At today’s Publishing Point Meetup, David Young (CEO, Hachette Book Group) spoke about the major changes in the publishing industry. Here are some highlights.

1. Changes in Bookselling

• “Last year 50% of our revenue came from companies not directly invested in our business (e.g., Walmart, Costco, etc.)” – this is a big change from the days of getting all their revenues from bookstores.
• “You go to bookstores to discover books you never heard of, you go online to order books you know you want.”
• Bookish was Carolyn Reidy’s idea (Simon & Schuster CEO). Unlike S&S, Hachette is not a household name (“our authors are our brand), so users are not drawn to our website. We limited Bookish to only 3 publishers due to advice from anti-trust lawyers.
• “I don’t see that we’ll be selling 100% direct to consumers in my lifetime.”

2. Changing Definition of Publisher

• “We’ve done a poor job of explaining what publishers do. Simply put, we want to broadcast books to as many places and in as many formats as possibly can.”
• There are challenges to being a publisher today: there’s a lower cost of entry, we pay writers to go off and write (when we pay advances), debt collection, anti-piracy.
• We’re doing a project that’s not sexy, but will have a huge impact, which is a change of our order-to-cash system. We’re removing our old mainframe and going to the cloud. This is changing everything, costs multiple millions, and is impacting everything that touches the business. We designed a system for publishers and distributees (not parachuting in a system from SAP, which they forced to fit publishers). There were lots of “naughts at the end, and not an immediate ROI against it,” so it’s amazing they approved it. But it can’t happen fast enough, really.

3. eBooks

• We need auditability of eBook sales – the info. has gone dark again (at a time when it should be more transparent.)
• On eBook Pricing: “We’ve sold more eBooks above $10 than below. There’s little change when we drop $2, $3, $4.”
• On eBook Library Lending: “I’m meeting with the President of the ALA in June and talking to partners on this. If you let that particular genie out of the bottle and get it wrong – you’ll get into a lot of trouble. We want to do it thoughtfully.”

Related articles

• Hachette at the Tipping Point (go-to-hellman.blogspot.com)
• Publishing Point: conversation with David Young, Chairman/COS Hachette Book Group (teleread.com)
• Bookish vs. Amazon, Goodreads: Community or Commerce? (loudpoet.com)

At the NYC Digital Asset Managers Meetup tonight, the speakers gave some great advice for dealing with DAM Users.

The speakers were Leala Abbott, Senior Analyst for Enterprise Content Management and blogger at Off the Shelf – The Musings of an Information Science Professional and Henrik de Gyor, Digital Asset Manager at K12 Inc. and blogger at Another DAM Blog. Here are a few quick takeaways:

It Doesn’t Matter What System You Buy – You Need Process!!

Leala started by talking about the human element of a digital asset management system, saying “It doesn’t matter what system you buy – you need process!” She said she started by taking a survey of the users to try and find out why only 1 department was using the system and why users were dissatisfied. The technology wasn’t the problem – it was the user interface.

The UI Matters

Leala said for most DAM systems, you are “throwing a regular user in front of a administrator system.” She claims that most users really only need 5 functions or features. She discussed possibly integrating DAM with other databases through a single Google-like simple search interface on top of it.

Cater to the Users

Henrik suggests creating use cases for each type of user, and publicly document their role. Find out what do they do today and how do they do it. He created video training for each user role, documented every field, and put it on a wiki. Now if a user has a question, he sends them the link.

Sorry, No Metadata Fairies

The speakers commented that they wished the metadata fairies would come in and add metadata to the assets. Since users need to be encouraged to input metadata properly, Henrik shared his success at giving out “DAM Awards” -  They measure uploads and track quality and then give certificates monthly and yearly. He says, “it shows appreciation to all the people who are doing DAM in addition to their other work.” He e-mails the recognition to the user’s boss, and their whole group, and they use it in performance reviews. Users frame the certificates, and some users have even put the fact that they are this month’s winner in their e-mail signature line!

At the Women on Wall Street conference last night, Steven Berlin Johnson gave a keynote on how innovation happens. He has studied the history of breakthrough innovations and found a pattern: They are created not by “Eureka!” moments, but slow hunches that incubate, sometimes for decades, with diverse people collaborating to make unintended consequences.

