{"id":518502,"date":"2010-04-06T21:26:02","date_gmt":"2010-04-07T01:26:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=111173"},"modified":"2010-04-06T21:26:02","modified_gmt":"2010-04-07T01:26:02","slug":"teenager-heads-to-north-pole-to-check-in-with-foursquare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/518502","title":{"rendered":"Teenager Heads to North Pole to Check In With Foursquare"},"content":{"rendered":"

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You think you’ve gone out of your way to earn a Foursquare badge? Not as far as Parker Liautaud, who hopes to be the first to check in at the North Pole<\/a> using the mobile social network later this month, which will earn him the specially-created Last Degree badge (pictured below). Oh, and he’s 15 years old, which will also make him one of the youngest explorers ever to ski to the North Pole. Parker, who was born in California but goes to school at the prestigious Eton College in England, is trying to raise awareness about<\/a> and funds for environmental issues facing the Arctic. His expedition is being sponsored by General Electric.<\/p>\n

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Although Parker’s willpower and determination is not in question (he is also accompanied by experienced Arctic explorer Doug Stoup<\/a>), mounting such a resource-intensive expedition is probably helped by the fact that his father is Bernard Liautaud, who co-founded Business Objects<\/a> and later sold the company to SAP in 2007 for almost $7 billion. Parker has a Facebook page set up for his quest<\/a>, where he has been posting videos, and fans can also sign a petition that the young adventurer hopes to present to world leaders or they can record and upload a video expressing their thoughts about the environment. Parker also has a YouTube channel<\/a> and is on Twitter<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Embedded below is a video of Parker talking about the expedition and the various kinds of cold-weather gear and equipment he has to pack into his sled.<\/p>\n

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Post and thumbnail photos courtesy<\/a> of Beverly & Pack<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You think you’ve gone out of your way to earn a Foursquare badge? Not as far as Parker Liautaud, who hopes to be the first to check in at the North Pole using the mobile social network later this month, which will earn him the specially-created Last Degree badge (pictured below). Oh, and he’s 15 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2260,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-518502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2260"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=518502"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518502\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=518502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=518502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=518502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}