Foursquare has gotten some pretty big publicity before — like in Vegas. But a new Verizon commercial appears to be completely predicated around the service. Well, provided you know what Foursquare is.

As you can see in the 30-second spot embedded below, a girl is walking around a city on her Verizon Droid phone. She pulls it out of her pocket, starts walking, and immediately begins using the device. So what’s she using on it? About 6 seconds in, you’ll see she’s checking-in to a venue on the Android version of Foursquare. She keeps using her phone as she’s walking, but we don’t see the screen until 11 seconds later. What’s she doing then? Again, she’s checking Foursquare.

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Foursquare is “growing like a weed,” co-founder Dennis Crowley tells us. So fast, in fact, that they’ve had to expand their office space. Foursquare will soon take over the upstairs floor of the office they’re currently reside at in New York City. That’s great — Foursquare undoubtedly needs more room as they’re now over 20 employees. The question I have is, how on Earth are they paying for it?

The answer, of course, is likely that they’ve either gotten or are about to get more funding. A couple weeks ago we heard that Andreessen Horowitz was the big winner in the race to put more money into the location-based service. With all these new employees coming on board, and the new office space, Foursquare simply has to have more money coming in, as they only raised a $1.35 million small round (back in September of last year) so far.

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On Friday, I dropped by Foursquare HQ in New York City. They showed me some stickers, and I got to sit down for a few minutes with CEO Dennis Crowley. In the video interview above, he describes his fundraising philosophy (at about the 4:00 mark), which is timely coming from the founder of a hot startup everybody wants to invest in or acquire:

You don’t have to rush through it. If you are building interesting things that people are excited about there is a way to make things work on your terms. It is important to select the partners that will support you and take the time to find the right partners.

Crowley also talks about Foursquare’s plans to give local merchants and brands more self-serve options for managing their venues and offers. “The sooner we can get those self-service systems in place, the better it will be for revenue.” He says that for businesses, Foursquare is building two different products: one for local shops, and another for national brands and media companies.

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How can Foursquare get more people to check into places as they go about town? One way is stickers. Next month you will start to see stickers in storefront windows reminding Foursquare users to check in and unlock specials. Foursquare’s director of business development Tristan Walker flashed one of the stickers in front of my camera when I was visiting the New York offices earlier today.

In the video above (forgive the iPhone audio) he confirms the company will start to ship the stickers soon to popular Foursquare venues. The stickers are part of Foursqare’s new business-friendly focus. They are just regular stickers that say, “Check-in Here on Foursquare” and “Foursquare Special Here.”

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One surefire way to know that a service is doing well is when you see their buttons start appearing all over the web. We’ve seen it with Facebook, we’ve seen it with Twitter (Tweetmeme buttons), and now we’re going to start seeing it with Foursquare.

To be clear, the “Add to Foursquare” buttons aren’t designed to be as ubiquitous as some of the other sharing buttons around the web. Instead, this button allows content providers to give readers one-click access to add venues to their Foursquare to-do list. The first such partner that is testing this out is the Wall Street Journal. Beginning tomorrow, the newspaper’s site will feature these buttons next to venues featured in articles (specifically, in restaurant reviews and other cultural coverage).

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A months long fundraising process for Foursquare is in its last stages, we’ve heard from multiple sources, and Andreessen Horowitz looks to be preparing to check-in to Foursquare to take an investor badge.

The company has delayed committing to new venture capital as they considered buyout offers – negotiations went deep with both Yahoo and Facebook, and possibly Microsoft. The Yahoo discussions ended weeks ago, and Facebook passed on an acquisition earlier this week, we’ve heard.

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Back in January, we noted that Loopt was sending around a deck to advertisers showing off a new product. The product was focused on check-in specials (the kind popularized by Foursquare) and was entirely built on top of Facebook’s social graph. Finally, nearly 6 months later, that app is here.

