Feature Vs Business | $41M Silver Lake loan keeps Foursquare afloat.

So in 2012, I lived on a plane and used Facebook regularly to just update people where I was at any particular point. In JoBurg last week, I updated my location on my Facebook profile, alerted and managed to meet a few local startups whilst I was there for 3 days. This was all within Facebook. Apparently there is another startup which has tried to build a business around this; FourSquare. As nice a feature the ‘location status’ is, it’s not something I would specifically download an app for and actually invest time in updating. I guess I am not alone. FourSquare, which has 33Mn registered users of which 8Mn (24%) are said to be active and made $2Mn in revenue last year after raising er, $72Mn in venture capital, just got another $41Mn loan — as I predicted, to starve off death. I hope they do survive, their luxury is that as a developed market player with a large user base, they stand a solid chance and can often turn on ad products which generate revenue quickly.
Why should the N...