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While Pokemon Go makes location play a thing, the original geo-game creator Foursquare is innovating with bots
I first heard about Marsbot in January, at Social Computing Symposium, a small conference run by Microsoft Research and held at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. ITP is kind of an art-school version of MIT’s Media Lab — less geeky, more flamboyant, totally NYC. Late in the conference, Dennis Crowley dropped in. Crowley, now 40, is one of ITP’s more celebrated grads. In 2004, he notoriously organized a real-life Pac-Man game in the streets of Greenwich Village during his time there, lighting a slow geo-gaming fuse that arguably helped lead to the Pokemon Go explosion 13 years later. His obsession with location and games led him in 2009 to c0-found Foursquare, the service known for check-ins, badges, and mayors. Crowley and his company were early and important innovators of mapping play to the real world.
At SCS, Crowley impulsively decided to talk off the record about a product his team was working on. It was a bot, he said, that would flirt with you.
Here’s roughly the picture he painted: You’ve just been sprung from work one night at 10 p.m. You are hungry — and Marsbot, infused with Foursquare’s deep knowledge of location, knows you’ve been in the office all evening. Also, it is aware you have not eaten dinner. Both you and Marsbot know it’s an hour when food choices narrow. You like Mexican food, a preference that Marsbot can’t help but notice because of the profusion of cantinas in your weekly peregrinations. Your phone vibrates. You look at the lock screen. It’s Marsbot.
I had a dream we were eating tacos at Dos Toros, she says. I see it’s still open. Want to take me there?
That’s what Crowley was describing. A bot that dreams about you.
I was the only journalist at the conference, and my story sensors began buzzing off the charts. Foursquare was once known for innovation, but lately news had been bad—very bad. Now here was the CEO, revealing to outsiders for the first time a potentially transformative innovation. The dream part was gravy, really; Crowley had me at flirt. I made an appointment to talk to him at the company’s SoHo headquarters a week later.
We did have our meeting as planned, but instead of interviewing the CEO, I was talking to the newly minted executive chair. Crowley had turned over the leadership of Foursquare to a more business-minded CEO, Jeff Glueck. The move came along with an announcement of funding at a valuation of around half of the company’s 2013 peak of an estimated $650 million.
Crowley declared that he had never been happier. He’s a builder, not a bean-counter, he explained. You know, the same stuff that every dethroned founder says. But Crowley gave credibility to his claims by putting Marsbot in the context of the change. Now that he was liberated from the business side, he could do stuff like this. But first, he wanted to explain where Foursquare was at, debunking the common perception of the company.
To outsiders, Foursquare had its moment when — way before anyone used their phones to toss Pokeballs at Dodrios and Pinsirs — hundreds of thousands of people were obsessed with winning badges by visiting lots of Greek restaurants, or passing through airports, or ascending to the mayoralty of their nearest Starbucks. Now, no one talks about doing that, and it was regarded as somewhat of a desperate move when, in 2014, the company bifurcated its app into a classic Foursquare and Swarm, the latter of which became the repository of all the gamification stuff.
But the truth, according to Crowley, is that the shift from gaming didn’t matter. Foursquare is a technology and data company, not a game company. (Nintendo, take note.) “We’re doing the same stuff on the consumer side that we wanted to do from the beginning,” he says. “It was never about the check-in. It was always about making fun and games to get the check-in data.”
All that data enabled Foursquare to build Pilgrim, the under-the-hood technology it rolled out in 2014 that passively tracks where you go with your phone and combines that with its own deep database of locations to correctly identify which stores or sites you visit. It is that data that advertisers buy and big companies license. Foursquare’s users also benefit, with ever-more relevant information on what’s nearby — it enables the company call itself “the location layer for the web,” providing a personal, local search. And with that data, Crowley says, “You can build something that tells people where to go.”
What Foursquare built is Marsbot, repackaging the information it provides to users as a personal bot.
Actually, the idea has been around almost as long as Foursquare has. Crowley proceeded to prove this by showing me a slide he prepared for a talk in Amsterdam in November 2009, promising software that can “tell you what to do before you know.”
