Location is the new black, but why do mobile apps need to have all the fun? Increasingly, location is getting baked into regular web pages as well. Today, Fwix is taking its hyperlocal places database and exposing it to web sites in a novel way. “Our goal is to index the Web by location,” says Fwix CEO Darian Shirazi.
With one line of Javascript through its new GeoTagger API, partner sites will be able to geotag their web pages. What that means is that Fwix will index the site and extract any places it finds. The first partner to roll this out will be NBC’s local sites such as NBC New York and NBC Bay Area. A Geotagger button on the page, which could be labeled “Places on this page,” will then create a places widget when someone clicks and hovers over it. It will show the names, addresses, and each place on a map. → Read More
With a fresh infusion of $4 million from Comcast Interactive Capital, which it raised recently in a series B financing (with previous investor BlueRun also pitching in), hyperlocal places database Fwix is pushing out a major upgrade to its developer API today. Fwix is creating an open database of places in partnership with Factual . Developers will be able to pull data about millions of places into their own apps, and edit the places as well by adding their own data or content.
Fwix started focusing on becoming more of a places database last year, but its API was clunky. Nevertheless, it served 20 million API calls in March, up from 11 million in February. Now with the new developer API, it will be easier to associate places with content such as news articles, Tweets, and check-ins. The API also includes an advertising layer which plugs into various mobile ad networks and geo-specific offers, including ones from Groupon, LivingSocial, YellowPages.com, and Gilt City. → Read More
Fwix is rolling out new versions of its iPhone and Android apps, which adds social geotagging to its hyperlocal places directory. As we’ve reported last Fall, Fwix originally launched as a hyperlocal news aggregator but has more recently been transitioning to a hyperlocal places directory, sort of a cross between AOL’s Patch and Google Places.
For neighborhoods, businesses and points of interest, Fwix It culls local data from 30,000 blogs and news feeds; status updates from Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, Google Buzz, and BrightKite; geo-tagged photos from Flickr, Smugmug, and Picassa; local deals from Groupon, LivingSocial, and MobileSpinach; events from Eventbrite, Eventful, Zvents, Stubhub, Ticketmaster, reviews from Yelp, Citysearch, OpenTable, Yahoo! Local, and Zagat; and government data from SpotCrime, FixMyStreet, and SeeClickFix. → Read More
For the past two years, Fwix has been building a hyperlocal news site for cities and neighborhoods around the country in a very automated fashion. Its homepage for every city has been three columns filled with recent news and blog headlines, along with other local data like weather (see second screenshot below). Today, it is scrapping that approach to become more of a hyperlocal places directory.
“We are automating Patch and building richer places pages and city pages,” says CEO Darian Shirazi. With everyone on the Web crazy for Geo and trying to tap into local commerce, places directories are becoming more valuable. (They are also better for SEO). Whereas AOL’s Patch is building out a directory of places in 500 small towns by hand, Fwix is creating an automated directory filled with maps, news feeds, events, photos, reviews, Tweets, status updates, and check-ins. → Read More
Fwix, a news site that offers a stream of hyperlocal, realtime news by location, is launching a new portal today that aims to give anyone a real time view of what’s happening in a location. You can access the new search portal here.
Fwix Local Trend Search allows users to search for anything that is happening at any geo-point. The search feature rounds up news, events, government data, business reviews, check-ins from Foursquare or Gowalla and more on a map of a given area. You can expand the sphere of location to show coverage from a greater area or a more localized location. For example, you could see all of the hyperlocal news from the city of San Francisco, but can then pinpoint the Mission neighborhood and see all of the most recent news relating to that given area. → Read More
Up until now, fwix has stuck to indexing and serving up hyperlocal news from neighborhood blogs and news sites. Its main competitor in that respect is Outside.in. But fwix is moving beyond local news to create a broader geo index via publisher widgets and its API.
In addition to its existing local news API (which is already being tested by the New York Times Co. and the UPI), fwix is adding geo-tagged status updates (from Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, and Brightkite), geo-photos (from Flickr, yfrog, Smugmug, and Twitpic), local events (from Eventbrite, Eventful, Upcoming, and Zvents), nearby reviews and restaurants (from Yelp and Citysearch), concerts (Songkick), local crime and government data, listings (Oodle, Trulia), and deals from local merchants (Groupon, Town Hog, and Living Social). A little map pops down you tell you where these places are. → Read More
Fwix, a news site that offers a stream of hyperlocal, realtime news by location, is tapping into Facebook’s recently launched Open Graph API to socialize content on its platform. As we wrote in our initial coverage of Facebook’s announcement of the API, it aims to add a layer of social connections and instant personalization based on people’s interests and “likes” on every single page on the Web.
Users on Fwix can now like any piece of content on the platform. And readers can customize news feeds for any level – by place, topic or Facebook friend – and then connect with others interested in the same topics. Other readers’ interests and comments that are similar to yours will also show up in your own news feed, as well as social interactions around news, suggested topics and more, aiming to create an ecosystem of real-time local and hyperlocal news. → Read More
The iPad is undoubtedly a compelling device for consuming media, whether it be reading a magazine, online news site, or a book. Fwix, a news site that offers a stream of hyperlocal, realtime news by location, is launching a free iPad app to allows users to access local news from their communities.
