Google Launches Coordinate: A New Service For Managing Mobile Workforces
Location-based apps and services like Foursquare have made significant inroads among consumers in the last few years, but most of the recent developments around location-based apps have bypassed the business market.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google has been circling the business side of location for years: back in September 2010 it was distributing mobile devices to businesses for checkins and ratings, and in February 2012 it quietly rolled out Latitude Leaderboards, a feature that put it in direct comparison with Foursquare's consumer game. Coordinate turns that experimentation into an explicit product: a paid service for dispatching, tracking and coordinating mobile workers.
The timing lands awkwardly for Foursquare. Days earlier the company shipped version 5.0 of its app, deliberately de-emphasizing check-ins, and Dennis Crowley laid out a shift toward mining location data for revenue, following May's launch of personalized coupons. With reporting at the time flagging that Foursquare's growth was not accelerating under a venture-backed model, Google choosing this moment to open an enterprise location market that consumer apps had bypassed reads as a squeeze on exactly the revenue paths Foursquare is chasing.
First-order effects
- Google gains a recurring-revenue enterprise product built on its existing location infrastructure, moving from free consumer services like Latitude into paid B2B software for workforce coordination.
- Foursquare's stated plan to monetize by mining location data now faces a competitor selling location-based services directly to businesses — the customer segment Crowley identified as the path to profitability.
Second-order effects
- Facebook, which coverage since 2009 has positioned as poised to dominate geo, faces a Google that no longer competes only on consumer check-ins but on enterprise contracts — raising the bar for any consumer-first geo player seeking durable revenue.
- Businesses evaluating mobile workforce tools get a credible option from an incumbent vendor, pressuring smaller workforce-management startups on price and distribution through Google's existing enterprise channel.
Third-order effects
- If enterprise demand proves out, location shifts from a consumer novelty measured in check-ins to business infrastructure sold per worker — forcing consumer LBS companies to find B2B revenue or consolidate.
- The pattern extends Google's long arc from free consumer location services toward paid business products, making place data itself a billable enterprise asset rather than a marketing feature.
The trend: Location-based services are splitting into a consumer layer losing momentum and an enterprise layer where Google is converting free mapping infrastructure into paid workforce software.