Foursquare debuts Pilgrim SDK to license its location data to mobile app devs and improve notifications; pricing will be tiered based on app's number of users
Kerry Flynn / Mashable :
Context & Ripple Effects
Foursquare has been repositioning from consumer check-in app to location-data supplier for over a year: it joined Apple Maps as a data source in late 2015, launched the Pinpoint ad-targeting platform on top of its location corpus, and Dennis Crowley explicitly framed 2016 as the year the company would focus on how its data serves other appmakers.
The Pilgrim SDK is that strategy made into a product: instead of selling insights only through ads, Foursquare now licenses the underlying location intelligence directly to mobile developers, with tiered pricing tied to each app's user base.
First-order effects
- Mobile app developers can now embed Foursquare's location technology to power smarter notifications, paying on a per-user scale rather than negotiating custom data deals.
- Foursquare gains a second revenue line alongside Pinpoint, monetizing the same location dataset through developer licensing as well as advertising.
Second-order effects
- Every app that ships with Pilgrim extends Foursquare's sensor network across millions of additional phones, feeding more location signals back into the dataset that powers both the SDK and Pinpoint targeting.
- Other location-data providers face pressure to offer comparable SDK-level access, since Foursquare is lowering the integration barrier from enterprise contracts to a self-serve developer product.
Third-order effects
- If the licensing model scales as Crowley's roadmap implied, Foursquare's durable asset becomes the location graph itself, with its consumer apps reduced to feedstock for the data business — a structure later coverage of Pilgrim running in thousands of apps suggests took hold.
The trend: Consumer location companies are converting proprietary place data into licensed developer infrastructure, shifting their center of gravity from apps to APIs.