Loopt Star is in some ways a simplified version of Loopt’s regular location-based service. Rather than being a service that is continually updating your location in the background, the focus here is only on the idea of the check-in. And naturally, those check-ins take place at specific venues — some of which Loopt has deals in place with to coincide with the launch of the new app. We’re talking big, national brands such as Gap, Burger King, and Universal Music.

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After speaking on a panel Wednesday at TechCrunch Disrupt with Facebook’s Chris Cox and Google’s Vic Gundotra, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley sat down with our own Evelyn Rusli for a backstage video interview.

It is clear that he feels Foursquare is still in its infancy and still has a long way to go. “The products is 10% of what it needs to be,” he says. “Look at the stuff we are doing with game mechanics, it is 1.0 game mechanics.” Where does he see it going? The badges, points, and Mayorships that people acquire by using Foursquare increasingly will be used to “unlock free goods” in real places like restaurants and stores.

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Its unfortunate lack of vowels aside, Google-backed Scvngr is emerging as a real threat to Foursquare and the bevy of location based services. Last week, Scvngr launched its consumer-facing side with apps on the iPhone and Android, a major departure from its initial focus on larger institutions (like universities and governmental organizations).

Since its consumer launch, Scvngr CEO Seth Priebatsch, says he’s been astounded by the growth: “We’ve seen a ridiculous spike.” According to Scvngr, every day since last Thursday has turned in record traffic numbers. Growth may be accelerating but Scvngr still has a way to go before it catches up to its larger rivals— its total user base is still below the 1 million mark. However, the company of 45 employees is making money: it’s been cash flow positive for several months. Priebatsch discusses numbers, his business model and why he hasn’t added a coupon feature (at least not yet). Video ahead.

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Code doesn’t lie.

Over the past several weeks, there’s been a lot of speculation about Facebook’s location functionality. At least part of that speculation can end now. We now know what Facebook is planning to launch with regard to location shortly, because it’s right there in their code.

Specifically, it’s right there in the JavaScript on the touch.facebook.com version of the site. This is the mobile version of Facebook that is optimized for phones with touchscreens like the iPhone and Android phones. Visiting this site on the Safari web browser (which, of course, the iPhone uses a version of) causes something interesting to happen: it just hangs. And when you enable debug mode, it’s easy to see why.

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Last month, Erick wrote a post calling for the creation of an open database of places. As location-based services continue to gain popularity, each of them is building up these massive databases of places themselves, and this is going to become an issue as services like Twitter and potentially Facebook attempt to federate all this data. And Erick is hardly alone in thinking about this — nearly all the companies involved in the space talk about such an idea enthusiastically, and regularly. Yet no one seems to be doing much about it just yet.

Back in March, I moderated a panel featuring key members of Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Twitter, and Plancast. When I raised the idea of a unified place database, all seemed to be in agreement that it would be a good thing. Even when I brought up that their own place databases were a way to keep their users around, everyone seemed to think there were better ways to do that, and that the benefits of a unified place database would outweigh any costs. Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley reiterated that to Erick last month, saying that a “‘Facebook Connect of places’ would be amazing.“

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Yesterday, AdAge ran a story that Facebook was preparing to roll out its first true location-based service (beyond its for-fun Presence thing). The story said that the social network was partnering with McDonald’s for a special Facebook app that would allow people to check-in to restaurants and get deals. But apps that use location to emulate Foursquare on Facebook have limited appeal. Much more interesting is what Facebook itself is planning to do with location. AdAge offered a little bit about that in their story, but didn’t go too deep.

Today, they have a new story that, to be honest, seems more like a recap of yesterday’s, but with less of a focus on McDonald’s. According to their sources, Facebook will start allowing users to update their status messages with their location as soon as late May — yes, a few weeks away.