Here are some of his riveting stories, which are from his new book, Where Good Ideas Come From:

Slow Hunches, not “Eureka Moments,” that Incubate Over Time

An Engineer started working at a new job and got overwhelmed with keeping track of projects, people, and documents. So he started trying to organize the data for himself and wrote some software.

He put it aside for awhile and tinkered with the code again a few years later. Then he got side-tracked and put it down again.

A while later, he realized it could help with a project they were working on. He built a prototype based on Hypertext called ENQUIRE. The Engineer was Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, and his vision became the World Wide Web. He had worked on it for ten years.

Unintended Consequences

Sputnik was launched on a Friday. Everyone was talking about it on Monday. At a cafeteria at the applied physics lab at Johns Hopkins two young guys said “has anyone tried to listen?” They picked up the signal (the Soviets made Sputnik easy to track so no one would thought it was a hoax). Then they start recording it with time stamps and noticed a variation in frequency. They realized there was a pattern to it. They got permission to use the UNIVAC computer for this side project. After 3 weeks they figured out the exact orbit.

Their boss says, “So, you figured out an unknown location of a satellite orbiting the planet from a known location on the ground. Could you go the other way?” And they did. (Turns out he wanted it to figure out how to send missiles from submarines to Moscow.) This side project turned into GPS, which originally was for the military, but then opened up and now it’s in your pocket!

The Side Project

Johnson said Google encourages its engineers to take 20% of work time to work on side projects. Yet they claim that 50% of their shipping products come from this time.

Collaborate with Diverse People

There was a study done following scientists to find out where their good ideas came, said Johnson. Rather than being the Eureka moment when they were looking through a microscope, it was at the weekly lab meeting when they were sharing notes and exchanging ideas. Sometimes a scientist would be stuck on a problem or share that he found a lot of noise. Another scientist would help and explain that it might be signal.

We now have an opportunity to find information from across our diverse social network. Get involved in conversations, find articles, stumble across things, Johnson exhorted.

His parting words: “chance favors the connected mind.”

Related articles

• ‘Eureka moments’ and other innovation myths (cnn.com)
• Steven Johnson: Where good ideas come from (ted.com)
• Mothers of invention (boston.com)

If content is king, context is God, said Gary Vaynerchuk yesterday at a talk on social media. If you have never seen him, make sure you do – in person or on video. I first saw him at Social Media Week last year and caught him at NYXPO yesterday. He grew his family’s wine business from $4 million to $60 million annually using social media, started his own branding consultancy, and he is generous with sharing how he did it with in-your-face advice. Here are the highlights:

Trends to Watch

He asked the audience “Who used to say ‘I will NEVER have a Facebook page. Why would I want to share my information with people? That’s dumb! I don’t need to do that’?” “Truthfully now,” he admonished. Tons of raised hands. “OK, now who said that and now HAS a Facebook page?” Lots.

“Who said they would never get a cell phone because ‘I don’t want people to be able to reach me 24/7, why would I want that?!!’” Tons of hands. “OK, now who said that and doesn’t have a cell phone with them right now?” Only one brave hand.

Twitter, Foursquare – Vaynerchuk had example after example. What he pays attention to are things like this, which people insist they will never do, but most everyone will.

Context is Key

“Most people use Twitter like a 19-yr-old dude – do not try to close too early,” he said. He described how he built his business:  He would search Twitter 15 hours a day for keywords, such as “Merlot” and “Pinot Grigio” (and says he still does). If he found someone asking “What Merlot should I have for this dinner?” he would suggest something, give free advice, but NOT SELL. Then if someone wanted to buy, they’d know he was an expert, he’d have a relationship with them, and they would end up buying from him.

“People say that ‘content is king,’” he said. “If content is king, context is God.” Social media gives you the context – you have built yourself up as an expert and made relationships with people.

Out-Care the Competition

“You can defeat much bigger businesses by out-caring them,” said Vaynerchuk. “Amazon bought Zappos out of fear, they were winning a war not based on price.” He said customer service is what can differentiate you, and he’s written a new book about it called The Thank You Economy. He advised a woman who wanted to start a lingerie company to write hand-written thank you notes after each order. “Wouldn’t you delight your customer if you drove to their house to give them a hug? That’s the kind of sh** you need to do!” he said.

