Teenage son of VC gets very own Foursquare badge for North Pole check-in

Normally if you’re the teenage child of a multimillionaire, you might expect a nice car or designer clothing as a present.
But if you’re the 15-year-old scion of Bernard Liautaud, who founded and later sold Business Objects to SAP for $6.78 billion and is now a partner at Balderton Capital, you can probably do a lot better.
Parker Liautaud, his Eton-educated son, is getting his very own Foursquare badge for checking into the North Pole this week.
Liautaud rounded up a sponsorship from GE for a trip to the North Pole promoting environmental awareness. He has is very own Facebook application and Page, Flickr stream, YouTube channel and Twitter feed to pull others along and is traveling with Doug Stoup, a longtime Arctic and Antarctic expedition leader whose sponsorship marketing page says “the benefits of aligning your brand with Doug Stoup are priceless.”
The teenager is asking people to tag themselves in his photos as part of a ‘visual petition,’ ‘donate’ their Facebook status or submit a video talking about how they’re reducing their carbon footprint. The goal is to collect pledges and videos to show off at United Nations world conference in Germany next month.
It’s definitely a noteworthy goal, and we can’t help but admire how far the youngster’s connections have taken him.

Companies: Foursquare
People: Bernard Liautaud, Parker Liautaud