intro to entrepreneurship m2 case study foursquare

This assignment asks you to complete the case study on “Foursquare” from the text (see case on page 31, at end of chapter 1). In completing this assignment, you are asked to answer the following questions, found on page 33 of the text under Case Study Analysis: 1-21, 1-22, 1-23, and 1-28.

Foursquare is a local search-and-discovery service mobile app which provides search results for its users. The app provides personalized recommendations of places to go to near a user’s current location based on users’ “previous browsing history, purchases, or check-in history”.

The service was created in late 2008 and launched in 2009 by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai. Crowley had previously founded the similar project Dodgeball as his graduate thesis project in the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University. Google bought Dodgeball in 2005 and shut it down in 2009, replacing it with Google Latitude. Dodgeball user interactions were based on SMS technology, rather than an application. Foursquare was the second iteration of that same idea, that people can use mobile devices to interact with their environment. Foursquare was Dodgeball reimagined to take advantage of the new smartphones, like the iPhone, which had built in GPS to better detect a user’s location.

As of December 2013, Foursquare had 45 million registered users. Male and female users are equally represented and 50 percent of users are outside the US. Support for French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Japanese was added in February 2011. Support for Indonesian, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Thai was added in September 2011. Support for Turkish was added in June 2012.

In preparing a case, it is recommended that your first reading be a relatively quick one. Read the case and make some notes: Who and what are involved here? What seems to be the major questions or issues?

Then, take a second and more thorough reading of the case, testing your preliminary conclusions from the first reading concerning the major problems and key players.

Next, begin shifting through the facts in the case and sorting them out in terms that are useful to you in analyzing and resolving the major issues. Keep in mind that case facts are presented in a more orderly fashion than they tend to be in the real world, but you should not assume that they are all equally useful, or that they are properly and fully related as presented in the case.

Finally, write a clear, concise, and thorough report of your analysis and recommendations. Each case study is a minimum of two pages in length (not including the cover page, any abstract, and references) and professional in appearance. Case analysis assignments should be in APA format