The slideshow also featured a cameo appearance by the much-mocked Microsoft Office feature known as Clippy, one of the first bots. To most people, Clippy represents the nadir of computer interfaces — users loathed its clueless interruptions to their work. (It has been called “one of the worst user interfaces ever deployed to the mass public.”) More recently Clippy found itself on the cover of Business Week, illustrating a story about the company’s big bet on bots. It used Clippy as a joke, an irony.
Dennis Crowley does not think it is a joke. He considers Clippy “my spirit animal.” What he loved about Clippy was its pro-activeness. It would just show up when you needed it (though all too often when you didn’t.) He made it clear to his skeptical team a year ago that he finally wanted to take what people most despised about Clippy — its habit of barging into a user’s activity with an attitude a thousand pixels wide — and make it a feature that people would fall in love with.
“People here are so sick of me talking about Clippy because no one likes Clippy,” says Crowley. “But I wanted to resurrect Clippy and make it cool and hipster, and tie it with what Foursquare was doing.”
Last July, he put together a skunkworks to build the bot. There never was a question of what to name her: Foursquare’s original designer Mari Sheibley had designed a cartoon character who instantly became the company’s mascot. Marsbot was a bob-haired sprite who looked a little like Ching “Honey” Huan, Uncle Duke’s amanuensis in Doonesbury. Users dubbed her “the pouty princess,” in part because it was her imperious image who popped up when the system wasn’t working. She’s still popular with users. Now she’s conscripted for this new role.
“She’s the one who’s talking to you,” says Crowley. “But the challenge is, what do you get her to say?”
That’s where the Pilgrim technology comes in. It allows Foursquare to know places you visit, and when, and it learns your patterns. Crowley gives an example. He works in Soho and lives in the East Village. Marsbot knows this, and also knows where he stops for coffee on his way to work. But what if one morning he is on the Upper East Side, maybe for a doctor’s appointment? Marsbot will notice he’s out of his comfort zone at coffee time and suggest a nearby cafe that’s just his speed.
Marsbot is not as comprehensive as femme cousins SIRI or Alexa. She has no view on politics, knows no sports scores or flight arrivals, and cannot serenade you with Adele tunes. She’s designed to do one thing, and that’s to text you unbidden and give you personalized tips on where to go, whether at that moment or sometime in the future. When Marsbot matures, a relationship with her will improve one’s urban experience in New York or San Francisco by 50 percent, says Crowley, though it’s not clear how that could be measured.
While not integral to Foursquare’s business aspirations, Marsbot is a symbol of the company’s efforts to stay relevant to consumers, even as its focus is increasingly business-to-business, with its main revenues coming from licensing geo-data. It is somewhat ironic that Marsbot is the first product of Crowley’s innovation lab, because the innovator of location software with a play aspect has shepherded a non-gaming product at the moment that Pokemon Go has made geo-gaming go gaga. (Foursquare itself will get a boost from the phenomenon, as those attempting to take on Nintendo will undoubtedly trek to this Soho office for their data. Meanwhile, as Crowley is recognized as a pioneer of mapping digital games on the playground of a city, his own fame has spiked.)
But Marsbot is important for other reasons, too. She represents a different kind of bot than the ones you see in Facebook Messenger — one that’s proactive rather than passive. She’s not a chatbot, but an interruptive bot. Crowley says that most other bots are in the model of Aladdin’s lamp: you invoke them and the genie appears. Marsbot is more in the Jiminy Cricket mode, hanging over your shoulder and chiming in when needed.
After almost a year of development, Foursquare has released a public beta, with the caveat that Marsbot in its current nascent state is but an apparition of what she will grow into. “What makes me happy is building stuff that’s going to exist in the future — in the mainstream of the future,” says Crowley. “What does it mean to have a piece of software that follows you around and talks to you about the places you’ve been? No one’s doing that. And we get to do it. We get to launch this product, even if it’s under-baked and super beta. At least it shows people what we’re talking about.”
