Mor Naaman suggesting that Apple should buy both Square and Foursquare:

To summarize: after the deal, Apple will immediately become a giant payments company, with an installation base that is expected to encompass half of all mobile devices sold. The company will have the best local search abilities, far exceeding any existing recommendation engine. And due to its enormous reach, it will possess a payment system that merchants will line up to support. Who’s betting against this holy trinity? Not me.

I find it hard to believe. I can see how it makes sense for Apple to enter the payment business, but I don’t think they need to acquire Square to do so. Apple has the credit card info from over 200 million people, they have experience in managing payments (iTunes and the different AppStores) plus they have millions of devices in the wild already. I guess they have enough talented engineers and designers to work on such a system rather than paying $4 billion for Square.

Now regarding Foursquare, what’s the point? They could offer recommendations with a Square-like service anyway. Plus, isn’t Foursquare a niche service? Most of the people I know use Facebook to check-in nowadays.