I interviewed there a few years back- I actually really liked the team there and came close to taking a less lucrative offer to work there. To the best of my kn

I interviewed there a few years back- I actually really liked the team there and came close to taking a less lucrative offer to work there. To the best of my knowledge, this is not in any way secret information, its just not widely known. Foursquare is essentially a service for other apps at this point- They are a library embedded into many apps. Foursquare is likely on your phone somewhere. The app owner gets a whole lot of location data "for free", and Foursquare gets is own copy. They give you analytics on the data fed to them- the details were not laid out to me, but its not hard to fill in the blanks here- how many people walked into your store that day- how many people walked into your store after you covered that zipcode in an ad campaign, etc, what is the shape of your traffic in terms of people coming in from 9-10am, vs 10am-11am (helping them refine their staffing) etc... None of this couldn't be built themselves, but its already built and refined, and more refined. On the flip side, there are some very lucrative uses for this data in aggregate. I am a hedge fund, and I want to know how many people are walking into a Macy's, or Chipotle after its dust-up, or even an entire mall (to get some edge on the owner's health). Right now it would probably be very interesting to look at someone like Home Depot's foot traffic- they are "essential"- but is anyone going? Combine this with some data like Yodlee (for e-commerce- they sell gift card data) and you can get a quite accurate model for where their revenue is going to land. Hedge funds are willing to pay a lot of money for this type of data. This was the state of affairs 3 years ago, things may have evolved since then.