I’ve had Marsbot on my phone for a couple of months now. At first, I was disappointed because Marsbot displayed none of the flirty interaction that Crowley had outlined at SCS. When we first met, she did suggest I identify her in the text stream, “so it doesn’t look like you’re texting with a rando.” She warned me to keep any questions I had on the simple side, like “Sushi in Williamsburg.” Otherwise, she warned, her “head will explode.” This was to be my geo-locational soulmate? If Marsbot had been dreaming of joining me at various speakeasies and SpinCycle outlets, she kept it to herself. Her recommendations were along the line of, “All the kids are talking about…” Yes, Marsbot, those children might be chattering. But what about our special places? She was less of a companion and more of a chatterbot Time Out.
Sometimes, though, Marsbot is pretty useful. During the July 4th weekend I was in Philadelphia and really wanted a place to go with relatives for a drink. “All the kids were talking about a hot new lounge” on Logan Square. I took her suggestion to check it out, and it was great.
On another occasion I had a lunch date near the Medium New York office. Normally I would have gone to the café around the corner. But that morning, Marsbot had touted a new Japanese tapas restaurant nearby. I was excited — finally, Marsbot and I would have an adventure. But when I escorted my lunch companion to the location, we discovered that it did not serve lunch.
Mostly, Marsbot’s sweet nothings were on the level of, “After a meal at Café Lift, some people like to grab a cup of coffee at Elixir Roasters nearby.” (I’m sure the coffee was great, but didn’t want to walk almost a mile to find out.) When Marsbot ventured away from food and drink, she was off her game. When I visited the VA offices and the Pentagon on a trip to Washington, she wondered if I wanted her to be on the lookout for “other great government buildings.” I found that weird.
Since I was an early tester, Crowley was eager to hear my experience when I re-interviewed him on Marsbot. We met in late June. Crowley had just returned that week to Foursquare’s HQ after a six-week paternity leave. He had two more weeks to go in the break, but he wanted to check in to Foursquare’s Soho office, and the first thing he did was visit the Marsbot team. At his country place, he hadn’t been able to use the bot; like many urban hipsters, Marsbot doesn’t do rural, thriving only in the city, where her knowledge of the latest cocktail hangouts and foodie finds is encyclopedic.
I asked Crowley what happened to the flirting. He acknowledged that the Marsbot has been dosed on digital tranks. “It started out as more playful and flirtatious but we dialed it back,” he admits. “We were sending out messages that were kind of meaningless.” For instance, Foursquare scrapped Marsbot texts that describe her heated dreams of tête-à-tête trysts. Something like that could unrealistically ramp up expectations, he says. Flirtatious texts seem like invitations to respond, and Marsbot, despite her Zagat-like grasp of breakfast places and lounges that serve exotic margaritas, lacks conversational acumen. Even a Marsbot breaking a silence by asking, “Hey, what are you doing?” is bound to trigger more than she can currently handle. Crowley says Foursquare will dial up the flirting as Marsbot gets age appropriate.
I told Crowley about the afternoon Marsbot pointed me to a place that was only serving dinner. Though he acknowledged that it was a bummer, he considered the event a win for Marsbot — it found a new place for lunch for me! The stuff about hours open, he said, was just a beta glitch that would be fixed. I conceded his point.
Overall, I found Marsbot promising, but it would be a lot more powerful if, like Google Now, and even iOS notifications, it was able to access stuff like your browsing history and calendar to really know what you were up to, so its Pilgrim-based suggestions would be even more uncanny, and it could even take actions on your behalf. Marsbot might even be able to zero in on future lunch dates and actually find good places for the meeting. And maybe even book the reservation.
Crowley agreed that path makes sense. But his vision for Marsbot in the future is even more ambitious, casting Marsbot as a rival to Alexa and SIRI, at least in her preferred domains. As is inevitable in any conversation about a bot, Spike Jonze’s canonical 2013 movie is invoked. (Consider it a corollary to Godwin’s Law — as any bot discussion proceeds, the odds approach 100 percent that someone will mention “Her.”) Eventually, he sees Marsbot as an actual voice speaking to you via an omnipresent earbud: Foursquare’s Scarlett to your Joaquin.
