Mr. Crowley (flickr.com/seeminglee)

It's been a tumultuous past few weeks for New York startups, some of whom are scrapping long-held ideals in order to seek profitability. Looks like it's time to finally make some money.

Last month, Tumblr announced it will now offer paid ads, a reversal from founder David Karp's prior opinions about advertising--mainly, that it kind of makes him sick. And today, Foursquare cofounder Dennis Crowley told the Wall Street Journal that the location-based social network is planning to offer personalized coupons, tailored to each individual user, beginning in July. The news builds on earlier reports about Foursquare's new paid media platform, scheduled to launch in June.

According to the WSJ, Foursquare:

plans to let merchants buy special placement for promotions of personalized local offers in July in a redesigned version of its app. All users will be able to see the specials, but must check into the venue to redeem them.

This is just one prong of Foursquare's new money-making strategy; though the actual revenue it will produce is rather questionable, the company also announced last week that it would charge $10 to businesses for instant verification of their accounts.

Of course, a new advertising method doesn't automatically guarantee loyalty from either local businesses or potential new users. The WSJ also notes that many people still have a "special hatred reserved for Foursquare location check-ins," a problem that not even a 20-percent-off sushi coupon can solve.

Kind of sad

Just two years after winning a SXSW Interactive award for Mobile apps, Gowalla has officially shut down. The location-based social networking start-up, once backed by investors including Kevin Rose and Jason Calacanis, was bought by Facebook in early December of last year but only put up a good-bye notice on its website today. The Next Web notes that the shut-down coincides with this week's South by Southwest and that Gowalla was based in SXSW's home city of Austin. Also, if you were a Gowalla user and concerned about the data you'd uploaded while using your account, you probably have nothing to worry about:

If you forgot to delete your account prior to the acquisition, fear not, the Facebook acquisition did not include all of the data the company has collected on your whereabouts over the years.

Last night Betabeat stumbled on Bromance, sort of a Grindr for straights, that goes by the tagline, "Live, Laugh, Fist Bump."

This morning we got our beta invite. "Starting a poker night? Looking for a game of hoops? Bromance supports virtually any type of event and takes the guess-work out of creating, interacting and sharing with friends both old and new."

As usual, becoming a beta tester requires participation in a pyramid scheme, with users asked to invite three friends via Facebook, Twitter or email before getting one of the coveted early adopter slots.

Finally, the droves of lonesome bros wandering the streets with nothing but a sad face and sweet smartphone will be able to geo-locate their way to an all night sausage fest where the good times never stop. How do we invest?

Once upon a time very active users were promoted to superuser status, but this seemed to promote a lot of cheaters, and so Foursquare turned off this feature.

With less hands to handle more problems, superusers were getting burned out. So this week Foursquare announced a new initiative to upgrade normal users to power status. Until now only users handpicked by the staff were considered for these positions. Now anyone can apply for the gig and exisiting superusers can nominate others to join their ranks.

There is an admissions process that requires aspiring superusers to share their reason for wanting the position and even a quiz that tests them on the rules. Having passed these hurdles, superusers are given the opportunity to edit a venue to ensure they can keep up with proper foursquare style.

The new superusers will have expanded powers, including the ability close venues, edit URLs and set the radius from which users can check in.

Photo from Fortune

A new study from Comscore finds that one in five smartphone users access check in services through their device. That five times the activity found by Forrester Research in a report they put together last summer.

As if venture capitalists needed further incentive to get behind services like Foursquare, the same Comscore report found that these users, "showed a high propensity for mobile media usage, including accessing retail sites and shopping guides."

Don't make us spell it out. These folks checking in are lucrative targets for advertisers and businesses who take advantage of geo-targeting. It's the business being built by folks like LocalResponse, who just rolled out a new platform with a bunch of national brands.

Part of this growth can be attributed to the widespread adoption of smartphones. Android, which leads in US market share, also led the pack in terms of check ins. Not surprisingly, and perhaps less exciting for many retailers, users who checked in a lot also displayed, "Characteristics of early adopters, including a stronger likelihood of owning a tablet device and accessing tech news."

The Comscore study doesn't have much information on the user base that is not checking. They are less likely to have a smartphone, of course, but what would be really interesting is to see if all the location based activity going on is changing attitudes around this behavior. A Microsoft study from January found 54 percent were concerned that sharing their location would lead to identity theft or loss of privacy.

That second data point seems sort of oxymoronic to Betabeat, since  the whole point of checking in is to share your location with others. But perhaps the future will include a class of users who check in for rewards or to keep a personal log, but never broadcast that information to anyone in their social circle. Check in chickens, perhaps?

