Foursquare to roll out Korean application next month

By Lee Youkyung
SEOUL, May 25 (Yonhap) -- Foursquare Labs Inc., a developer of the namesake location-based mobile application, said Wednesday that it plans to launch a localized application for South Korean users in June and hopes to build partnerships with businesses here.
"We want to get more users. (To that end) we need to make applications easier to use, easier to sign up," Naveen Selvadurai, one of the co-founders of the New York City-based startup, told reporters in Seoul. "That's why we are doing more translations."
Selvadurai was on his first visit to the South Korean capital for a technology forum.
The 2-year-old enterprise lured more than 10 million users for its Foursquare mobile application, which allows mobile phone users to "check in" at a certain location and share their location information with friends. The service is available in Japanese, French and Spanish as well as English.
The co-founder of the Foursquare application, lesser known in South Korea than services like Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc., is interested in building partnerships with local businesses here to pre-install the service on mobile phones or to help local businesses find ways to use geographical information to command consumer loyalty.
"We are open to all sorts of integrations -- mobile carriers, mobile handsets," he said.
On the back of the worldwide popularity of smartphones that are equipped with sensors that can identify geographical locations, the global market for location-based mobile services is forecast to exceed US$12 billion by 2014, according to Juniper Research's 2010 report. Gartner Inc. estimates the number of consumers using such services to reach 1.4 billion by 2014.
Facebook and a raft of other startups have introduced similar services that allow users to voluntarily post their location information on the Internet. Many see such services, which offer analysis, history and real-time updates of location data of people around the world, as a way to develop more sophisticated mobile ads that can help advertisers better target users.
However, the latest wireless data collection practice by mobile software makers like Apple Inc. and a South Korean television broadcaster's suicide that some see was caused by malicious online slandering sparked debates about personal data protection and privacy issues on the Internet.
"We don't know how to use some of these things. Some users share too much, but what is too much?" Selvadurai said. "People need to be more aware of where this is going and what happens when we grow up."
He said while social networking services brought positive changes, such as allowing people to "communicate with personality" with more intimate and detailed information, operators of such services need to be transparent about how they use data and respect privacy.
"The best services are the ones that do two things. Build great products that respect privacy ... keep users informed" about how long their information is shared, to whom and where they are used.
"To move forward is to be more transparent," the tech entrepreneur said. "Social network is more about transparency."



ylee@yna.co.kr