After recent financial problems Foursquare is trying to make some more changes to make the service more business friendly and more user friendly. With hole bunch of updates over last few months 4SQ hopes to finally monetize their 25mln users social network. It’s hard to believe but in 2012 Foursquare generated only $2 mln revenues (revenues, not profit!), which in case of such big organization means that for last several years they’ve been living out of investors. Ok but let’s get back to the topic.

Something for business

Recently Foursquare has announced an update that will be certainly something cool for business – 4SQ events. Users can already check in to concerts, movies, sporting events but now venue owners will be able create special events in their locations. With this update users will be able to check-in not only to a particular venue to particular activity (‘event’) at the venue. This is a pretty huge step toward helping users not only to find new places to go but also to tell friends about why they go there… Pretty cool.

From the other hand Foursquare will gain yet another important data source about user motivations instead of pure location data which is probably the most important from marketing targeting point of view.

And something for iOS users

 There are as well some small changes to iOS app version. The refresh provides a number of rather cosmetic improvements, including a tighter check-in screen that omits addresses in favor of a map view of your surroundings (and seems to forget that users have that elongated iPhone 5 screen nowadays). The other change gives new stuff – info about recently opened businesses, which goes along with new Foursquare strategy to go from pure check-in service to discovery and recommendation engine. This is actually pretty cool when you like to find some new places in areas which you already new well.

source: The Next Web