Foursquare peeps into the S40 and Nokia Asha world

Foursquare is a location-based social networking website for mobile devices, such as smartphones. Users "check in" at venues using a mobile website, text messaging or a device-specific application by selecting from a list of venues the application locates nearby. Location is based on GPS hardware in the mobile device or network location provided by the application. Each check-in awards the user points and sometimes "badges".The service was created 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 is the second iteration of the same idea, that people can use mobile devices to interact with their environment. As of April 2012, the company reported it had 20 million registered users. The company was expected to pass 750 million check-ins before the end of June 2011, with an average of about 3 million check-ins per day. Male and female users are equally represented and also 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. The app was supported on BlackberryOS iOS and Android but the news coming up is that this app will soon be available to Nokia devices supporting S40 and the Nokia Asha series Users on Nokia’s Symbian 40 and Asha phones were for long been missing out on the popular Foursquare app on their devices. And after this long wait, Foursquare has finally introduced an all-new Foursquare app for Nokia’s S40 phones, including all the new Asha touch devices. Foursquare and Nokia will be partnering for the app which will thus come pre-loaded globally on a bunch of new Asha devices that will be released in future. For other devices, the application can be downloaded from here. The company is working on enhancing the user experience and it recentlyintroducing Group check-ins in its apps for Android and iOS. “Today, we’re releasing an all-new Foursquare app for the full range of Nokia’s S40 phones, including all the new Asha devices. Hundreds of millions of people around the world use Nokia S40 phones, and now they’ll all have access to Foursquare. Now, all those people can use Foursquare to make the most of where they are and where they’re going,” says Foursquare in a blog post. S40 users can download the app update here. Foursquare has made a name for itself out of the growth in smartphones, but as it tries to build up business in newer markets, it’s covering all of its bases.  It looks like this may have been the first time in years that this app has gotten attentionWhile Nokia’s Symbian smartphone platform has died, and while Windows Phone (Nokia’s new smartphone platform of choice) has yet to gain much critical mass, S40 is actually putting up a respectable performance. According to these figures from StatCounter, it’s third after Android and iOS for worldwide mobile platform market share, with 13.9 percent of the market at the moment. Looking at how that breaks down in different countries, the picture is more interesting and points to how a strong presence on these devices could be a good way specifically for targeting users in emerging markets. Again, from StatCounter: “Hundreds of millions of people around the world use Nokia S40 phones, and now they’ll all have access to Foursquare,” the company writes in the blog post. “Now, all those people can use Foursquare to make the most of where they are and where they’re going.” For a company like Foursquare, fighting for mindshare among smartphone users and their millions of apps, going into slightly less-crowded territory like this is a smart move, all the while helping it continue to achieve critical mass for its location services, advertising and more. It also refocuses a little more attention on Nokia’s other line of business in a week when all eyes are on what it might reveal on the 11th — quite possibly Nokia’s most high-end smartphone yet. Still, it’s a move that appears to be a more recent decision. When I met CEO Dennis Crowley back in 2012 during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, he was squarely focused on building out new products, making use of all the fancy gadgetry of smartphones and not focusing on lower-end devices. Fast forward a year to February 2013, he admitted that the company hadn’t done any proper work on low-end devices in years. “We have a bare bones one that is not very pretty, which supports feature phones. We’ve had that since 2009,” he told me. “It’s not super sexy. We think our stuff is so niche that for now we don’t have HTML5 in our strategy. We’re a small team so we have to focus on where our users are.” Looks like that focus has expanded to pick up new users, some on feature phones.