Related articles

• The Thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuk (laughingsquid.com)
• Gary Vaynerchuk gives personal brand top billing (theglobeandmail.com)
• Gary Vaynerchuck’s Social Media Advice for Scaredy Cat Corporations (fastcompany.com)

Dennis Crowley spoke at NYU Stern School of Business today about how he went from being laid off in 2001 to CEO of Foursquare.

About 400 people were gathered outside the auditorium, because the session before Crowley’s was running late. The crowd was getting very loud. There were business school students and NYU alums, and everyone seemed to be talking to each other.

Then I noticed a young man in jeans and a hoodie off by himself in the corner. He was concentrating on his iPhone and glancing up at the crowd. I realized it was Crowley, so I went up and introduced myself. We started chatting about his upcoming talk, and I asked him what the format would be – whether he’d have a moderator/interviewer. He said “I don’t know, I just show up where they tell me to, and just hope I’m in the right place at the right time!”  Well he did, and with no Powerpoint or agenda, he told his story:

From Pink Slip to Grad School

After he was laid off from an internet startup, Crowley thought about going to business school. A friend brought him to an art show, sponsored by NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). Students at the show were doing cool things, like making robots “just because.” He made up his mind to go to ITP.

From a Thesis to a Business Sold to Google

For his graduate thesis, he decided to make a product with someone he met the first day of school (Alex Rainert,  now Head of Product at Foursquare). It became Dodgeball, and he sold it to Google in 2005. He worked there for two years, but was stymied from fulfilling his vision for the product and left.

Later he was at another startup, sharing office space with another startup. He started a side project with a buddy at the next desk (Naveen Selvadurai). They wanted to make a cool product. Then they heard that Google abandoned Dodgeball, and they decided to do it better.

Coding on the Tarmac

They decided to make life a game, and make a “leaderboard for Saturday.” The object of the game was to be able to say, “Hey, I had more fun than you last night.” They wanted to convince people to do things they don’t want to do, such as go further than 5 blocks from your apartment, and came up with badges. He said the “ultimate reward is that you’re happy that you did it, but you need the kick in the pants to get you do it.”

He said “Dodgeball was too focused on my friends, it didn’t appeal to most people. If you have 3 friends and 2 stop using it, then you’ll have a crappy experience.” He described Foursquare as a 1-player game that hooks you until you build up multiple players.

For a launch date, they gave themselves the deadline of the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference, which he called “Nerd Spring Break.” They took different planes to the conference – not because they were afraid the plane would crash and they would both die, but so that in case the database went down, someone would be there to fix it. They were “coding in the airport, coding on the tarmac.”

They got 10,000 users from SXSW and press, and decided to make a company out of it. (He had been looking for a job before that, but he said “no one wanted to hire me – the founder of a startup that failed). They went to venture capitalists (VCs), who said “Oh, you’re the dodgeball guy, what happened to that? Ha ha ha” and everyone rejected them. “Actually,” he said, “no one said ‘No,’ they said, ‘We LOVE this idea, but we need someone else to be lead, which means they want to know someone else thinks it’s good.”

Merchants Tap into the Power of Foursquare

Meanwhile, the product was maturing, and one day Techcrunch sent them a picture. It was a coffee shop in San Francisco, who made a flyer with the Foursquare logo that said “tell us that you checked in and we’ll give you a $1 off. Show us you’re the Mayor!” Techcrunch asked him, “what are you experimenting with?” He said, “we didn’t do this. Check ins are like ad impressions that a business didn’t buy to reach people that they normally wouldn’t reach. Businesses caught on to this before we did.”

He said “people were writing that ‘Merchants tap into the power of Foursquare.’ We were flooded with requests to verify their businesses.” They went from free coffee to a free taco, and then “went crazy: free steak dinner, free airline ticket.”  Crowley said they went back to the VCs, and said “you know that Foursquare thing? The community wants us to do this. Merchants are begging to work with us.” Then they started raising money, and settled on $1.35 million, which he thought would last forever.

A Good Problem to Have!?

“Dodgeball had only 30K users total,” he pointed out, “and now we get 25K in a day.“ Foursquare has 3.75 million users with 1.5 million checks in a day. “Unfortunately,” he said, “that means outages, which brings the server down, as it did Monday and Tuesday.” While some may say “that’s a good problem to have,” he said, “it’s not when you have 10!”