What’s still not clear from all of this is if this location ability will be more like Foursquare or more like Twitter? What I mean by that is, Foursquare is predicated around the idea of checking-in to a specific venue (as are Gowalla, Loopt, and others). Twitter, meanwhile, allows you to tag a tweet with your location — not really a check-in. To me, this Facebook location system sounds more like the latter.

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I can almost hear Ben Stein saying it right now. “Bueller?… Bueller?… Bueller?”

It’s been almost 25 years since Ferris Bueller took his day off from school. And yet, the legend lives on today thanks to Twitter and Foursquare.

An account, @ferris_bueller_, started tweeting yesterday afternoon, noting, “Ugh… school’s really getting me down. less than an hour to go.” Bueller apparently went home and was quiet on Twitter until about 7 hours ago when he tweeted, “Really don’t feel like going to school today… Think I have a plan” If you’ve seen the movie, you know what happens from here. If not, watch it now and starting following the account, the day is still ongoing — they’re at the baseball game right now.

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“Hey Foursquare and MyTown, suck it.”

Okay, Google’s Steve Lee didn’t actually say that during the location panel at the Web 2.0 Expo today, but he may as well have. While Foursquare may have just crossed 1 million users, and MyTown now has 2 million, Lee revealed today that Latitude, Google’s location-based service, has 3 million active users — and some 8 million have signed up since the service launched.

“Latitude is not dead,” Lee said in a half-joking manner, presumably refering to the fact that no one really talks about it despite all the talk of the location space right now. In fact, the service has grown 30% per month each month this year so far, Lee says. The reason appears to be the strong growth of the Android platform. Over 10% of all Android users are using Latitude, Lee said.

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It’s like deja vu all over again.

Two years ago, Twitter used to be continually down. It doesn’t seem like this should be a major issue, but it actually is quite annoying during conferences when so many rely on the service for information. And, back in those days, people used to rely on it to know where everyone was going drinking afterwards.

Today, those same people now use Foursquare for that purpose. And that’s why when its down — as it has been tonight for the past couple of hours — it matters. How on Earth am I supposed to know which Web 2.0 Expo afterparty to go to without Foursquare?

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For the past few weeks I’ve been struggling. I’m addicted to all these location-based iPhone apps, but of the big ones, really only Loopt has had a native iPad app ready to go from the beginning. Today that changes with the launch of Gowalla’s iPad app.

As we first previewed a month ago, the app looks amazing. The main page is a giant Google Map, and on it you can see where your friends are nearby. Clicking on their faces reveals where they are — or where they were when they last checked in. And how long ago they checked-in at that location. There’s also a side menu (in landscape mode — or a pop-over menu in vertical) that shows the stream of all your friends’ check-ins. From here you can do some of the newer Gowalla functions such as comment on check-ins. And yes, of course, you can check-in yourself.

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Location based apps and services are all the rage now, with Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, and Twitter leading the space. Startup ChoiceVendor has launched a location based iPhone app and service called MoPho.to that has a different twist. Instead of an emphasis on check-ins, MoPhoto is designed around the idea of capturing a photo. It’s “social photography” with geotagged photos enriched with metadata, comments, and likes. You can download the free app here.

Similar to Foursquare, Gowalla and others, MoPhoto is built around a free app and website. And the service currently allows you to tap into your social graph on Facebook. Here’s how it works. The app is essentially built around the camera, requiring you to first take a photo at an event or place (bar, restaurant, business, work etc). Once you take a photo, you can add a caption and you must pin the photo to a geographic place or event. Places are sources from GeoAPI (which was acquired by Twitter last year) and events are sourced from your Facebook events (although the app will eventually pull events from Last.fm and possibly Plancast). When you take a picture, you’ll be given a list of possible place or events near you according to your geolocation.

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Narendra Rocherolle, a hippy-type who lives up in Marin County and lives life to the fullest, had a zen moment today while contemplating his dog’s toilet. Dogs, he realized, have been playing foursquare forever. We’re just trying to catch up to our four legged friends.

