Developed over 13 years ago, the Foursquare app was an early player in location-based social networking, connecting people to places of interest across the world in over 200 countries.

This voluminous data is valuable in the right hands, bringing Foursquare Labs Inc. directly into the data-selling market. The company now uses Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Marketplace to sell its massive datasets.

“You can think about use cases, like ‘how can I improve the engagement with my app through location data?’ For example, Nextdoor is a customer of ours, and everyone knows Nextdoor,” said Lea Purcell (pictured). “When a new business comes online, they want to make sure that a business is a real business, so they use our data to ensure that the address of that business is accurate.”

Purcell spoke with theCUBE industry analyst John Furrier at the AWS Marketplace Seller Conference, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how companies might use the Foursquare’s data, how the Marketplace helps with selling its data, the future of data use and more. (* Disclosure below.)

Data is an emerging currency

With data rapidly becoming a valuable commodity, it’s important to understand why some companies would benefit greatly from Foursquare’s datasets. The company helps organizations improve business decisions or applications through location data.

“We know where places are and how people move through the world over time,” Purcell said. “We can tell you: ‘We’re sure that this is the Hilton in Bellevue. We know that. We know how many people are moving through here,’ and that’s our pitch.”

Whatever the procurers use the data for is completely up to them, and they are able to freely implement the datasets into their projects as they see fit, according to Purcell. With Amazon putting products out constantly in new regions, creating new Wavelengths, and adding new layers of connectivity, this raises questions about what the future of data will look like.

“We are keeping an eye on all that, and we haven’t quite figured out how we want to allocate resources against it,” Purcell said. “But it’s an interesting space to be in. I don’t think data’s going anywhere, and I think it’s going to grow, as well as how people use it.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Marketplace Seller Conference:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Marketplace Seller Conference. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE