Facebook buys Gowalla
money.cnn.com
money.cnn.com
Also, does anyone else find it amusing that CNN broke this news and there isn't a single mention of it anywhere on TechCrunch?
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.
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 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.
B) Facebook isn't buying the product (they don't care about the product). They're just hiring a couple of engineers/designers/product folks.
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.
Sorry if I was curt. Just trying to be clear and concise.
which I thought was abrasive.
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
Why would you expect him to lavish complements on a competitor that lost by a wide margin?
Go walls was in some ways a kind of straw an against Foursquare. You had someone to be "100:1" against. Now who is your competitor?
I would not call this inconsequential because it can also be interpreted as the non-viability of check-in sites as a distinct business.
I appreciate you engaging in the conversation but you haven't convinced me that this acquisition is in anyway irrellevant to Foursquare.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
Coat of paint and nice UI doesn't always win.
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.
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 am only in Berlin for 3 years and I would not necessarily be able to come up with better recommendations for tourists.
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...
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.
[1]The article says 2009, wikipedia says 2007?
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/).
[1] http://crunchbase.com/company/gowalla [2] http://crunchbase.com/company/foursquare
Outside of the startup world: Apple, IBM, Dell and AMD have major campuses in Austin.
I grew up in Austin and live in NYC. I love seeing Austin companies make waves, but I feel like the startup scene there is still in its early stages.
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.
Gowalla isn't involved in the community.
Gowalla plus Made by Sofa plus Push Pop Press
So, one has to ask, what are these people working on? A facebook phone? Facebook X.0?
That said, I have a lot of faith in their culture that they will become so; team-building is just never a given.
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.
This is a good starting place for research: http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-pros-and-cons-of-each-Plac...