Enjoyment: Structure News: Foursquare's data-oriented future gets real

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January 15th, 2016 / by Tom Krazit

This week, we'll talk about how GPUs are driving the AI revolution, a nice move from Yahoo to bolster machine-learning research, and the future of Foursquare.

STRUCTURE NEWS

THE STATE OF AI IS STRONG AT THE FUTURE OF AI SYMPOSIUM

We've been tracking the shift from basic data analysis tools to more advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques for several years now, and it was cool to see a bunch of these topics debated this week in a very collegial style between companies and organizations with a huge economic incentive to win this market. The Future of AI Symposium was a great reminder that the world of AI is still a small one, when companies like Google and Facebook (which really don't like each other) can come together to help advance an exciting new technology, and I summarized a few of the key points made in this post.

Several of these topics will be up for discussion at Structure Data, scheduled for March 9th and 10th at the UCSF Mission Bay conference center. If you haven't already registered, now is a good time to do so right here, and there's more information on the show and its themes here.

INDUSTRY NEWS

THE TRANSITION FROM CLOUD BACK TO A DATA CENTER MIGRATION

If you were with us in November at Structure, you heard a lot of people talking about ditching their data centers and embracing the cloud. But what about companies that are going the other way? TechTarget has an interesting look at what I call "the data center tipping point," in which companies born on the cloud start to realize they can run more efficiently in their own data centers after achieving a certain scale.

AI IS SUPER HOT, SO WHERE ARE ALL THE CHIP FIRMS THAT AREN'T NAMED NVIDIA?

Nvidia, which appeared at the aforementioned Future of AI Symposium, put out a post this week highlighting the work it's doing on chips for artificial intelligence applications, which are used by AI stalwarts such as Baidu, Facebook, Google, Microsoft. Fortune unpacks Nvidia's post and examines the general state of chips for AI, noting "when it comes to AI, hardware is a huge differentiator, and that gap is widening all the time."

A DISPATCH FROM CLOUD CITY - STATE OF THE UNION 2016

Adrian Cockcroft's state of the cloud is a hallmark of Structure each year, and analyst Charles Fitzgerald weighed in with his own take this week on the cloud market heading into 2016. One interesting suggestion: if Amazon Web Services wants to convince customers it isn't bent on locking them into its services, it will have to become more transparent, and that could be a tough thing to embrace inside Amazon's famously guarded corporate culture.

AMD FINALLY READY TO CRACK THE DATA CENTER WITH ARM CHIPS

We spent part of last week's newsletter talking about the failure of ARM data center chips to make any sort of headway against Intel (just look at Intel's fourth-quarter results, as reported by Bloomberg), and AMD's newest ARM-based server processors are finally available. But this sounds like too little, too late, for both AMD and ARM: "The A1100 is not an exciting product," longtime chip analyst Linley Gwennapp told Venturebeat.

YAHOO RELEASES THE LARGEST-EVER MACHINE LEARNING DATASET FOR RESEARCHERS

Yahoo may be at a crossroads in its long history, but it is still one of the largest sites on the web with a treasure trove of user data. It announced this week that it will donate 13.5 terabytes of data to the machine-learning research community based off user interactions with its home page, something we'll be sure to ask Yahoo's Ron Brachman about when he's on stage at Structure Data 2016.

LOOKER ANALYTICS PLATFORM SCORES $48 MILLION LED BY KLEINER PERKINS

The sweet spot in data analytics tools? Creating something that non-technical users can comprehend while giving the technical people some powerful tools to play with. Looker appears to have found this balance, and now has another $48 million ahead of what's going to be an uncertain year for fund-raising to continue building its company, according to TechCrunch.

BIG PICTURE

It's been a long bumpy road for Foursquare, one of the buzziest companies to emerge from three important trends at the end of the last decade: the Web 2.0 movement, the rise of the smartphone, and the maturation of the New York tech scene. The company's original vision of a social network based around location-sharing just has not panned out, and it has been retooling its pitch ever since while hanging on to a small core of loyal users.

What is clear, however, is that Foursquare is sitting on a treasure trove of mobile location data: data that the company has used to predict things like iPhone 6s sales and which could be used by some of the more sophisticated machine-learning companies of our time to discover some very interesting trends or opportunities. After announcing Thursday that founder and CEO Dennis Crowley (a Structure Data 2014 veteran, pictured center above) would step down to become executive chairman while raising $45 million in new funds, it's now pretty clear that data is Foursquare's main business.

Foursquare's fund-raising event will not be met with the usual congratulations: the company's once-lofty valuation has been cut nearly in half, according to the New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal reported that the new round of funding has some pretty stringent liquidation preferences on behalf of investors. But the shift in its revenue strategy should please those investors. Crowley told Techcrunch that licensing deals with Apple, Twitter, and Pinterest helped Foursquare to its biggest revenue year in 2015 (although it's not saying how much that actually was).

Crowley and Foursquare were ahead of their time in recognizing the valuable data that would be produced by millions of people walking around with sensors in their pockets. They also overestimated how many people were interested in publicly sharing their location. At this point, almost seven years into its history, Foursquare and new CEO Jeff Glueck (pictured right above) have a chance to build a very interesting data service for larger businesses.

We'll check in later this year to see how it's doing.