Foursquare and Microsoft Deal, Results Promised to Be Seen in Months

Foursquare Gets Investment by Microsoft, Microsoft Gets a Lot of Data in Return

Foursquare is a location based social network. Microsoft recently invested a hefty amount into it. The money amounted to 15 million dollars. In addition, the company also signed a data contract for a number of years. The data is expected to come in handy in the Bing platform which is owned by Microsoft. It is also to be useful for Windows Phone. There were talks between the two companies several months ago, in the summer. Now the contract and the investment seem to be the result of these talks.

There is also an app for Foursquare available for Windows Phone. It is available for Windows Phone 8 and 7.x. It can be downloaded from here. It shows a lot of information, including places where users’ friends have checked in, the prices, etc. The Foursquare app was designed with help from Nokia. It includes HERE Maps.

With the deal Foursquare gets more funds, in addition to the $35 million they managed to raise in December last year. The deal is beneficial for Microsoft too. It gets plenty of data at its disposal. The data and the technical components obtained will be able to be used in Bing and in Windows Phone, as well as in Windows 8. That is the largest scale access to Foursquare data that the network has allowed so far. With that large data pool, the influence on the services rendered by Microsoft will be tremendously auspicious. There is one more hope for Microsoft with that. The company hopes to enhance its position in contextual computing. That is computing in which the devices used are aware of the environment surrounding them. So users will benefit because their devices will be able to get aware of them and of their location too. Bing is a system level service, and now Foursquare is a system level service for Windows Phone too.

The news was released by TechCrunch. The two parties to the deal promised that there will be visible results of the integration very soon, in a matter of months.

Source: TechCrunch