I am a fan and long time user of Foursquare – now known as both Foursquare and Swarm.
Foursquare has struggled against competitors such as Yelp.com when it comes to local business recommendations. And I have less than 100 friends on my Swarm. It doesn’t seem to be that popular here in Toronto.
But I’ve always loved the data collection aspect of Foursquare / Swarm. Even though most people don’t seem to care about that. When I check-in somewhere, such as the gym, it’ll tell me how many weeks in a row I’ve been there, whether it’s a new personal record, who else is nearby, and a host of other things.
I’ve always felt like there was so much potential in all of the data it was collecting.
Well the company is starting to make better use of that data. Recently they used their foot traffic data at Apple stores (I am assuming this goes beyond just check-in data) to predict the number of iPhones that Apple was going to sell globally following the launch of the 6s and 6s Plus.
They predicted between 13 to 15 million handsets and it turns out they were right:
This validates the accuracy of our prediction and while we’re proud of the result, we certainly aren’t surprised. Foursquare’s data is essentially the world’s biggest panel of foot traffic data — we have the best sense of the trends and patterns of the movement of people and their phones around the world.
This is powerful stuff. If there were a way for me to be bullish on Foursquare beyond just writing this post, I would be.
1042 Queen St W by Kevin Steele on 500px
Earlier this week I attended a talk at the University of Toronto called Data Innovation and City Governance. It was by Mark Kleinman who is from London, but is now a Visiting Scholar at the Munk School of Global Affairs.
The topics covered would have been familiar to anyone who is a regular reader of this blog (the power of open data, the knowledge economy, etc…), so I’m not going to repeat it all here. But I did want to touch on one of his impressions of Toronto, which is that this is a city that is “never finished.”
What does that mean?
The opposite of a city that is never finished would be a city like Paris that feels a bit like a monument that is now done and shouldn’t be touched anymore. It’s a city that almost feels too precious to intervene in. This is obviously not the case for all of Paris, but I think you get the point.
Toronto, on the other hand, is a city that is constantly building, changing, and renewing itself. There are often layers upon layers of new interventions being applied, which gives you the impression that the city will never be done. It’s constantly in flux.
Some of you may not appreciate this kind of “messy” urbanism, but I think it gives cities a kind of entrepreneurial resiliency (resiliency is a hot topic right now in urbanist circles). Cities are an ecological system. And the most resilient ecological systems in the world are the ones that are able to adapt to constant change.
So in my view I look at this as a feature, not a bug. The only constant is change.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZ8ODREybcs?rel=0]
About 9 months ago I wrote about a new startup called Urban Engines that was trying to improve urban mobility by using big data to optimize transit usage.
Last Tuesday the app launched in 10 cities across North America. So if you’re in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Toronto, Vancouver, or Washington D.C., you can go ahead and download it right now.
The biggest “wow factor” is probably the augmented reality feature that allows you to hold your phone up and see transit information overlaid on top of the street in front of you.
But more fundamentally, the real potential lies in the platform’s ability to collect data on the way people move in cities and on how transit lines are performing, so that it can be fed back to improve overall efficiency.
That’s why the company is also working with cities to give them 24/7 analytics and reporting on how every bus, car, and train is performing in their networks.
My hope is that with better data at our disposal, we’ll be able to elevate the discussions around transit and transit planning. Without great data, it’s too easy for these discussion to become political.