Dennis Crowley spoke at a Girls in Tech event recently, about Foursquare's newfound freedom to investigate their user data. "We've got tons of user data, but a big part of the last year was just spent keeping things up and running. You remember Twitter went through all those problems, we're not out of the weeds yet, but we went through all those problems this summer."

Now that they aren't preoccupied putting out fires, Foursquare has been able to step back and think about what all this user data means. "We hired our first analytics engineer. This guy just goes through numbers all day long and finds interesting patterns."

One fact worth noting, Crowley says the average Foursquare user has between 5-8 friends, "Which is great, because it is so much lower than the Facebook number. That is what we want. Facebook is like everyone you have ever made eye contact with in your entire life. Foursquare is the people you see at a bar and don't avoid."

The average number of connections could certainly trend a lot higher and still remain a fairly intimate circle. The photo sharing app Path set 50 as the threshold for connections. Sociologists will refer to the Dunbar number, which says 150 is the upper limit of engaged connections a person can have with others. This boundary is probably shifting for a new generation of digitally connected youth.

Still, there is an intrinsic value to a service that connects you with a trusted circle, and its great to see Crowley recognizing this is a competitive advantage that can be  emphasized, not a weakness the company needs to surmount as quickly as possible.

But your average restaurant owner doesn't have time to learn and monitor multiple location based services. LocalResponse, which launches tonight, aims to provide a simple, out of the box solution for businesses to connect this new breed of consumer.

LocalResponse, is a pivot from the folks at Buzzd, who built a city guide based on the same concept, aggregating data from different services to help users figure out what locations were trending nearby or relevant to them. "Buzzd is doing well, 500k unique users in march, but the team is now 110% focused on growing Localresponse, a much bigger business opportunity," said co-founder and CEO Nihal Mehta. "We're now in advanced discussions to find Buzzd a good home."

Best of luck to Buzzd scoring some new digs. This time the team is putting that aggregate location data to work targeting consumers and rewarding influencers. ""Our data is more valuable to local merchants and brands than to the consumer," says Mehta. So for example Webster Hall would use Localresponse to see everyone who was checking in and perhaps offer up a free drink to users who shouted out the concert to friends or public feeds.

Sometimes this kind of data is explicit. A check in on Foursquare requires me to select a specific venue first. Folks can also check in on Facebook or attach location data to Twitter posts, but more often users just provide a status update on those two services. So in addition to reading obvious locations, LocalResponse tries to analyze natural language from simple phrases like, "I'm heading to Madison Square Garden!" and extract useful information about where users are.

"I have seen a lot of start-ups try to crack this formula," says Matt Meeker, the Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Dogpatch Labs NY. "But this is one of the few that I have seen that seems like it will actually scale with the growth of these services, and work for local merchants right out of the box."

Localresponse plans to roll out the platform with big brands in the near future, and blue chip names like Coca-cola, Kraft, Nordstrom, American Express and Verizon have signed on to launch loyalty campaigns through Localresponse. It has competition from social media managment services like Social Sprout and the General Assembly based Postling. It will also be interesting to see how things develop with  services that provide the raw material of check in data, like Foursquare for example, which are in many ways competing for the same advertising dollars.

You don't know the man, but he lives in your city. He's telling you a story. It's about the time he was waiting on Barbara Walters and accidentally whacked her in the face. "I hit her right on the bridge of her nose. Right on the bridge of her nose, with a heavy, heavy salad plate."

The story is about a minute long. Then it's over. You're at Columbus Circle now. The boyish voice of MTV host Andrew Jenks starts telling you about the time Dennis Rodman was late for a CNN appearance. You can see One Time Warner Center from where you're standing. You walk to the corner of Central Park, where an actor's voice starts precisely enunciating the history of the nearby Maine Monument, "The sculptural program figuratively represented America's new position as a dominant world force," he says.

The voices in your ear are from Broadcastr, a collection of brief stories mapped across the world. The Brooklyn-based startup hit the Apple App Store last week, giving users a new way to access the 6,000 or so stories uploaded already through Broadcastr.com. You can now listen to the recordings as you move through the city, your phone feeding you stories based on your location, your interests—sports, history, travel--and what stories have been highly rated by other users.

Broadcastr also offers up service content, comedy and audible art. At Columbus Circle Fountain, musician Geoff Dugan has planted an ambient composition incorporating bass strings with the sounds of the city.

Broadcastr launched in private beta in December, aiming to fill a missing dimension in the social media landscape. We tweet, we blog, we post photos to Flickr and video to YouTube, Broadcastr's pitch goes, but what about our voices?

