I recently downloaded Foursquare on my Blackberry. Foursquare is great. In one word, every time you go to a venue (like a garden, a supermarket, a bar, a strip club or whatever you do), you can check-in. If you’re the one who checked-in the most in this place, you become mayor of the place. Of course, you can add friends and see where they are and what they are doing. You can also meet some regulars at your favorite venues. Foursquare also says that mayors can have special discounts – but I’ve never seen this happen.

Foursquare is not yet famous – about 250 000 users so far, which is about what any Facebook application nicely done can get in two weeks. Foursquare has been alive for a year now, and works on almost every embedded system (iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Windows Mobile and even Palm). We all know thousands of apps which do the same thing, like BrightKite or Aka Aki, which allow you to do the same but without the “Yeay! I’m earning some points, my friends are all jealous, I’m one of the cool guys“. But I will say that BrightKite/Aka-Aki is no fun compared to Foursquare. Foursquare is fun!

What you need to know about mobile advertising

Google revolutionized advertising on the web. Today, they are encouraging a lot of websites to be free, by easily earning money with their content. Before, the advertising was sold like meat. I even remember the time where we were paid by page views, which was a really stupid idea.  Well, it was also the time when scrollbars were pink, that was nice! Anyway, advertisers didn’t want to sell some ads that nobody was interested in, users didn’t want porn ads while browsing a Christian website, and webmasters didn’t want to force users to see those shocking ads. Google AdSense/AdWords came out, and they are still offering the best ads system for everyone – until Facebook used all the information they got on you to create the most targeted ads you can imagine. Google made AdSense available for mobile.

Apple recently released iAd, which was suppose to be the perfect ads system for mobile. iAd looks more like a new prank targeted to Adobe. To summarize, they created a rich ads system. Before, thanks to AdWords, you could easily create in ten minutes the ad you wanted. Now, iAd enriched the experience by launching – when you click on the ad – a mini-app inside the app. This mini-app can run a little game or a trailer for example. It’s great but it’s far from being a revolutionary system. You can see the whole Steve Jobs’s keynote  by clicking here.

Of course, making those ads will cost a lot of money. AdWords’s power lies on giving the opportunity for any size company,  to create ads for a small budget. It was a real revolution for small businesses. But iAd is going the other way, forgetting about the long tail, by offering big budget ads. They will cost more to make, and more to show.

How Foursquare could revolutionize mobile advertising

So far Foursquare is free and doesn’t earn any money. If you have a convenience store, you can see for free statistics about who came to your store/who checked-in. Of course, since few people know  Foursquare, stores don’t use it yet. Moreover, sometimes they don’t own their stores on Foursquare, because anyone can create it if it doesn’t exist.

Soon, Foursquare will have a huge database, a lot more complete than the one Google Maps owns, because on Foursquare it’s the users that create it. On Google Maps, you have to own the place to create it. Let’s face it, most of the owners don’t see why they should be on Google Maps. This is poor thinking.

Foursquare also owns all the informations they need about you: where you are, where you’ve been, what you like to do. After a little thinking, we imagine that Foursquare will soon be able to tell you where you should have dinner : a nice place, near you, that fits your needs – defined by where you checked-in before. Say goodbye to Zagat.

For now, we don’t see how thoses new-yorkers are going to earn big bucks. Yet, it’s simple and logical : Foursquare has a special relationship with convenience stores since it offers them statistics about their visitors. You know, those convenience stores that iAd/AdWords totally forgot. They have a small ads budget, but they are so many! A small budget multiplied by millions of stores turns in a lot of money.

It would be easy to sell them advertising on Foursquare. Let’s imagine that you check in at a bar, and that you’re near a night club who has an ad contract with Foursquare. Foursquare could suggest you spend the rest of the night in this club. If you decide to go, you would check in it, and Foursquare could claim a small fee for that.

Foursquare seems to be the ideal candidate to launch this geolocalization-based advertising system without moving mountains because they own a particular relationship with customers and shops. This might be why Yahoo offered them $100 millions to buy them out, which is nothing compared to what Google offered Youtube to buy them out (around 1,5 billion). Foursquare doesn’t have any business plan yet, so did Youtube two years ago, when Google bought them out. However, it would be a lot more easy to find one for Foursquare than for Youtube, since Youtube costs a lot each month in bandwidth and servers. Google is still unable to find a good way to make Youtube a profitable resource.