DEMO: Footfeed aims to soothe consumers’ check-in fatigue

Footfeed is one of 70 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2010 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Location-based check-in services like Foursquare are increasingly becoming a problem for both users and businesses. Users are now facing multiple services to check in with, and businesses need an easy way to integrate multiple services into their products.

Los Angeles, Calif.-based Footfeed has a solution for our collective check-in woes: Its service lets users check in to multiple location-based services at once, and allows businesses to create a multi-check-in network of their own or integrate Footfeed’s service into an existing product. Footfeed supports check-ins to Foursquare, Brightkite, Gowalla, Facebook, Twitter, and Google Latitude.

The company says it has built an advanced location-mapping system that can send locations to multiple check-in services with a single user ID. As part of the 2.0 version of its software, which the company is exclusively showing at the DEMO Fall 2010 conference in Silicon Valley, Footfeed is launching a crowdsourced system called “select-and-match” which will let users manually match locations upon check-in. The new version will also be able to aggregate deals and tips from multiple services.

Check.in, another multiple check-in service, is Footfeed’s only major competitor thus far. It’s developed by Brightkite, itself a well-known check-in service. Footfeed believes it has an advantage in that Check.in is a Web-only application and doesn’t offer businesses the ability to integrate multi-check-in functionality.

The company has seen over 2,000 users sign up for its service after it began beta testing in June, and those users collectively check in an average of 1,200 times a day. Footfeed recently signed a deal with Renaissance Hotels to integrate its multi-check-in service into an upcoming app, and it says its in talks with “over a dozen major brands” for future deals.

Footfeed is bootstrapped by its founders, and remains entirely self-funded so far. It’s currently seeking to raise a seed round of $500,000.

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