Definitely a talent acquisition. Gowalla has always been absolutely gorgeous, through all of it's various designs. I could never really use it for a long period of time though, because it was only useful with fellow web-dev like friends. In the real world, I think it's pretty useless. Unlike something like Twitter, which managed to grow some legs and start gaining traction with virtually everyone in the world. I'm excited to see what these guys can do at FB.
Also, does anyone else find it amusing that CNN broke this news and there isn't a single mention of it anywhere on TechCrunch?
Does pretty much look like that - and you would not exactly buy the runner-up of the 4square / Gowalla competition at a premium - so might have also been a deal at quite favorable conditions for f-book.
Given the understanding here that Gowalla will bring great engineers and with them a whole bunch of other innovative people to f-book in a time where such teams are one of the sparsest "resources" (anyone remember the story published recently that GOOG is paying their engineers 250k p.a.) it might help to cure some of Zuckerberg's "greatest fears" as voiced by their COO last week in NY at the BI Ignition conference (lack of innovation, lack of people aka "...Google has two times as many job openings as we have employees...")
Being able to acquire whole teams of innovative people is certainly their best chance to catch-up.
>Gowalla will bring great engineers and with them a whole bunch of other innovative people to f-book ... "greatest fears" as voiced by their COO last week in NY at the BI Ignition conference (lack of innovation, lack of people
i worked at a big [ultimately failed] SV company and for many its final years the "innovation" was the top word of the CEO and other executives. When company executives start talking innovation it pretty much means that company got enough entrenched products, market position and internal balance of power that any significant internal innovation is killed immediately [by the same executives] to avoid any risk to the above mentioned products, existing revenue streams and internal power, etc... Once internal innovation is squashed and has vanished as a result, the executives start to whine that there is a "lack of innovation, lack of people"
I'd love to hear the conversation at foursquare right now. I wonder if they're happy for their competitors, or maybe sad? Perhaps concerned that the check-in novelty is really dying off?
I don't mean this as a dig, but if you think one of your competitors getting bought by the predominant, and deep-pocketed, social media site is "irrelevant" something seems strangely amiss.
My guess is that you might have not seen them as a competitor, which would certainly be understandable. But this would still have ripple effect that is, IMO, somewhat worth more than casual dismissal.
I dislike your lack of humility and modesty in this discussion. You may be correct in your A point, but "just hiring a couple of engineers/designers/product folks" remark makes it sound like you guys are some elite squad, and FB is picking up some stragglers to join their team.
I can see why you've taken this attitude though, since commenters here are attacking Foursquare and making you seem like you lost to Gowalla+FB, but there is really no need to say these things in HN.
Oh, I think that the team at gowalla is great, and I have mad respect for them. But in terms of facebook's overall hiring this is a relatively small deal. Don't really know how many folks FB hires a year but I'm guessing hundreds?
Sorry if I was curt. Just trying to be clear and concise.
Fwiw, you were perfectly clear. Anytime someone says "Facebook/Google/Awesome-Tech-Company-of-the-decade bought them as a talent acquisition", the obvious implication (and compliment) is that the talent is really talent. Don't know where this confusion is coming from.
It's a tricky connotation based on context, but I read it as sometimes more positive than others. It does imply that the talent in question is quite talented, and worth paying significant money to acquire, but it also sort of implies that the product/company wasn't in itself particularly great or interesting to the acquirer.
Just to play the devils advocate a bit: Sometimes you need to forge ahead without any fear or concern for what Facebook is doing or does.
There are millions of people, like myself, who will never have a Facebook account - or at least will use services that are not fuly coupled to FB.
I think, while one should certainly keep track of what facebook does - one should never not do something/change their behavior simply because of facebook
The fact that foursquare was beating Gowalla 100:1 is proof that you don't have to have a better, more fun-to-use, better designed product in order to win in the market.
My love affair with Gowalla was prematurely extinguished when they pivoted to local guides, but I hope that this acquisition means that they'll bring some of their original magic to Facebook.
my reaction was the exact opposite. I hate being with friends constantly checking in everywhere on their phones when I want to hang out with them, but still like writing reviews & helping others find good places to go. The gowalla pivot seemed to work towards that.
