Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley walked into the J.Crew store on New York’s Prince Street, armed with an experimental version of the company’s popular mobile app. The app is now smart enough to track his whereabouts, and as he entered the store, it automatically showed him a special offer that said he could save $20 if he spent at least $100 with his American Express card.
In other words, it sent him an AMEX ad because it knew he was at J.Crew. “We have all these specials on Foursquare, and we can make people more aware of them,” he told us during an interview this fall, not long after his visit to the SOHO store. “We’re really good at recommending places to people, and you can imagine some of that is paid promotions at some point.”‘We’re really good at recommending places to people, and you can imagine some of that is paid promotions at some point’
Dennis Crowley
That’s not how the public version of the app works today. Though Foursquare recently rolled out a new version of its mobile service that closely tracks your movements and delivers suggestions regardless of whether you “check in” to the app or not, these automatic suggestions don’t include paid ads, and officially, the New York-based startup says it has “no plans at the moment to push ads through real-time notifications.” But when we spoke to Crowley, he clearly indicated that, somewhere down the road, it will.
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