【War Archives】

You may be War Archivesseeing Foursquare less and less as a consumer, but behind the scenes, the company is set to touch more aspects of your life than you'll realise.

This is especially the case in Asia, where Foursquare just announced a seriously impressive roster of partnerships with some of the region's biggest companies.

We're talking Tencent, Samsung, LG, for starters, not to mention other companies like Momo, Travel Japan Wi-Fi, Path, and Carousell.

Tencent owns China's biggest and practically ubiquitous messaging app, WeChat. Its 889 million monthly active users use the app to chat, share updates on their timelines, and even pay widely for goods and services with its mobile wallet.

Tencent's other big property, QQ, is an instant messenger where its 899 million active users chat and play social games.

That's nearly a billion users on each of Tencent's platforms.

Foursquare will become the exclusive location partner for WeChat outside of China. That means consumers who tag a location while travelling, will be tapping on places marked in Foursquare.

For Korean phone giants Samsung and LG, Foursquare's API will be used in some of their default apps. If you take a picture using a Samsung Galaxy S8 or S8+, the phone will tag your location based on Foursquare's Places database.

Samsung phones will also be able to push a list of restaurants or interesting places around you, based on Foursquare.

You can see this in action in Samsung's latest Galaxy S8 commercial.

LG will use Foursquare's location tagging in its calendar entries.

The announcements are part of Foursquare's evolution from a consumer location-tagging app, to an infrastructure company, providing its location smarts to other apps.

Foursquare already powers other big tech players such as Uber, which uses Foursquare globally to let users set their destinations by typing in the name of a building or restaurant, instead of having to find an address.

New Foursquare office in Singapore

Along with its push into Asia, Foursquare announced a new Singapore office. Its team in the country will provide technical support to its Asian clients.

Its new hires for the office include new Asia head Jeremy Geiger, who founded Palo Alto-based Retailigence; senior business development manager Allen Wu, who's worked with Baidu, Lenovo, and Dell in China; and Hyounil Choi, senior technical account manager, who's worked with Naver in Korea, and Line in Japan.

Line, owned by Naver, is the largest messaging app in Japan, with some 220 million monthly active users.

Naver runs one of South Korea's most popular search engines, and smaller apps such as Snapchat-clone, Snow.

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