Because of their investors and relationships, he said he can write to Twitter: “Dear Twitter, How did you get over this outages problem?” and find out “Oh, we hired some people and wrote some code, it’s open source, you can have it.” And they can write to their investors: “Dear investor, How did some of your other companies get over this server problem?” and hear about some new experimental database technologies that can help them.

Crowley was asked if Foursquare was threatened by Facebook Places. He said “Facebook getting into this space could be one of the best things that happen to us. They are teaching 5 million users about location-based check-ins, so I don’t have to. Now it’s ‘Foursquare and Facebook,’ not ‘Foursqaure and 5 other scrappy startups.’”

New and Different Ad Models

He said, “Everyone wanted to buy banner ads (we don’t do that), they wanted to buy ad space in the app. (we don‘t do that).” But their through their deal with BravoTV, users loved getting rewards by going to restaurants that the brand discussed and unlocking hidden levels of the game.

He was asked how they make money. He said, “When global merchants want to work with us, it’s easy – there are opportunities. Amazon monetized search for digital cameras, by showing ads for digital cameras. If I’m looking for the best Indian food right now, there’s no way for the Indian restaurants on 6^th Street to compete for my eyeballs using mobile.” He said, “It’s not about taking existing ad models and put them in Foursquare, we need new and different models.”

Related articles

• Foursquare Founder on Developing Fun (sandlertechworks.com)
• Tweet Tweet Boom Boom (NYmag.com)
• Why Selling To Google Can Be A Mistake (GOOG) (businessinsider.com)

I am looking for publishing app. case studies for Premedia Spectrum (1/18-1/21, in Naples, FL http://bit.ly/ddhnih) e-mail me at ksandler1@gmail.com, subject: Tablet Story.

Premedia Spectrum 2011 January 18 - 21

Premedia Spectrum is a conference that brought together two leading industry conferences: the GAA Premedia Conference and IDEAlliance Spectrum. GAA is the Gravure Association of America, a trade association for gravure printing. IDEAlliance does XML specifications (such as PRISM for sending magazine content to syndicators), conferences (such as Primex), and runs networks (such as P3-Partnership in Print Production).

Types of publishers I’m hoping to hear from:

• Magazine
• Book
• Catalogs
• Retail

I want to know about Workflow and Technology.

Here is my outline. Love to hear what you think and hope to see you there!

Creating an eReader Edition

I. How to Create a File for a Tablet Device

A. Overview – Tablet Devices and Standards

i. iPad

ii. Other tablets

iii. e-readers

iv. mobile devices

B. What is ePub?

C. Limitations of ePub

D. Workarounds

E. Other standards – nextPub

F. Demo – InDesign to ePub

II. Best Practices – Examples from publishers using cross-media workflows

A. Repurposing

B. Simultaneous Design – XML Workflows

III. Challenges

A. Advertising – standards and preflighting for interactive ads

B. Multiple Devices & Standards

C. Sustainable workflows

D. Change Management

E. Hidden costs

IV. Further Resources

Stephen P. Anderson gave a great talk tonight to the NY Chapter of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). He spoke about using psychology to achieve great user interface and design. He showed a ton of examples of great design, analyzed why it worked, then spoke about the psychology behind it. He sells a card deck that explains the psychology, called “Mental Notes,” which he gave attendees a sample of.

Here are some of the examples:

• Piano Stairs
  • Example: See this video in which they encouraged people to take the stairs, rather than the escalator: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lXh2n0aPyw
  • Why it worked: They made a piano of the stairs, and 66% more people used the stairs than the escalator because of it. It worked because fun can change behavior.
  • The Psychology: It tapped into people’s curiosity.

• LinkedIn Progress Bar
  • Example: In 2004, LinkedIn showed a simple progress bar, which allowed you to see what percent of your profile you had completed. They succeeded in getting tons of people to fill out their profile to 100%.
  • Why it worked: Levels broke the task into sequences and challenges excited the user.
  • The Psychology: People felt a status for achieving 100%.

