Remember Foursquare? Its tech silently helps run your life – and more uses are coming.

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Zooming In

A deep-dive into one big theme or news story every week.

Foursquare check-ins may be relics of a bygone era. But, whether you realize it or not, you’re still using its technology every day.

The company’s massive geospatial datasets – which map an entity’s geographic coordinates – power the geofilters on Snap Inc. 's Snapchat, the tagged tweets on Twitter and even locations on Uber .

More than a billion people touch Foursquare’s technology per month, Gary Little , the company’s CEO and president, told me in an interview at the company’s San Francisco offices last month. He maintains that Foursquare’s technology is only getting more critical by the day.

That’s because geospatial data underpins emerging technologies ranging from autonomous vehicles to augmented reality. And as these technologies become mainstream, Foursquare is pitching itself as "the Twilio of location,” providing the infrastructure layer on top of which such technologies are built, just like Twilio did for communications interfaces.?

“When you think about the next 10 to 20 years in technology, there are all sorts of platforms that go from having location and geospatial data as a feature to a core part of the operating system,” Little? said. “Whether it's AR glasses or another mechanism – for it to function well it has to actually understand its surroundings.”

Foursquare says it’s poised to capitalize on this paradigm shift thanks to its already established position as a third-party enterprise tool. Its Pilgrim SDK or software development kit, for example, is powered by a decade-plus of data and used by thousands of developers to build location experiences.

But it’s taking a decidedly different approach moving forward, in part because of the data privacy regulations that have been fast gaining momentum.?

While in the past, the focus was on aggregating data to build a product, and then ship it to a customer, its forthcoming products will be “agnostic to” collecting personal identifiable information, said Little. A product called Hex Tiles, for example, can unify diverse datasets about customers with location information without actually having to collect any new data.

“We've gone from a products company to a platform company,” he said. “By adopting the API model, we’re giving you Lego building blocks instead of giving you fully-built products, where multiple applications can be built without the data ever reaching us.”

The global location analytics market is expected to become a $30 billion opportunity by 2026. But Foursquare is hardly the only player in town, said Greg Kahn ??? , CEO of advisory firm GK Digital Ventures, pointing at competitors like NextNav.?

The company may have started out as a promising mobile startup focused on consumers, but today, it’s barrelling ahead on the B2B path and becoming an enterprise platform that enables other companies’ location bets – whatever the outcome.?

“It'll be a great privilege if we get the choice to either go public or sell ourselves and be part of something bigger,” said Little. “But we have to earn that.”

TechTok

Catch up on the tech headlines you may have missed last week and what people are saying about them, and join valuable member conversations on LinkedIn.

• Amazon is no longer in the "Trillion-Dollar Club." The e-commerce giant's market cap fell just below the US$1 trillion benchmark Tuesday after its stock slipped more than 5% for the day — down 20% over the last five sessions and 42% over the past year.
• The company is also pausing hiring for corporate roles, with Apple not too far behind, "pausing almost all hiring," potentially through late 2023.?
• Lyft says it's cutting 13% of its workforce — or about 650 employees — after trimming 2% in July. An email from executives obtained by CNBC cites a “probable recession in the next year” and rising insurance costs for the coming reductions at the second-biggest ride-hail company.
• Beast mode on: The ax is also coming for Twitter employees under new owner Elon Musk, who is expected to announce job cuts affecting around 3,700 employees (approximately half of the company) on Friday.
• In more layoffs news, Hootsuite is cutting jobs as economic uncertainty continues to take its toll on the tech sector. The social media management company laid off 5% of its workforce this week citing the “current economic and market realities.”?

Movers & Shakers

Here’s keeping tabs on key executives on the move and other big pivots in the tech industry. Please send me personnel moves within emerging tech.

• DataOps cloud provider Y42 has hired Salesforce and 微软 alum Jules Cantwell as its new president, and former Cask CMO Max Herrmann as svp of marketing.
• SaaS CX platform DISQO has hired Nicholas W. as VP of Engineering. He was formerly at 谷歌 , where he led engineering for search ads in the AI and machine learning productivity category.?
• 沃尔玛 has hired Instacart’s top ad exec Ryan Mayward as SVP of sales for its retail media unit Walmart Connect .

This Week in Tech

A weekly advent calendar of tech history from the archives.

This week in 2000, Russia launched the spaceflight Soyuz TM-31, which carried the first crew to the International Space Station.

ICYMI

Here are other top stories of the week from beyond LinkedIn in the broader world of tech.

• ?Google searches for excuses to skip work increased nearly 1,900% since 2020. There were 2,230,240 Google searches in the US for excuses to miss work, according to data analyzed by recruitment company Frank Recruitment Group.?
• DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and senior staff research scientist John Jumper have been jointly awarded this year’s $3-million Breakthrough Prize for predicting the 3D structures of almost every known protein in biology — about 200 million in all.?
• More than 70 VC firms including Bloomberg Beta, 776 and M13 have banded together to launch VCs for Repro, a coalition stating that criminalizing abortion is a violation of human rights that stifles innovation.

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