Broadcastr was founded by Scott Lindenbaum, 26, and his business partner Andy Hunter, 38—two poetry-reading, coffee-swilling, fiction-writing "M.F.A. kids," as Mr. Lindenbaum puts it.

The pair runs Electric Literature, an online literary magazine, and the offshoot Electric Publisher, which produces iPad apps for books.

"Our mission is to bring narrative into the digital age," Mr. Hunter said. "So we were thinking about using mobile phones and using GPS in some way. Maybe having someone like Jonathan Lethem write a story that refers to 30 different locations in Brooklyn and have people be able to walk around and once they get that location, it triggers that part of the story to play."

Then one day Mr. Hunter was walking through the East Village, looking at the flyers advertising bands, poetry slams, lost cats, guitar lessons—the usual messages staple-gunned to telephone poles. "It just hit me that instead of curating from the top down, what we should really do is allow people to use their cell phones to call in stories anywhere they are," he said. Users would simply record a short audio clip and pin it to a map.

They raised something in "the low six figures" from some of the Electric Literature investors, Mr. Lindenbaum said, and have been working with a Bulgarian development shop. And that's how the M.F.A. kids found themselves building a social network.

Mr. Lindenbaum and Mr. Hunter actually have experience in the whole social media thing. Electric Literature used Twitter to publish a story by author Rick Moody in 140-character bursts, which gained them more than 150,000 followers. They're also behind the YouTube video, "Can a book save your life?" in which a marksman shoots a gun at the top ten books of 2010 and at a Kindle, which reaped more than 65,000 views in less than a month.

But this time, rather than using social media as a promotional tool, they're repurposing it altogether. They're trying to create a new kind of social media.

"How do you take oral storytelling, which is like, the oldest, probably most out-of-fashion form of storytelling," Mr. Lindenbaum said, "and give it a new life? Bring it back to the popular conversation, put it into pop culture?"

Broadcastr was seeded with more than 3,000 stories from comedians, artists and writers, as well as the New York Parks Department, Fodor's Travel Guides and The National September 11 Memorial & Museum. The startup has about 30,000 active users, they said, and about 2,000 of those post content. The stories are spread across the globe but there is a concentration in New York, where the founders hope the app will get traction first. "We want this to be the spring of Broadcastr," Mr. Lindenbaum said.

Their timing is excellent, with Foursquare and other location-enabled apps already on the up. Broadcastr's challenge is to capture that momentum, and do it before anybody else. A few similar apps already exist (like Voxora, a New York hacker side project), and Foursquare could easily add audio clips to check-ins the way it added photos at the end of last year. "The longer we wait, the less of a chance we're going to have at the exact moment it needs to be delivered," Mr. Lindenbaum said.

Broadcastr became available in the App Store a day before South By Southwest, and an Android app is coming soon. The website will continue to be in public beta for a while as the bugs are ironed out, hopefully before the start of the tourist season. Then comes the full-court press: street teams, band tour diaries, guerilla promotions, more partnerships, and a social media blitz.

The app will also market itself. One of the goals with Broadcastr was to make it "super shareable," in Mr. Lindenbaum's words. Users can follow individual broadcasters, rate broadcasts and embed them on other sites. Eventually there will be Twitter-esque features such as re-broadcasts and third-party apps.

People seem to love the idea of Broadcastr. But without a critical mass of users to listen to stories and add new ones, it's sure to flop. "Just having the tool is not enough. You need the army with you," Mr. Lindenbaum said.

People use Twitter to talk about the news, create inside jokes, have conversations, make art and foment revolution. Something similar could happen with a lightweight and flexible app like Broadcastr. It could also become the primary outlet for the hours of recordings sitting on hard drives at universities and other archives. Only a tiny fraction of the 60,000 American voices recorded by StoryCorps have made it onto NPR, for example; the rest are at the Library of Congress.

It could just as easily be relegated to the ghetto of still-popular but decidedly second-tier services like Posterous and Myspace, or be buried in the social network graveyard with Bebo and Yahoo! 360. But there are 8 million stories in the naked city, give or take, and Broadcastr is worth a listen even if it captures a small fraction.

Foursquare users are also influential, Forrester concludes:

Geolocation users are 38% more likely than the average U.S. online adult to say that friends and family ask their opinions before making a purchase decision.

Geolocation users may only be four percent of the population (only one percent when you look at who checks in more than once a week). But they're an "interesting target group," as Forrester tactfully puts it.

[via VentureBeat]

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries