerts).
- NASDAQ Facts will tell you how a publicly-traded business is faring in the market when you check in at that place.
- Connect to Team Turf War and up the competition with friends and coworkers for mayorships at your favorite spots.
- 4sqTrigger Lets you associate apps or websites with locations so you can quickly launch them when you check in at that place.
- FourPlay cross references your interests with those of potential mates who use the app and have checked in at the same place you’re at.
- Use HipSpot to access and play minigames when you check in at certain points of interest.
- Healthy Lemur encourages check-ins at gyms, tracks, pools, and other fitness-oriented places by sending you positive reinforcement.
- FourDrinks lets you pick a place, invite some friends, and meet up for drinks, minus the hassle.
- DinerBeware lets you know about health inspection and health violations that might exist for restaurants you check in at.
- Connect Jamsesh to Foursquare and when you check in, your favorite song will start playing at the participating store or restaurant.
- ThreeSquare remembers what you ordered last time, so you won’t have to!
- 4SQ ID lets you check in at a place with an RFID tag.
We’d like to give a huge thanks to all of our sponsors, judges, and to everyone who participated. We’re always blown away by the enthusiasm and talent of our developer community. So go ahead and try out a few apps, and let us know which ones are your favorites!
Your best check-ins, now with more likes
Remember that time that barista made a foam art panda bear in your latte that looked exactly like a certain botched fresco and you took a picture with your check-in, and tweeted it, and blasted it out to all your Facebook friends?
Starting today, when you share your #braggybrag check-ins with friends on Twitter or Facebook who are on Foursquare, they’ll be able to like them, even if they’re not your Foursquare friends. We’ll even send you a notification so you know how awesome you are (you can turn them off in your settings). Hearts all around.
Winter wonderland! Londoners check in for a snowy surprise
Those who ventured into the Hackney borough in London over the holidays were treated to a little Foursquare magic, thanks to the people at Poke. As a part of the London-based agency’s Make Hackney Sparkle project, people who checked in to the neighborhood received a special surprise – their very own snow flurry.
P.S. Our global hackathon is tomorrow (wink wink)!
Time to get your sightseeing and borough-hopping on – the NYC.gov “Big Apple” badge is back!
Say hello to Lady Liberty, put on Empire State of Mind, and unlock a badge while you’re at it! The City of New York has teamed up with Foursquare to bring back the “Big Apple” badge, and this time around, there are different levels to unlock the more you check in around the city.
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