Fwix aggregates news articles and blog posts that are relevant to a certain region (the site now features support for over 80 cities in the United States and Canada). To do this, the Fwix team selects news sources and blogs that it thinks are related to each city, and also uses automated algorithms to determine when other content might also be relevant. Fwix has also recently tweaked its algorithm and offerings to include “nearby” local content features. So content on Fwix displays relationships between both topics and nearby location. For example, after reading a story about a robbery that took place in the Mission district of San Francisco, you’ll be able to find any other crime and or stories about the Mission neighborhood. → Read More
Fwix, a startup that offers a stream of local news that’s updated in real-time, has landed a deal with The New York Times Company to use Fwix’s hyper-local news wire across The New York Times Company’s Regional Media Group’s 15 newspapers, as well as other business units such as Boston.com and NYTimes.com.
Fwix, which launched its realtime API a few weeks ago, aggregates news articles and blog posts that are relevant to a certain region (the site now features support for over 80 cities in the United States and Canada). To do this, the Fwix team selects news sources and blogs that it thinks are related to each city, and also uses automated algorithms to determine when other content might also be relevant. Fwix has also recently tweaked its algorithm and offerings to include “nearby” local content features. So content on Fwix displays relationships between both topics and nearby location. For example, after reading a story about a robbery that took place in the Mission district of San Francisco, you’ll be able to find any other crime and or stories about the Mission neighborhood. → Read More
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
Fwix, a startup that offers a stream of local news that’s updated in real-time, is launching a new version of its API that is targeted towards hyper-local news. Last fall, the startup launched a ‘Wire’ API that allows third parties to integrate the company’s stream of news updates into their sites and apps. Today, Fwix is expanding its API to include hyperlocal news.
Fwix aggregates news articles and blog posts that are relevant to a certain region (the site now features support for over 80 cities in the United States and Canada). To do this, the Fwix team selects news sources and blogs that it thinks are related to each city, and also uses automated algorithms to determine when other content might also be relevant. Now, Fwix has tweaked its algorithm and offerings to include “nearby” local content features. So content on Fwix will display relationships between both topics and nearby location. For example, after reading a story about a robbery that took place in the Mission district of San Francisco, you’ll be able to find any other crime and or stories about the Mission neighborhood. → Read More
Fwix, a startup that offers a stream of local news that’s updated in real-time, has somewhat belatedly announced a $2.75 million funding round it closed last year, led by BlueRun Ventures. CEO Darian Shirazi says since closing the round last fall, the company still has the majority of the money left. Alongside today’s funding news, the company is also launching a new ‘Wire’ API that will allow third parties to integrate the company’s stream of news updates into their sites and apps.
The basic idea behind Fwix is fairly simple: it aggregates news articles and blog posts that are relevant to a certain region (the site now features support for over 80 cities in the United States and Canada). To do this, the Fwix team selects news sources and blogs that it thinks are related to each city, and also uses automated algorithms to determine when other content might also be relevant → Read More
Fwix, a social news site that skims through dozens of web services to generate a ‘News Feed’ for your city, has just released its free iPhone application (iTunes Link).
The application revolves around your ‘City Feed’, which offers an automated list of stories pulled from sources including local newspapers, blogs, and Yelp, to help users quickly find the most up-to-date news relevant to their region. Stories range from the hottest restaurant reviews and concerts to recent crime reports in the area, and are generally fairly relevant to your current location (though stories that seem pretty random do occasionally pop up). These feeds are also available on Fwix’s homepage, which launched last summer.
The application also brings a few entirely new features to the Fwix service. The first is the introduction of location-based checkins with friends (called ‘Neighbors’ by the app). The inclusion of the feature seems a bit odd at first – Fwix didn’t launch as a social network, and there a number of other services like Loopt and Brightkite that already have a huge head start in this space. → Read More
In the last year, we’ve covered well over a dozen activity aggregators, nearly all of which share a single goal: helping you keep track of your friends’ exploits across the web. Today, we see the launch of Fwix, an aggregator that is taking a (thankfully) different approach. Fwix isn’t concerned with your friends – instead, it keeps track of what’s going on in your physical region. The site pulls data from over 30 APIs including Yelp, Twitter, and Eventful, with more on the way. Every 15 minutes it combs through thousands of potential stories, using a series of algorithms to determine what the hottest items are in your city – it’s sort of like a regional News Feed. But Fwix doesn’t just bear a resemblance to Facebook’s News Feed in function – a quick tour around the site reveals that it’s nearly visually identical as well. This isn’t a coincidence: Darian Shirazi, one of the site’s co-founders, was an early Facebook employee who was involved with the News Feed project. The site is laid out well and is very intuitive. Users can browse through stories by their category (News, media, etc.), and can also choose to look at a regional or universal stream. And because there’s no login, the site could easily serve as a Digg alternative for users looking for a constant stream of new content to read (though I quickly began to wish it refreshed more often than once every 15 minutes). Fwix has potential, but it still lacks a number of key features. For one, there’s really no way to figure out why a given story is being displayed in the feed. This morning I was presented with a series of photos of a Renaissance fair, with no indication as to why this stream was considered popular. To remedy this, Fwix needs to include a descriptive measure of each item’s popularity (something along the lines of “there have been 3 blog posts and 5 tweets about this photo”). There’s also currently no way to select which APIs you’d like to draw data from, though the team says this is on the way. Fwix will see competition from a number of other activity streams (FriendFeed) and news aggregators (SocialMedian and Regator), but most of these do not consider location in their algorithms. CrunchBase Information Fwix Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