“Instead of waiting for someone to build the thing that’s in that Scarlett Johansson movie, [we said] let’s just build it,” he says. “I don’t expect any more than a thousand people walking around with this thing talking to you all the time, not today. But will it be interesting a year from now, when we perfect it? Maybe.”
After all, Scarlett Johansson wasn’t built in a day.
Of course, there’s a real question of how much time Foursquare has to develop Marsbot and all the other products. That’s one reason that, after my chat with Crowley, I made a point of meeting with CEO Jeff Glueck before Marsbot and I hit the street that June day. A longtime exec at Internet companies, Glueck came to Foursquare at the suggestion of VC Ben Horowitz two years ago, ascending to the top spot in that January remix.
Glueck assured me that all was great between him and Crowley, as well as Foursquare’s former revenue chief Steven Rosenblatt, who was promoted to president in the January shakeup. In fact, he couldn’t have been more upbeat, predicting that the company will become profitable in the next couple of years. [That’s an update: I originally interpreted him as saying “later this year.”] After all, it has business relationships with “hundreds of thousands” of developers who use its data. Foursquare gets a big income stream from the major players who have licensing arrangements that allow them to take fuller advantage of Pilgrim. For instance, Twitter recently made a huge deal to use Foursquare data to geo-locate tweets. It also gets money from advertising; a technology called Pinpoint allows companies to target audiences by location.
Glueck even made a surprising statement that check-ins are up in 2016. “We have more than ever,” he says. “Just because some people aren’t doing it doesn’t mean no one is.” But even Foursquare users who don’t do it are, essentially, doing it. With Pilgrim, Foursquare can be confident enough about where you are, that it checks in for you. Of the billion check-ins a month, the big majority are “implicit.” That’s what makes Marsbot possible. She’s always watching.
There is a definite leitmotif in Glueck’s employment history. He sold one company he co-founded to Travelocity, and was at Travelocity when it was sold to a consortium of private equity companies. Then he became CEO at another company, Skyfire, which he sold to Opera Software. So while he says that he’s running Foursquare with the expectation that it will be independent, he knows it’s ridiculous to deny that there’s a possibility Foursquare might be gobbled up. He can even provide names of the potential gobblers who have current business relationships with Foursquare.
“You look at our customer list and it’s all folks who have some reason to compete or distrust Google or Facebook,” he says. “It’s Twitter, Pinterest, Uber, Samsung, Microsoft, Apple, Tencent…I can give you another twenty. These are our natural allies. But the key now is focusing on becoming a profitable business.”
Maybe Foursquare can indeed turn a profit and grow as an independent; Crowley is right that only a very few companies have anything approaching its location technology and data. But my guess is that Foursquare will indeed get a buyer. It would be a prize for any of those companies Glueck spoke of, not to mention the big two those companies distrust. Or even a game company wanting to create the next Pokemon Go. If I were to bet a long shot, I’d put my money on Uber. Last May, the two companies made a “global multi-year agreement” where the ride service would use Foursquare’s location data for pickups and destinations. You don’t need much imagination to figure out other ways Foursquare data could dovetail with Uber’s ambitions, and at its reduced valuation, Uber could certainly afford to buy. But I wouldn’t be struck dumb if the buyer were one of those other potential suitors.
If that happens, I hope Marsbot’s new overlord decides to keep evolving her, even if it meant shifting the content of her sweet nothings to reflect her new boss’s mission. Though I was no fan of Clippy, I see Crowley’s point about proactive bots. One thing Crowley and I discussed was having Marsbot, or some variant, as a road companion. Maybe she could access a smart car’s API, so besides advising you the best roadside diners, she could alert you to road hazards or a draining battery.
Marsbot herself, of course, had no comment, besides a suggestion that after I finish my shopping at the local gourmet shop, I walk three blocks to treat myself to a coffee at a place that all the kids are talking about. Still, I wonder what she’s dreaming.
Creative Art Direction by Redindhi Studio
