[Germany] Ah, the Appstore approval process. It can destroy the news cycle. A week ago, our “Dear Leader” Mike Butcher started to ask startups on several occasions to come up with a worthy Foursquare competitor from Europe. Two days ago, I heard from a German company who said they might fit the bill. Dailyplaces sent a press release with Friday as release date. But when we fire up iTunes to install their app, what do we find? Nothing.
CEO Andreas Ebert says Apple still hasn’t approved Dailyplaces for the iPhone, although the app was submitted 4 weeks ago and approval normally takes only 14 days. But you know what? Screw Apple! We’ll tell you about it anyway.
Dailyplaces on iPhone.
Dailyplaces combines features of location based review sites like Yelp or Qype, where members evaluate bars, stores, doctors or sports clubs. It also works with photos and allows business owners to open and advertise their own locations.
The pitch of Dailyplaces is centered in their so called Points of Interest (POI). Here’s their pitch:
Share your world with dailyplaces:
With the dailyplaces-iPhone application you are able to capture all moments in your life with the dedicated locations either to save it for private purposes or to share it with other dailyplaces-users. With only few clicks you can create your individual POIs with a photo and a short description.
Whether you want to recommend a restaurant just around the corner, to remember the parking lot of your car, to share a beautiful outlook during hiking or just to present a funny or intersting moment of your life – You can use the dailyplaces-application to save all kind of those location-based information with just a few clicks.
All POIs will be published at the individual daiyplaces-website of the user and are available for other internet or mobile users as well. All POIs can be send to the Twitter-network to also communicate with the followers. POIs of other users can be commented and users are able to search for followers within the dailyplaces-network. The POIs of those followers will have a dedicated area within the application.
Feature overview:
- create POIs with a dedicated position
- add photos and description to the POI
- save POIs at the individual website
- administrate POIs including status (private / public)
- show POis at the map
- search for POis nearby
- search for latest POIs
- comment POIs
- identify other users as “follower”
- search POIs of your “followers”der POIs der “Freunde”
This doesn’t have the gaming element of Foursquare or Gowalla, no mayors to overthrow and no badges to earn. But the feature list is longer.
Every user can get their own webpage like USERNAME.dailyplaces.net and customize it with photos and profile information. The page shows all the user’s POI and makes these recommendations searchable for others. Already existing locations, that have been created by others, can get timeline updates from every Dailyplaces user. That’s especially handy for Saturday night: Clubbers can check out parties in realtime on their iPhone and see where the crowd is at that very moment. Party photos are uploaded straight from the iPhone.
The integration with Twitter is very deep. Every public update gets published as a Tweet that contains the corresponding location in a special shortlink like http://dlpc.es/4xb for Zurich or http://dlpc.es/p7b for the famous Boticelli exhibition in Frankfurt’s Städel Museum. More examples are here. If you post from your iPhone, the Dailyplaces app leverages GPS to automatically add your comment to the right POI near your location. Of course you can also tap another point on the map to update it.
Every photo and every message from the Dailyplaces website or iPhone app gets tagged with geodata, so you can see its location in advanced Twitter software like Seesmic. Of course it’s also possible to search on the iPhone for POI near your location or to show only the newest ones. Other people’s POI can receive your comments and you can follow interesting users’ updates like you already know it from Twitter.
That is, if you have the app – which no-one does right now. So we’ll have to get back to you when Apple releases the app…