• iLike:
  
  • Example: In 2008, Anderson was doing research for a music application and signed up for a lot of services. Most of them were mediocre. He pointed to iLike, which had a clean registration process, with helpful pop-ups (for example, “we want your zip code to tell you when bands you like are in town.”). To pick his favorites, rather then type them in like other sites required, it showed visuals with pictures of bands.
  • Why it worked: User goals meshed with business goals: “I had a great time clicking bands I like and iLike gained lots of data about my musical tastes & preferences.”
  • The Psychology:

1.     Feedback loops – We are engaged by situations in which we see our actions modify subsequent results.

2.     Curiosity – Teased with a small bit of interesting information, people will want to know more.

3.     Visual imagery – Vision trumps all other senses and is the most direct way to perception.

4.     Recognition over recall – It’s easier to recognize things we have previously experienced than it is to recall them from memory.

5.     Pattern recognition – Our brains seek ways to organize information.

• iLike Challenge
  • Example: After he signed up for iLike, he got an e-mail confirmation that told him to play the iLike Challenge. It would play 30 seconds of a song and you name it. It tracked points based on speed and correctness. It was playful and had a social component.
  • Why it worked: Again user goals meshed with business goals. You can show music preferences and buy direct from the game. “And iLike gained lots of data about my musical tastes, preferences and knowledge.”
  • The Psychology:

1. Sensory appeal attention/memory

2. Appropriate challenges

3. Feedback loops

4. Status – We constantly assess how interactions either enhance or diminish our standing relative others and our personal best.

5. Achievements

What We Know About People

It wasn’t the usability that makes it great. Usability is removing friction. Increasing motivation is psychology. He encouraged the audience to think about what you know about people. For instance:

• We’re curious
• We seek out patterns
• We don’t like to make choices, but we like choice
• We’re afraid of change
• We like to order and organize things
• We’re intensely self-centered
• We’re lazy
• Highly visual thinkers and learners
• Like to be the hero of the story
• We respond to our name

Then he asked: “are you using these observations in your designs?”

Applying Curiosity to Interaction Design

• The bestselling Hotwheels car is the one where they don’t reveal the car – you can’t see through the plastic.
• NetFlix has movie rating capability all over their website, but when you return a movie, it shows two movies with question marks. It asks you to “rate your recent return to reveal 2 movies you’ll love” – most people rate movies there.

Are you in the Club? We naturally desire those things that we feel are restricted and want to be part of something with limited access. Sabre travel had a Q&A site internally and employees had to “unlock karma points” by answering questions in order to upload photos and other things they wanted to do. 60% of the questions are answered in 1 hr.

Lighten Up! Humorous interactions are more remembered and enjoyed. For example, MailChimp has lots of humor, and people will forget the frustrations of e-mail when using it.

Loss Aversion and Ownership: Anderson pointed out that Foursquare mayorship didn’t mean anything until it was threatened. You want to protect what you had once you lose it.

When asked about creating business applications using this strategy, Anderson asked, “Are there humans involved?” If so, he said, “human psychology applies.”

Thanks to The Publishing Point meetup the other day for hosting the fascinating Tim O’Reilly (founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media and the Tools of Change Conference). I live tweeted the event, but wanted to share my snippets with you.

Advice for the Industry:

• “The faith that I have in the future of publishing: You will do a job that really matters, because it will sell.”
• “We’re all going to die. Do something that lights you up, and lights up your customers.”"It’s a great time: We have this opportunity to try things and go back to basics – there’s joy in that!”
• Innovation is being stymied by big players who own points of control. He said he told Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google), “Not being evil isn’t good enough, you need to create more value than you capture.” He said, “We need to grow the technology ecosystem, not eat it.”
• “You don’t know what quality is as a publisher – it’s what matters to your reader….Publishers: Don’t kid yourself that you’re good at manual curation, those days are over…..It’s seductive to think ‘we’re good at that, I know what people want.’”
• O’Reilly’s reaction to Godin’s self-publishing: “There’s nothing new with that, it’s a lot of work! Publishers are in the ‘pain-in-the-ass industry’ – we do stuff no one else wants to.”
• “Don’t be afraid to do something so small that it won’t move the needle, most successes start small.”
• “Watch for the innovators,” you can buy their company and scale it as a publisher.
• O’Reilly Media tries to “do interesting work for interesting people.” Their mission is to spread the knowledge of innovators. “You just sorta follow your nose – but that’s assuming you have a mission.”

Business Models:

• Book publishers should look at different business models for e-books. For O’Reilly, Safari Books Online subscriptions is their 2nd biggest source of revenue.
• The industry missed an opportunity – “We could have had algorithmic pricing for e-books. Google could have helped the publishing industry with this, but we screwed ‘em.”
• “The elephant in the room in publishing is: What’s the right price for an e-book?”
• “The demand and the economics do not line up” for content.

