【A Busty Girl Caught Having Sex While Taking A Lookbook Photo】

Foursquare's transformation from fun consumer app into serious behind-the-scenes business is A Busty Girl Caught Having Sex While Taking A Lookbook Phototaking another step forward.

The location app is rolling out a new platform open to all mobile apps that will allow them get to the front of your smartphone, capturing your attention at the right time and more importantly in the right place through location-based triggering of push notifications and app features.

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It's another step in the evolution of a company that was started more than a decade ago by New Yorker Dennis Crowley (@dens), who wanted to build a mobile app to connect his friends, understanding where they were so they could potentially meet up IRL.

Crowley created Dodgeball. The service was so intriguing that Google came knocking and snatched it up. But the tech giant let it slowly bounce into oblivion. In 2008, Crowley tried again. This time his company Foursquare also would be dedicated to empowering entrepreneurs.

"We not only build cool things but build tools that help other people build cool things," Crowley said. "We knew that someday would have to build something that was a check-in button you would never have to press, without the person having to open their phone or even do anything."

On Wednesday, Crowley, who now serves as the company's chairman, unveiled his magnum opus to that endeavor. Pilgrim is now available to any mobile app developer to help them with mobile notifications and other information based on location.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

At one point in time, the name Foursquare would often be referenced alongside other companies like Twitter and Instagram. While those companies continued to grow, Foursquare hit a ceiling, even raising a round of funding at a lower valuation to stay afloat.

Now, the company is starting to make money from its business connections, and Pilgrim is seen as a way to generate revenue off its most valuable asset — your data location. Foursquare sells pricing tiers based on an app's number of users and also will negotiate commercial technology licenses. 

Pilgrim is just a few lines of code within a software development kit (SDK), but it's built with sophistication and on top of Foursquare's seven-year-old and continuously updated base of location information.

Any mobile app that uses the kit is able to sense where a smartphone owner is (assuming that they have their location services enabled). The data is not just general latitude and longitude; Foursquare narrows into the store the person may be shopping or sitting in.

"The lines of code are telling people that the app is inside of a bakery, the app is inside a bar in the Lower East Side. They’ve been to this bar three times," Crowley said. "We’ve all been building off of GPS for the last 10 years. GPS is just latitude and longitude, but it’s not good as, 'Are you at the sneaker store?'"

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This location information is the same tech that powers Foursquare's own consumer apps: Foursquare City Guide, Swarm and Marsbot. Partners in the private beta test included Capital OneWallet app, mobile coupon app SnipSnap, gift-card marketplace Raiseand interactive music platform TouchTunes.

"For TouchTunes, they might have 100, 500, 1000 places in the city that have the machines built into them. When you walk into one of the places, the app can say oh you’re at a place with TouchTunes," Crowley said.

Push notifications on mobile, even those based on location, aren't brand new to some of those partners. Foursquare thinks it can make these notifications even better with technology that makes the feature easier to maintain and more precise.

"No need to manually configure geo-fences; instead we were able to know when you'd entered a location and get you the right coupon offer via a notification," Ted Mann, founder of SnipSnap, said in a statement.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

The tech is pretty sophisticated, but again, it's not brand new. In fact, Google (the same company that bought and crushed Dodgeball) has similar capabilities. But Crowley said he isn't intimidated by the tech giant.

"It's one thing to have it and another thing to give everyone the ability to do this. We designed this for people around the world," Crowley said. "I don’t doubt that Google and Facebook have the ability to do this, but if you talk to a lot of developers you'll learn that people don’t want to use the tools that these companies use because Google and Facebook [are] trying to take them out of business."

Foursquare's openness and commitment to the developer community has opened them up to partnerships with other tech giants. Snapchat, Twitter, Samsung, Apple and more than 100,000 other developers use their Places database, allowing them access to location information.

Still, Foursquare's business is reliant on Apple, Google and Samsung as they are the smartphone makers.

"We’re leveraging the network effects of the developer community to help us build the crowdsource of the world, but that's been true since 2009. Our Places database was built by the user community," Crowley said.

Foursquare, as a consumer app (the old Foursquare) has been called long dead by the tech community.

There are still daily active users (I'm one as well as my entire family), but are we among an increasingly select few?

When asked if Foursquare is dead, Crowley was quick to refute.

When asked if Foursquare is dead, Crowley was quick to refute.

"I can look at the dashboard now and tell you, no," Crowley said. "Sure, a lot of the people using in 2009, 2011 aren’t using it, but we get more check-ins per day now than we ever got."

Foursquare might not be as popular in the U.S., but it's huge elsewhere as well. "A lot of people inside the U.S. think that if this doesn’t have 100 million people using it in U.S., it’s irrelevant. We have people in all corners of the world," Crowley said.

The company is still independent. According to Crowley, it may remain that way for the foreseeable future.

"We spent the first three or four years of the company so focused on the consumer app. People thought we were trying to be Twitter or Instagram, but we found this amazing enterprise business that comes from analyzing and making things," Crowley said. "That’s why we power those that aren’t Google and Facebook."

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