ReadWriteWeb

Foursquare, about to celebrate its third birthday, is big but not huge. It has signed up 15 million users, hired over 100 employees and now boasts several million check-ins per day. That is impressive work for three years, but it must keep growing.

To do so, Foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley says the company is in the process of redesigning its mobile app for a broader audience, disassembling it and trying to put its features back together in a way that's more useful and interesting. It has also launched new features on its Web site, such as the neat and powerful "Explore" tool, which can help you find cool places to visit in your neighborhood or in an entirely new city.

As Twitter realized a few years ago, Crowley says Foursquare is seeing a big chunk of its growth from people who want to use parts of Foursquare, but not necessarily broadcast to the world. That means building a service that's useful to more casual users, and not just early Foursquare diehards.

I recently sat down with Crowley at the company's brand new, roomy headquarters in New York City, for an idea of what's next. Here's a lightly edited transcript of our chat.

The rise of the app store has fundamentally changed the concept of software delivery. Gone are the days when zealous software companies sent users discs in the mail (oh, AOL, we remember you well) that ended up making better coasters than promotion. Many computers these days do not even ship with a CD-ROM drive and smartphones have never seen any type of physical downloads. The delivery mechanism of the application store is an often-overlooked revolution of the mobile era.

A Croatian startup named ShoutEm that provides a platform for iOS and Android app creation created a timeline infographic of the history of the mobile app store. Starting in 2008 with the advent of Apple's App Store, the game has fundamentally changed. Check it out below.

If you need remote access to your desktop from your iOS phone or tablet, now you can get there for free. Starting today, LogMeIn has a new app in the Apple App Store and it is free. This replaces their low-end Ignition app that they previously charged $30 for. It doesn't give you everything that the current paid app provides, such as file management and cloud storage and HD video/audio streaming. But if you just need remote access, then the free app will do quite nicely. You of course need to run the free version (or the paid version) of LogMeIn on your Windows or Mac desktop, and set up an account online with them to complete the connection.

What I like about LogMeIn is how they are upstanding guys. If you put down your money in the past for Ignition, you will be grandfathered in and have the premium features forever. They are planning on an Android app next year, naturally. The Pro version is $40 a year.

"Big Data" is a hot topic these days, but there hasn't been a lot of discussion about the specifics of what will most likely be one of the biggest sources of data: newly web-connected devices in the home and workplace.

I spoke this week with Bill Zujewski, Executive Vice President of Product Strategy & Marketing at M2M (machine to machine) platform company Axeda. Axeda is one of the most successful companies to date in the early M2M market and whenever I get a chance to speak with Zujewski, I ask him for as many real-world use cases for M2M connectivity as I can. The company's examples are fascinating, this time about M2M-produced big data used in the cloud.

Google has taken an important first step towards finalizing its acquisition of Motorola Mobility. Today the European Commission, the European Union's version of the Federal Trade Commission, approved the merger. The commission granted the approval, "mainly because it would not significantly modify the market situation in respect of operating systems and patents for these devices."

The rest of the regulatory chips should fall in line for Google and Motorola after E.U. approval. The merger still needs to be approved in the U.S., China, Israel and Taiwan, but the logic of the European Commission is sound. Motorola only took 2% of profits from the entire mobile industry last year. From an anti-trust perspective, Google could buy Sony Ericsson and LG and still not come anywhere near the combined market share of Samsung and Apple.

Update: The U.S. Department of Justice has also approved the acquisition. See below for details.

Whether you think the protestors camping out in various city parks around the world is justified or not, it is interesting to see this analysis published in Technology Review today. They used a tool from SocialFlow that examined a pile of Twitter data. Did you know the first use of their hashtag was in a July 13 Adbusters blog post?