Yahoo has reportedly begun acquisition talks with the Microsoft and O'Reilly Media-backed location discovery service, which has raised almost $190m.

Internet company Yahoo has entered talks to acquire Foursquare, the US-based services search app backed by software company Microsoft and media company O’Reilly Media, for about $900m, TechCrunch reported yesterday.

Founded in 2009, Foursquare operates a search, discovery and recommendation app for local services. Its key feature was a tool that enabled users to publicly ‘check in’ to a place they had visited using their mobile device, though the feature was spun off into a separate app called Swarm in…