Street Fight: Heard On The Street

Street Fight: Heard On The Street


Heard on the Street, Episode 33: Building Network Effect for Location Intelligence

August 28, 2019

Location Intelligence has become a crowded market. In addition to being well-populated, players also dizzy buyers with differing value propositions and claims of superior data collection. Among the "good actors" and truly differentiated players are Foursquare and Placed.

As we discussed recently with Foursquare CEO Jeff Glueck, responsible location intelligence involves practices like "stop data," to measure users' location dwell times, and the scale Foursquare achieves in its network of app publishers. Placed is one of the first location data players and a leader in attribution since 2011.

Now that the two companies have come together via acquisition, how does that position Foursquare for interstellar domination of the location intelligence market? It's about greater capability and scale, say Foursquare's Josh Cohen and David Shim, our guests on the latest episode of Heard on the Street.

Scale is particularly important because quantity (in addition to quality data gathering methods) can provide greater sample sizes for aggregate location tracking. This also gives advertisers more confidence in the size of Foursquare's publisher network, and it works against the sector's fragmentation.

"Foursquare had this thesis around consolidation in the space and really delivering a full location stack where people can come to a single company and have the best solution," Shim said. "What you had to deal with in the market was 12 different vendors for each silo. ... Foursquare had a good attribution solution but just not as much market share."

Bringing the companies together has competitive advantages for greater capability across the board in all the functional areas typically found in location intelligence platforms (attribution, audience targeting, point of interest data, etc). But the combined size also works towards the all-important network effect.

"I refer to it as the 100-Club," Shim said. "We have over $100 million in revenue, we have over 100 million measurable mobile devices, we have $150 million in funding, we have over 100 engineers working on location ... we have POI data for over 100 million locations, and we're working with 75 of the top 100 most visited businesses in the U.S. So, it really does tell that story of scale."

Check out the episode above, find out more about Heard on the Street, and see our entire episode archive here. Contact us if you'd like to sponsor an episode.