Looking Beyond the Check-in with Dennis Crowley (video)

Mobile and social media are two of the hottest topics being discussed by marketers today and will become the bedrock of their activity in the future. These two worlds are colliding, and the result is a network that’s on more than off and connections that are growing in numbers and importance.

Dennis Crowley, the co-founder and CEO of Foursquare, is in the centre of this space and is defining where things will go next.

Foursquare defines hypergrowth in the digital age. A year ago, the NYC-based company had 4 employees and around 300,000 users. Today, there are over 50 employees and over 7 million users.  Location-based services are one of the hottest topics in mobile marketing, and Foursquare is leading the charge along with competitors like Gowalla and scvngr.

For all the growth, there are still many questions to be answered in terms of how Foursquare keeps people interested in using the service and their app beyond the initial fascination with the “check-in”.  To answer some of those questions, I met with Dennis whilst at the Mobile World Congress which took place last week in Barcelona.

“Let’s change the way people experience physical space,” Dennis says. “Can Foursquare create serendipity? That’s something we’re exploring. We want to build things that help people have experiences. We want to help people make sense of the real world.”

The thing about Dennis is that he’s been onto the idea of location-based services for quite some time. He got started in the late 1990s as a developer at Vindigo, an early local content service available on the Palm Pilot.

“This is the biggest lesson I learned from my days at Vindigo: if there’s something you want to build, but the tech isn’t there yet just find the closest possible way to make it happen,” he said on Quora.

From there, he created Dogdeball in 2000, a location-based game, which he sold to Google in 2005. After some time at AreaCode, he started Foursquare. So whilst some “serial entrepreneurs” go from one idea to the next, Dennis has had a much more iterative approach to his thinking. His focus has always been on the importance of location and the interaction of mobile users. His view on social software and user-generated content within a mobile context is thus far from accidental, and now with the availability of much more powerful smartphones and the rise of social media, he and his team have combined those things into a new and interesting service that appeals to masses and marketers alike.

“Phones are sensors connected to the network. When we use them, they can help us understand the intent we’re giving to people, places and things nearby. We want to help people make sense of the real world, and help marketers create a lens through which people can experience their brands.”

This is your first Mobile World Congress. Why here? Why now?

“We’re experiencing tremendous growth and there’s lots of interest in what we’re doing. The Mobile World Congress is a great way to see everyone involved in the business in one place.”

How are Location Based Services changing things in terms of the way marketers need to understand things in order to do their job in a connected world? It seems that one of the company’s goals is to create value beyond the check-in. Can you elaborate on that?

“We want to use check-in data to figure out what people like based on their habits. Whenever someone checks into a retail location, it’s an endorsement. It’s a mini ad impression the brand didn’t have a hand in.”

“Brands naturally want to be part of this. They’re already doing that on places like Twitter, but instead of being a place where things come and go, blast off and then disappear, we want to be a place where people can stash things for other people to find. It’s an augmented layer on top of the world.”

For the History Channel, Foursquare has scattered historical trivia all around the world. As the site explains, “History is made every day and everywhere. Check-In on foursquare and unlock the history in your city. Impress your friends by collecting our historical tips, some of which you’ll find in the most unlikely of places. The more you uncover, the closer you get to unlocking the Historian badge!”

As TechCrunch puts it, “It makes Foursquare into a kind of real world Pop-Up Video.”

It’s clear that Dennis knows that Foursquare’s API (the interface that allows external developers to create new uses of Foursquare via interactions with Foursquare’s data) is important to their growth. “The API is critical to the business, and developers have used it to create all kinds of things, from new apps to food reviews, to dating,” he said. “It helps developers and marketers mash up physical place and social information.”

This past Saturday, Foursquare hosted its first “hackathon”, and 150 developers turned up to experiment together with the Foursquare platform. According to their blog, “At the end of the day we saw 25 pizzas consumed, over 300 cups of coffee, 15 hours of coding, and 39 awesome apps built all offering a mix of entertainment and utility built on top of the foursquare API.”

There’s more information about the Foursquare hackathon on their blog, and you can find all the new apps on their wiki. It’s the experimental nature of things like the hackathon that will help Foursquare stay fresh. Marketers can learn a lot from this and should think about integrating some of the same experimentation into their own organizations.

Dennis shares a lot of his thoughts online, via Twitter and other social networks. Recently on the Q&A site Quora, he gave these 6 tips for entrepreneurs:

#1  Stop sketching and start building.
#2  Don’t let people tell you your ideas won’t work.
#3  Build early and often.  
#4  Don’t let a lack of technology get in the way.
#5  Hire the best people you can find.
#6  Don’t get distracted.

It’s easy to forget that the company is only a few years old. Foursquare launched in March 2009 at the SWSX Interactive conference in Austin, Texas. 2010 was a big growth year for Foursquare. “We spent a lot of 2010 scaling tech, people, business. 2011 will be about rolling out new products.” With the 2011 SXSW conference only a couple weeks away, and I’d expect to hear some big news from the company.

My advice? Check in and check it out.

For more instant news, conversation and opinion, follow George Nimeh (@iboy) on Twitter.