Foursquare always had a better design. Hear me out:
Design is about 2 things: how it looks and how it works. Gowalla always had a prettier coat of paint, pretty interactions. But what mattered more was the design of the game - becoming mayor on Foursquare was easier to grasp and get addicted to than dropping the original Gowalla teddy bears.
Foursquare also beat feet to win the hearts and minds of small business owners - I've lost count of the number of bar and restaurant owners excitedly telling us about how the Foursquare rep came in to talk to them, pointing out the sign on the wall where the "Mayor goes," arguing with regulars over who's the Mayor this week, who cheated to become the Mayor last week, and so on.
We've travelled a lot, and this happens coast to coast in big cities and small.
I've always really dug Gowalla (when I check in, typically only around an event like SXSW, it's what I've used), but when real people are talking about you in real life (an initially slow, but snowballing and very effective advertising model), all over the country--you end up winning.
More than that you get free stuff if you checkin. I think this is the draw more than anything else. And this is the reason why foursquare solves a business need.
I'm not here to convince anyone of anything. You asked a question, and I answered. Just trying to be helpful.
To answer your question about who our competitor is, it's the same as it's always been (and always will be): the back button. Our job, as pg says, is to build something people want. We started by building checkins and attracted millions of users doing that, now we're moving on to building the best social city guide we possibly can as well as starting to explore interesting new ways for local merchants to communicate with their customers.
It's not about beating someone else. It's about building something useful enough that people will pay attention at all. That's what startups are really about.
foursquare's competitor is other mobile 'time wasters'. I mean that in a good way, not bad way. so facebook, twitter, instagram, etc are all competitors.
if you want to talk about check-ins.. check-ins are commodity, i'm sure foursquare knows this. noone says "hmm.. what app to check in??? hmm what competitors to try?" they go "hmm.. what's interesting and fun way to show off and impress others while i'm here in this restaurant? facebook? foursquare? foodspotting?"
Most people tend to agree that it is not good to have NO competitors.
I believe this is primarily when you're starting out. You're trying to decide if there's a market at all and having competitors lends some credence to that.
Once you already have the traffic that FourSquare does, I don't think it matters anymore. One case where it might be different is if there were some paradigm shift where there were a whole bunch of similar companies for a long time and all of them had dropped out of a dying game while a single company was holding on -- but that's not going on here.
Off topic to the acquisition, however, not being a Gowalla user, I went to gowalla.com and looked what they have to offer.
Naturally, I look at my town, Tel Aviv[1], and was shocked. Tel Aviv has much more to offer than what it is listed in that guide, and in my opinion, it is far more attractive city than it appear at gowalla (for instance, some photos are rotated upside down, others by 90 degrees).
Perhaps it takes more than just "snap a photo, type short description, we will get the location" to make a tourist guide.
I hacked together a "recipe" (requires a few steps) to migrate your gowalla checkins to foursquare. I moved 350 of my check-ins this way a couple weeks ago. I wanted to preserve the record of where I'd been, and more of my friends use Foursquare anyway. Unfortunately the 4sq API did not provide a way to back-date the check-in, so they all occurred on the same date (date of the API post). Perhaps that has changed? Take a look, fork/extend/add features etc., hope it is useful for someone else! https://github.com/webandy/migrate_gowalla_checkins_to_fours...
If you or anyone else is interested in migrating from Gowalla to a different service, the company I work at, Factual, has a useful (Beta) API for mapping ids between different location data providers: http://developer.factual.com/display/docs/Places+API+-+Cross...
It was a very elegantly designed product; cleaner, crisper design than Foursquare's was in my opinion. But I always had difficulty checking in. I literally had to be inside a venue to register a check-in; and even then it was finicky. 30 feet away? Forget it.
Yeah, this is an interesting topic. Why did Foursquare win? Was it anti-cheating provisions that were too strict in the early days? New York vs. Austin? Better PR? Simpler product? Dodgeball users as jumpstart? Who knows. One thing we do know was that it wasn't money.
I think it's pretty clear that Dennis Crowley has been thinking about this problem space for more than a decade, and foursquare is the third (fourth?) iteration on his original vision.
I presume it means that, having seen things from the inside out, his team knows winning and losing things to spend time on.
