At least according to the folks at custom badge site Osnapz, who have created a Foursquare brand leaderboard stack ranking the location based service’s many promiscuous partnerships in terms of follower count, with Zagat in the top slot at 48,136. For the uninitiated, the leaderboard is a glimpse into some of the more obscure Foursquare brand tie-ins and badges, some of them holdovers from earlier campaigns...

Foursquare may have a tenuous partnership with Facebook Places— but don’t let the Kumbaya presentation fool you, these frenemies are gunning for the ultimate mayorship and Dennis Crowley is feeling very confident. On Friday’s taping of Gillmor Gang with former TechCrunchIT Editor Steve Gillmor, Kevin Marks and John Taschek, Crowley discussed the opportunity for places, outlined his plan for the...

Editor’s note: Is the law of large numbers getting to Google? Innovation is hard, especially when a new idea needs to create billions of dollars in revenue for it to count. In the the following guest post, author and former venture capitalist Peter Sims talks about the challenges Google faces not to suffer the same fate as every other dominant tech company before it. Sims is co-author of True North:...

As we noted a couple days ago, the video Facebook made to explain their new Places feature was a bit Apple-esque. But something else they pulled off recently was even more Apple-esque: the secrecy surrounding their location launch. Sure, we spotted the code for it months ago when an overzealous engineer likely pushed the code (but not the actual feature) to the touch.facebook.com version of the site a bit early....

Glam Media, the top-ranked women’s media network, is honing in on another target: men. This morning the company is launching BrashSports, a new content channel that encompasses a network of more than 25 sports-related properties, including SportsFanLive and Bloguin. The launch comes on the heels of Glam’s acquisition of sports media ad network Sportgenic last week. That deal was for Sportgenic’s ...