Use your Foursquare Places Premium key with SignalGuard to enrich the places signal with sharper POI taxonomy — particularly better bar, nightlife, and venue categorization than the default catalog path.
What Foursquare Places adds to SignalGuard
The places signal lives in SignalGuard's Context pillar — one of the 50+ signals shaping the venue threat score. It quantifies what's around the venue: bars, nightlife, transit, restaurants, hotels. That catchment context affects post-event dispersal, alcohol-related risk, and crowd-density expectations.
Foursquare's taxonomy is notably richer than Google Places for venue-relevant categories. Nightlife specifically — bars, clubs, late-night venues — is categorized at finer granularity, and the data is more current in many markets. For SignalGuard, that means more accurate catchment scoring around stadiums and arenas, especially in entertainment districts.
Foursquare's BYOK path also unlocks higher-volume queries, which matters when SignalGuard runs catchment sweeps across multiple venues or extended event series.
How the integration works
Paste your Foursquare Service API Key into the Foursquare tile at /integrations. SignalGuard validates it with a one-result Places search, then stores it AES-256-GCM encrypted at rest. All requests run server-side using Foursquare's required version header.
Common use cases
- Stadium and arena catchment analysis with detailed nightlife categorization
- Post-event dispersal modeling for entertainment-district venues
- Alcohol-related risk weighting based on bar/club density around the venue
- Hotel-cluster identification for VIP and touring-talent logistics
- Transit-node mapping for ingress/egress planning
- Competing-venue identification within a primary catchment radius
What you need
A Foursquare Developer account at foursquare.com/developers. The free tier covers 50K calls/month; Premium plans start at $599/mo with richer attributes and higher quotas. Generate a Service API Key in your project's Service Keys section.
FAQ
Do I need a Foursquare subscription? No — the places signal works through SignalGuard's default catalog path. Foursquare Premium upgrades taxonomy granularity and query volume.
Where do I add my key? In your SignalGuard workspace at /integrations. Open the Foursquare tile and paste your Service API Key.
Is my key secure? Yes. Keys are AES-256-GCM encrypted at rest and only decrypted in server memory at request time. Nothing is exposed to the browser.
Connect Foursquare Places
Connect Foursquare in your SignalGuard workspace → and review the signal docs for how places feeds Context.