Nearly every startup ends up with a list a mile long of potential features, ideas, refinements, communities, partners and revenue sources. Being able to pick out the right few to work on (and what to say no to) is maybe the most important skill a startup CEO can have.
A founder who has been around the same space for a long time can use past experience and intuition where a newly-minted CEO knows very little and is actually best off when they recognize that.
Why do you think money wasn't a factor? Foursquare raised significantly more than Gowalla (according to Crunchbase, $71m vs $10m), and as a result grew a much larger team and presumably spent a lot more on marketing.
Actually, until mid-2010, Gowalla raised more money, earlier, than foursquare did. By then, the "check-in wars" were pretty much over.
Per Crunchbase[1][2]:
In 2008, Gowalla raised $2m, foursquare raised nothing.
In 2009, Gowalla raised $8.29m, foursquare raised $1.35m.
In 2010, Gowalla raised nothing, foursquare raised $20m. But by the time this happened (June 2010), the "check-in wars" were over (e.g., see: http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/07/foursquare-gowalla-stats/).
This is definitely a big loss for Austin. There are still a few interesting startups in the area, but Gowalla was the one that made it a serious contender.
I'll second that. Gowalla was in Austin in name only. Zero presence at any events, no penetration of the startup networks. They moved to Austin from Dallas, I hear, at the behest of investors.
It's interesting how many startups are based here yet Gowalla got the huge press whenever Austin was mentioned. I wonder why this is - is it because of the Foursquare competition initially? Because they launched at SXSW and were a local company?
No clue why they got all the attention.. but @mattt has gotten involved in the community here and there. I've run into him a few times at @damon's Friday Night Hacks.
In terms of other startups, we have Other Inbox, Infochimps, WPEngine, and a number of other things that are relatively quiet. In terms of "big" players, we have Facebook, Evernote, Zynga, some of Sony's game dev (DC Universe Online started here), and Ebay/Paypal is moving in. OpsCode and Mozilla both have lead evangelists here too.
And there are probably dozens of things I'm missing..
Disclosure: I'm a Developer Evangelist for Twilio and based in Austin.
This is well-deserved. I could never understand why Gowalla didn't gain as much traction as Foursquare despite their eye for sumptuous design. I often found myself rooting for the company, and I'm glad Google took notice of their talent. I look forward to whatever comes from the team. Congrats, Team Gowalla.
Facebook does have a solid design team, but I wonder where all that talent is being directed? Visually, their hires in the past year or so haven't made an impact with facebook.com. At least with Google's new design team, you can see what they're doing.
So, one has to ask, what are these people working on? A facebook phone? Facebook X.0?
I really, really hope Facebook doesn't do that. It makes absolutely no sense for anyone to buy a Facebook tablet, unless they intentionally cripple the capabilities of their apps on other tablet platforms.
If the Facebook's new designers do nothing new at all, but they hold the line against Google-style insane UX-destroying experimentation, they will be incredibly valuable.
Just as a point of clarification, Facebook has an incredible existing product design team, but the last year's new hires/acquisitions have yet to prove if all the new blood adds up to the best, e.g. just because you hire a bunch of amazing individual designers, it doesn't mean they're automatically and amazing team.
That said, I have a lot of faith in their culture that they will become so; team-building is just never a given.
I wonder what the purchase price was. And as a side note, Jason Calacanis is one of the angel investors right? Any comment by Jason as to whether he "did ok" or even got his original investment back?
Why did Facebook wait this long? And since they waited this long, it probably means Foursquare rejected whatever offer was made. I wonder what that was.
Nobody can say for sure yet, but I doubt it'll be around very much longer.
If you're looking for a check-in API, Foursquare's seems like the best bet at this point. The Venues (ie. places) Platform is especially good, with rate limits starting at 5,000/hr: https://developer.foursquare.com/overview/venues.html
There are other good APIs to consider as well: Google Places, Factual, Yelp, etc. Each API has its own pros and cons in terms of query limits, terms and restrictions, fees, etc.
Gowalla's been moving away from the check-in too, but even so, I imagine its mostly a talent acquisition. The source article mentions that the team will be working primarily on Facebook's new Timeline, which fits well with Gowalla's recent focus on "stories".
Also, does anyone else find it amusing that CNN broke this news and there isn't a single mention of it anywhere on TechCrunch?