As I’ve made abundantly clear over the past several days, just about every service that has anything to do with location is launching something at the SXSW festival which starts tomorrow in Austin, Texas. Don’t believe me, here’s a small sampling (Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Whrrl, Plancast, Brizzly, Twitter). So, how are you going to wrap your head around all this location data? SimpleGeo has an awesome way.
Vicarious.ly is a real-time location-based stream of information presented in a nice visual way. While the plan is to eventually launch one for many different cities around the U.S. and eventually the world, the first one is based around Austin, for SXSW. To make it, SimpleGeo partnered with BlockChalk, Brightkite, Bump Technologies, Flickr, Fwix, Foursquare, Gowalla, and Twitter to pull all of their location data and place it both in a constantly-updating stream, and put data points on a Google Map at the top of the page. These data points are represented by the logos of the various companies, so it’s easy to follow visually. → Read More
It looks like another Delicious key architect is migrating to the new location-based startup BlockChalk. The latest is Josh Whiting, who was formerly a lead engineer at Delicious for three and a half years (he was actually one of the first members of the team before they were acquired by Yahoo,. we’re told) before he left that role to become a senior engineer for Craigslist. Whiting joins former colleague, Stephen Hood, who was the product lead at Delicious before starting BlockChalk with Dave Baggeroer of Stanford’s Institute of Design.
Along with his title of co-founder, Whiting will be BlockChalk’s chief engineer. The location space continues to be red hot right now, and BlockChalk has a compelling, yet simple product. It’s a mobile app that lets you adds notes to the real world by pinning them to any location. Hood notes that in the past few weeks alone, they’ve doubled traffic and users, and are now available in 111 countries, 8217 cities, and nearly 13,000 neighborhoods all over the world. → Read More
With its new geolocation API, Twitter has the potential to delve into the realm of messages that are relevant based on location. But right now, most geotagged tweets are simply regular tweets that are being tagged with location, and really don’t have much specifically to do with it. Enter BlockChalk, a new service built around the idea of leaving simple messages directly tied to a specific location.
The service, created by Stephen Hood, the former product team lead for Delicious, and Dave Baggeroer of Stanford’s Institute of Design, works because they keep it simple. You load up the application on your mobile device, it locates you, and you leave a message. This can be whatever you want: A note about a good cafe, a tip of something in the neighborhood to watch out for, a request to borrow something that someone else may have in the neighborhood, etc. When other people also using the app come upon the area that you’ve pinned your “Chalk” (their word for message) to, they’ll see it on their screen in a stream of Chalks. → Read More
