When Foursquare launched in 2009, the app was consumer facing, letting you know where friends had checked in and what spots might appeal to you. People competed to be the “mayor” of certain locations and built guides to their favorite neighborhoods., The service expanded to allow merchants to offer discounts to frequent guests and track foot traffic in and out of the stores. While you can still use the Swarm app to find the best Manhattan in Manhattan, the company realized that real estate and data share the same three key rules: location, location, location.
On this sponsored episode of the podcast, Ben and Ryan talk with Vin Sharma, VP of Engineering at Foursquare, about how they’re finding the atomic data that makes up their location data—their location data—and going from giving insight to individual app users about the locations around them to APIs that serve these location-based insights to developers at organizations like Uber, Nextdoor, and Redfin, who want to build location based insights and features into their own apps.
Show notes
If you still want to check in at your local bakery and remember all the place you’ll go, the original Foursquare app is now Swarm.
They have almost 70 location attributes that they are starting to deconstruct and decompose into fundamental building blocks of their location data. Like data primitives—integers, booleans, etc.—these small bites of data can be remade with agility and at scale.
Through the recent acquisition of Unfolded, Foursquare allows you to visualize and map location data at any scale. Want to see patterns across the country? Zoom out. Want to focus on a square kilometer? Zoom in and watch the data move.
He walks us through a quantum computing challenge that he hosted with BMW, through his role at Amazon (and what real world applications he sees emerging from these types of collaboration experiments).
We discuss what inspires him to stay curious — raising the bar for scientific research, crowdsourcing breakthroughs, and opening up the playing field for more people to jump in.
We got the chance to sit down with Guillermo Ruach, Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel and co-creator of Next.JS, about the news coming out of today's conference. The most interesting was a new product called Turbopack. You can read more about it here.
Freund reflects on his early days at Applied Materials, where he worked on a machine that inspected silicon wafers.
It was in this early role that Freund gained an appreciation for rigorous software testing protocols in the manufacturing process.
At WeWork, Freund was fascinated by the idea of a full stack business, which is a business building itself.
While Freund officially launched Wilco in 2021, the origin story for the company dates back to 2013 when he was hiring and managing a team of engineers—he saw a need in the market to help developers build critical skills to problems-solve in real-time.
You can think of Wilco as the equivalent of a flight simulator for engineers.
John explains that Web3 is about the convergence of technology, economics, and social trends.
He elaborates that foundations begin with service-based architecture (SOA), the notion of how to design loosely coupled systems that consist of economic services and components.
He goes on to explain how DeFi represents this thinking of a loose composition of services.
With all of this, blockchain brings together technology and economic incentives into a holistic equation—people contribute because they want to contribute.
Nonsense it is not, says baby Yoda.
Crypto isn’t the end game. It’s a segue along the way.
Having trouble with understanding your team’s productivity outside of frameworks and tooling? Create a backlog and work through it: Instant Agile! How much of that backlog you work through is a good baseline measure.
Before jumping into driverless car talk, Ben shares a heads up about fake jobs at credible companies that are actually phishing scams meant to steal your identity and hijack your bank accounts. Beware the job offer that seems too good to be true!
Matt and Ben point out that in the medical technology space, robotic surgeons are so advanced that they have become more precise than human hands.
Shoutout to lifeboat badge winner GKG4 for a great answer to the question “how can I check if an array index is out of range?” which has been viewed 67,000 times.