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It is becoming alarmingly apparent that Foursquare is strongly considering a sale to Yahoo. As of the end of last week they had put the venture capitalists vying for their attention on ice. Those VCs happily provided term sheets valuing the company at $80 million or so. But in the meantime, Yahoo and maybe others expressed interest in the company, and are reportedly offering way above that $80 million.

There are so many reasons why this deal shouldn’t happen. Here are just a few:

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With last week’s declaration by Twitter that it intends to start identifying places based on the coordinates of geo-coded Tweets, the location land rush is in full swing. A long list of companies including Twitter, Google, Foursquare, Gowalla, SimpleGeo, Loopt, and Citysearch are far along in creating separate databases of places mapped to their geo-coordinates. Mapping businesses, in particular, to the GPS locations near where people are checking in, Tweeting from or pegging a photo is the first step to be able to show them geo-targeted ads, which could help fuel local mobile online advertising in a major way.

Here is the problem: These efforts at creating an underlying database of places are duplicative, and any competitive advantage any single company gets from being more comprehensive than the rest will be short-lived at best. It is time for an open database of places which all companies and developers can both contribute to and borrow from. But in order for such a database to be useful, the biggest and fastest-growing Geo companies need to contribute to it. I put this suggestion to Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley the other night at a party, and he was enthusiastic about the idea.

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Earlier we made fun of Bing for going “dark” today to save energy in a way that doesn’t at all save energy. But Foursquare has an actual way to do that: take down the entire service.

Yesterday, Foursquare had some downtime. That’s nothing new, startups have downtime all the time — see: Twitter, that was their M.O. for about a year — but the reason for Foursquare’s appears to be a little humorous.

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Last week, I wrote about check-in fatigue. While there is a lot of excitement right now surrounding location-based apps, and particularly the ones where you “check-in” places, trying to use all of them can be exhausting, as I found out at SXSW. So what’s the solution? Do you just pick one and stick with it? You could, but there’s no guarantee that all of your friends will pick the same one as you. So the guys behind Brightkite have a better solution.

Check.in is an application that lets you check-in with multiple services at the same time. Or, as they put it, it’s “on check-in to rule them all.” While the team showed it to me briefly at SXSW (and CrunchGear got some video of it in action), they’ve actually given me access to it now to play around with. And I’m happy to report that it works great.

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What do Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures and Redpoint Ventures have in common? Besides being tier one venture capitalists, at least one thing: They are all fighting furiously to be the lead investor in Foursquare’s next venture round.

All that competition is driving the valuation massively upwards, too. A couple of weeks ago we’d heard that the deal would likely be closed at around a $50 million valuation. Today we’ve confirmed that the final price will likely be $60 million – $70 million. They’re raising around $10 million, which means when it’s all over Foursquare will be worth up to $80 million on paper.

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Right before the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas a couple weeks ago, some of you may have read about SimpleGeo’s awesome location data visualization tool called Vicarious.ly. The site showed location information coming in to SimpleGeo from Austin in realtime, and included elements such as Foursquare check-ins, Gowalla check-ins, geotagged pictures from Flickr, and geotagged tweets from Twitter. It was really interesting to watch in realtime, but it may be even more interesting in hindsight. Luckily, SimpleGeo has released a video to show the data over the span of just about a week (March 11 to March 17).

As you can see, Foursquare and Gowalla clearly dominate the data. This is in line with what we heard in the midst of the so-called “location war” between the two. It’s also kind of fun to watch the early hours of the morning when everyone is clearly asleep, and then watch as the data comes roaring back to life around 8 AM as festival-goers undoubtedly nursed hangovers to head to the convention center.

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Now that SXSW is fully over, it’s time to start going over some of the data from the so-called Location War between Foursquare and Gowalla. The truth is that both saw an amazing surge in usage, and at least according to data I saw from one source, the two were neck and neck midway through the event (in terms of usage). Today, I asked them both to share some of their own internal recent data, seeing as both SXSW happened — and then both were featured in Apple’s App Store last week.

