Dodgeball 2.0 a.k.a. FourSquare may soon announce a seed round of $1.35 million according to a new SEC document reported by PaidContent and a direct company confirmation given to TechCrunch.
According to the stories, UnionSquare Ventures and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, as well as unnamed angels, have invested $1.35 million as a seed round.
FourSquare is a popular iPhone app that fuses geo-location, micro updates in the FourSquare network as well as other social networks such as Twitter, and social gaming into one mobile app for the iPhone and Google Android phones. Versions are imminent for Blackberry and Windows Mobile (courtesy of Anand Iyer).
When Twitter hit SXSW in 2007, it was primarily used as a source for sharing and finding friends as they scoured the streets and events strewn about Austin, Texas. In 2009, it was all about FourSquare.
The company was founded by Dennis Crowley, the creator of Dodgeball, which was eventually sold to Google where it was slowly forgotten and subsequently terminated. The team working on Dodgeball at Google have left to join FourSquare.
Similar to Twitter and other mobile location apps such as BrightKite, FourSquare provides you with an integrated activity stream of friends based on where they are and what they’re doing. In addition, FourSquare introduces points, the ability to earn badges, to do lists and tips, among other interactive, social, and competitive aspects. Each time that someone checks into a location, for example, it not only updates the stream, they also earn points. Users accumulate points the more they check into particular locations, contributing to an ever-changing leaderboard determined by locale. The more a player checks into an establishment, they can earn “mayorship” until someone else assumes the role by visiting the location more often than the other. Local businesses are picking up on this activity and offering free food and drinks to the mayor of the proprietorship.
I firmly believe that Yelp should take a serious look at FourSquare as it can bridge mobile reviews with local commerce and promotions tied together by a portable, mobile social graph. Robert Scoble agrees.
Loopt, an officially Apple-endorsed location-based network for the iPhone and other mobile platforms, announced that it has solidified a partnership with AT&T that allows iPhone users to run the application in the background to automatically update their location and be alerted to when their friends are nearby.
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