Plancast Is Foursquare... For The Future
If you're going to leave your job at TechCrunch, you better have a good reason. I think Mark Hendrickson actually may have had one. — Hendrickson left TechCrunch in March. After about two years of writing and doing development for TC, he got the startup itch.
Context & Ripple Effects
Mark Hendrickson spent about two years at TechCrunch writing and building before leaving in March 2009 to scratch the startup itch, and Plancast is the result: a service pitched as Foursquare-style check-in shifted from places to future plans. The framing rides the same real-time wave TechCrunch itself convened around at its November 20 RealTime CrunchUp in San Francisco, which examined accelerating real-time behavior across startups, cloud vendors, and open standards.
The launch also lands amid an awkward stretch for Hendrickson's former employer: Arrington had declared the sponsorship-backed CrunchPad 'steamrolling' ahead in mid-November, only for the project to end just before its planned public launch days before this story ran.
First-order effects
- Plancast enters the check-in market directly against Foursquare, differentiating on intent — what you will do rather than where you are — and immediately competes for the same early-adopter users and press attention.
- TechCrunch now covers a startup founded by its own recent writer, putting the site in the position of reporting on — and implicitly endorsing through coverage volume — a company born from its own newsroom.
Second-order effects
- Foursquare and rival location services face pressure to extend beyond the present tense, since a competitor staking out future plans exposes the limits of pure place-based check-ins as a retention hook.
- Event organizers and venues gain a potential new demand-signal channel: if users broadcast intentions rather than arrivals, marketing can target people before they show up, not after.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, check-in products evolve from diaries of the past into prediction surfaces for the future, shifting competitive value from location history toward declared intent.
- The journalist-turned-founder route out of influential tech media strengthens, blurring the line between the outlets that cover consumer startups and the founders building them.
The trend: Consumer check-in applications are expanding from logging where people are to broadcasting what they intend to do next, pulling social sharing further into the real-time stream.