GigaOm posted some numbers earlier today, including that during the five days of SXSW (Interactive), Foursquare signed up 75,000 new users, to push them over 600,000 total. We got some other numbers from both Foursquare and Gowalla, as well.

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I didn’t have the same problems at SXSW this year that some people did. Was it too crowded at some events? Sure. But there were plenty of alternative things to do. Did some of the keynotes bomb? Yes. But there were plenty of other things to listen to. Did AT&T fail? No. Actually, they did an awesome job keeping the network up. Instead, I had a problem of a different kind: check-in fatigue.

Seeing as location was this year’s Twitter at SXSW, and seeing as I write a lot about location, I wanted to try to use as many of the services as I could during the actual conference. I drastically underestimated how much work that would actually be.

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Editor’s note: This post was written by Joe Stump, the co-founder of SimpleGeo, a geolocation infrastructure company. While much of the focus in location these days is on the front-end side of things, SimpleGeo focuses on the backend, allowing startups to very easily get started with geolocation. We asked Stump to weigh-in with his thoughts on the front-end side of things, and the general state of the emerging field.

There’s been a lot of coverage lately about the location “war” between Gowalla and Foursquare. Nobody is arguing that Gowalla and Foursquare aren’t, on some levels, competing, but I do think a lot of people are missing the big picture here. Which is the impending location gold rush.

My cofounder, Matt Galligan, and I firmly believe that location is in a similar position as social was in 2001 or so. By that I mean that, at the time, social was very nascent, but exciting as it gave us a whole new view of the data we consume every day. Over the course of almost 10 years we’ve seen social get baked into everything from photo sharing to financial tools. I think that location, similarly, gives us an interesting new view of our data.

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As we noted a couple days ago, the so-called “Location War” was essentially an even match throughout the first few days of the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. The services were in a dead-heat when it came to check-ins through Sunday, based on data we’d seen. But when it comes to tweets from the respective services, Foursquare, it seems, is dominating.

I had the service Trendrr send me some data for tweets being sent out with “4sq.com” and “gowal.la,” the short URLs for each service. As you can see in the graph above, while Gowalla has a much more steady stream of tweets sent to Twitter, Foursquare has huge spikes. In total, according to the Trendrr data, Foursquare is averaging about 500 Twitter posts per hour with peaks as high as 1,329 posts per hour. Gowalla is averaging about 100 posts per hour with a peak of 190 posts per hour.

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The SXSW festival in Austin, Texas is currently ground zero for a war, the location war. While over a dozen services have launched new products or features around location, two still seem to stand above all others in terms of use here: Foursquare and Gowalla. Earlier today, Business Insider ran a report suggesting that Foursquare was dominating the battle — unfortunately, that’s simply not true.

In fact, Foursquare and Gowalla are basically in a statistical dead heat, at least in Austin. Multiple sources confirmed this information, and one actually showed me proof (which I was asked not to share). In other words, the war is still raging.

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Pixelpipe, the service that lets you syndicate text, audio, video and image files to 120 different social networks, blogs and sites, is adding geolocation functionality to its site with a Foursquare integration. The true virtue of Pixelpipe’s service is the fact that it lets you publish all types of files to various social networks and sites from a centralized place. And the startup offers its service on mobile devices, including a nifty Android app, as well.

Using Foursquare’s API, Pixelpipe now allows you to add check-in to a location with a link to media captured at the venue, which is hosted on your Pixelpipe Page. And you can check-in to a location with media (text, photo, video, audio or a file) with Pixelpipe’s Android app. Pixelpipe will present a list of venues to a user. The number after the venue represents the number of recent check-insFor example, if you are at SXSW, you can record an audio clip or video and post the media long with your check-in to the Austin Convention Center. The link will lead vistors back to your Pixelpipe landing page.

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