Microsoft may invest in social-media maven Foursquare: Report

Bloomberg is reporting on August 29 that Microsoft is in "advanced" talks about making an investment of an unspecified amount in Foursquare Labs.

Microsoft officials are not commenting on the report.

Foursquare is a social-media company which enables users to check-in from various locations and post those check-ins on FaceBook, Twitter, and other apps and sites. In 2012, Microsoft announced that Bing was integrating  Foursquare data via the Bing Sidebar.

Microsoft has made a variety of investments in various tech companies over the years, some of which worked out well and some not so well (at least so far). In the "well" category, Microsoft invested $240 million in FaceBook back in 2007. In the not-so-well: Microsoft invested $300 million with Barnes & Noble in its Nook Media spinoff.

Just this week, the official tablet-optimized FourSquare app made it into the Windows Store.

A Foursquare investment could make sense for Microsoft, as the company has been working to beef up its social-networking portfolio in the last couple of years. The company bought enterprise social-networking vendor Yammer in July 2012 and has been integrating Yammer across a number of its products and services since then. Microsoft also has done work to improve the social-networking capabilities of its SharePoint family of product.