Related articles by Zemanta

• In Conversation with Tim O’Reilly [VIDEO] (publishingpoint.ning.com)
• Philosopher Tim O’Reilly Lights Up Publishing (go-to-hellman.blogspot.com)
• A Middleman is Not Your Real Customer (ikiw.org)
• Web 2.0 Expo: O’Reilly Says Have Fun, Invent (informationweek.com)
• Tim O’Reilly on How the Web is a Sustainability Platform (greenbiz.com)
• Michael Arrington and Tim O’Reilly – Location and Points of Control (itc.conversationsnetwork.org)

Ad Age has a brilliant post on the limitations of social media at http://tinyurl.com/262x6g2. The author talks about un-social social media. Excerpts below. Fav quote: “At the end of the day, social media should be a relationship vitamin and sweetener, not a destination.”

I once heard @garyvee at a social media conference lament how insane it is to have talking heads on a panel about social media lecture to the audience and tell them to hold their questions. I want to know what social media nonsense have you seen? - Kathy Sandler

“Connecting in meaningful ways over someone you have lost, or are losing, makes everything else we deem “social” seem so … well, unsocial. Or perhaps just a bit trivial.

Indeed, looking at the word “conversation” through the lens of social media, you almost wonder whether we’ve allowed it to become cheapened and commoditized….

At the end of the day, social media should be a relationship vitamin and sweetener, not a destination. It should deepen bonds, not defuse or soften them. Remember, volume doesn’t always translate into intimacy. Speed doesn’t guarantee meaningful connections. Retweets don’t necessarily confer respect. Friending doesn’t always signal friendliness.

As marketers, we’re just starting to emerge from the full force of the first social-media tsunami wave. We blinked, and suddenly 550 million people joined Facebook. We turned our head, and Twitter has become a national compulsion. All the world’s our friend. A kingdom for a good tweet….

But there’s a big distinction between “click-through” and “stick-through.” It takes real work and investment — and even tough head-count decisions (think “community managers”) — to nurture and grow relationships, and even that’s not a guarantee of success. This is why getting social media right is fundamentally an “enterprise” — and not merely a marketing — endeavor….”

“There’s yet another layer to this humbling meditation. What we also have here, amid our endless connections, is a failure to communicate — and we barely know it….”

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• Is Social Media Creating an Empathy Deficit? (socialcitizens.org)
• Media Isn’t Social (Logic + Emotion)
• Consistency is Crucial in Social Media (hightalk.net)
• The Future Of Enterprises Will Be “Social”. What Exactly Does That Mean? – innovation playground Idris Mootee (mootee.typepad.com)

Foursquare Co-Founder Naveen Selvadurai spoke at Publishing Point meetup about developing fun (+ getting > 2 million users in 17 months). Questions he asked:

• How do we do better at living at a city? They created Foursquare so you could get info. from friends about cool places, find things to do in your city and really experience it. Foursquare is a social utility first and foremost – their goal is for you to learn more about your city by sharing tips with/from your friends and meet with them.
• How do we turn life into a game? They added multi-player game mechanics to encourage people to use the system and share.
• Can we use software to change people’s behavior? There are now 12-15K real-world items you can get for checking in to places, including hotel stays and free meals. Some people have created real-world meetups to get together and get badges as a group, such as the karaoke badge or the swarm badge. They have data to show you your stats, so you can do better (for example, go to new places not just the same ones)
• What’s next? They plan to refine game mechanics, pull in tips from other places, and redesign the point system. They want to figure out a way that you can track your happiness.

Questions from the audience:

• Monetization: Foursquare did a promotion with Bravo in which Bravo celebrities created tips and users get a badge for going to the places they like in a certain order. Susan Danziger suggested that book publishers could have authors leave tips about real-world places characters visits, creating a series of check-ins to get a badge.
• Privacy: The system only tracks you when you check in, you can let system know but not the rest of your friends, and if want to send to Twitter and Facebook you need to do manually each time.

- Kathy Sandler

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• Foursquare executives pocket $4.6M for themselves from funding (venturebeat.com)
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• Five reasons why Foursquare’s mainstream success is inevitable (telegraph.co.uk)