TechCrunch interviewed Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley a couple of weeks ago during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona (referenced here). It was his third time visiting and speaking at the event, and perhaps Foursquare’s most engaged visit of all in terms of going there: Crowley says that, all told, he met with 33 different companies this time around. It’s a sign of how the company is looking for… → Read More
Google’s location-based Field Trip application has just made its way to the iTunes App Store today, after previously having been Android-only. The app, which works a little bit like Google Now, runs in the background on your phone then automatically shows you information about nearby businesses, including places to shop, dine, and be entertained. → Read More
Y Combinator company Glassmap, a location-aware app that was big back in the day (last year), has just announced that is has been acquired by Groupon. A representative from Groupon has confirmed to TechCrunch that the company has indeed acquired Glassmap and is ”excited to bring the team aboard.” This makes total sense, because Groupon needs to know where you are, who you’re… → Read More
Spindle, an app that aids with social discovery, has just launched its latest version for iOS. It not only helps you explore the areas around you, it will be a great place for businesses to promote themselves and where they live on social networks like Twitter.
The company has also raised a $2.3 million round of funding from an impressive list of investors: Polaris Ventures, Greylock Partners… → Read More
TomTom has launched a location-based services platform and developer portal. The company supplies maps to some big names in the mobile space, including Apple, but is aiming to make it easier for developers of all shapes and sizes to contribute to its coffers. → Read More
Glympse, the location-sharing app which first debuted back in 2009, is still hanging in there. The app arrived at a time when its competitors were the original, location-based social networks such as Loopt and Brightkite, now long gone. But Glympse survived – and today, it’s getting a revamp. The company, which has slowly grown its install base to 3 million users, is updating its mobile apps on… → Read More
As I’ve said before, I’m an avid user of foursquare, and it has become the de facto service for me when it comes to finding new places to grab dinner or just chill out with a drink. I’ve been using the service since it launched in 2009, and I’ve found it to be a fun way to chronicle the vast world that I live in. One day, I will be able to show my kids the history of check-ins and information that… → Read More
Google just launched Fieldtrip, a new location-based app that, as the company says, is meant to be “your guide to the cool, hidden, and unique things in the world around you.” Just like Google Now shows you location-based information on Android 4.1, Fieldtripper runs in the background and will automatically show you a card with relevant information as you walk around. The app, says Google, “can… → Read More
Foursquare wants you to keep in touch with your friends, so it has released a new notification setting for the system. → Read More
Factual is a company that provides open data sets for developers, most notably its location data sets and APIs. The company just announced that it has added thousands of new locations to its U.S. point of interest sets, for a total of over 22 million places in the U.S and 62 million places around the world. → Read More
“The best and the worst of everything” app Amen, which lets users make simple votes on straightforward statements — “amen” and “hell no” being the operative words – has now amassed one million Amens (votes) from its users, says the startup. And now that it’s picking up significant amounts of crowdsourced data and traction around the best places to eat, visit and other tips, the developers are… → Read More
Amazon’s Kindle Fire is one of the most popular Android-powered tablets, but it doesn’t feature a GPS chip. Given how important location-based services have become, that’s a bit of a drawback for many developers and quite a few apps that want to access location features on Amazon’s tablet actually crash. To avoid these issues, Kayak teamed up with Skyhook to provide location services for its… → Read More
Geoloqi, the Portland, Ore.-based location platform, today announced that it is partnering with the popular mobile app development platform Appcelerator. Thanks to this partnership, Geoloqi is now available to the 1.6 million iOS and Android developers who have signed up for Appcelerator’s Titanium 2.0 platform. With this, Appcelerator developers can now easily create location-based apps on the… → Read More
EchoEcho is one of the more useful location-based applications on the market today. Instead of focusing on check-ins and deals, the application simply makes it easy for you to find out where your friends are and lets you set up a meeting with them. Last September, EchoEcho raised $750,000 from Google Ventures, UK-based venture firm PROfounders and Don Dodge. The company just told us that it has… → Read More
Palo Alto-based Who’s Near Me Live, abbreviated as WNM Live, is a two-year-old company that’s found moderate success by launching first on Windows Mobile and Windows Phone, before porting its mobile app to the iPhone, where it arrives today with a more limited feature set. The service, essentially a location-based chat similar in some respects to the newly acquired Yobongo, now boasts 400,000… → Read More
With the number of apps growing by the day, companies offering analytics on how they are performing have taken on a new focus, and the recent acquisition of Chomp by Apple has put the area positively on the map. Now a company is emerging, Placed, that is zoning in on one area of app analytics in particular: location. Formerly known as Sewichi, today Placed is coming out of stealth mode with a… → Read More
It’s turning into a battle of apps at SXSW – the sheer number of location-based networking apps hoping to emerge from the conference as this year’s breakout hit is nearly overwhelming. What’s worse, the apps are often so similar in nature, it’s hard to discern the advantages of one over another.
Is the app for business networking or making new friends? Does it use check-in data from other… → Read More
Geoloqi, a name you may know because of the mobile app that once provided automatic Foursquare check-ins and geofenced reminders, is today launching its next-generation location platform as an SDK. Although previously available in API format for developers’ use, the new iOS and Android SDK makes it even easier for developers to drop in location services into their apps, whether those are… → Read More
YC-backed Glassmap is a new mobile application publicly launching today that presents a viable challenge to realtime, location-sharing apps like Apple’s Find My Friends or Google Latitude. Where those two competitors focus on enabling social experiences on top of their own platforms or ecosystems, Glassmap is enabling a third alternative: realtime location tracking built on top of Facebook’s… → Read More
As Semil showed back in November, social travel sites are all the rage these days among the entrepreneurs, offering plenty of interesting approaches to offering recommendations on where and how to travel. You may not have heard of HipGeo, but if you’re a traveler, this is something that will likely pique your curiosity. HipGeo has developed a location-aware platform that records and displays the… → Read More
Dropost.it is a clever little service that allows you to drop gifts for friends which are geo-tagged to specific locations. These gifts, which you can think of as virtual gift cards purchased via the Dropost.it service, can only be accessed when the recipient visits a specifc location. Initially, the service works over PayPal, but the company is working towards deeper integration with mobile… → Read More
Open data platform Factual.com is launching a new API for developers of location-based services called Resolve. The API is an entity resolution API that makes partial records complete, matches entities against one other and assists in the process of de-duping and normalizing datasets.
What this means is that developers can simply tell Factual what they know about an entity (i.e., a venue in a… → Read More
Location Labs, a location-as-a-service provider and makers of mobile parental control utility Safely, is today announcing the acquisition of two companies in the mobile space, Wirkle and Volly. Wirkle, a mobile product development firm, and group messaging company Volly will bring their product portfolios, IP and team to Location Labs as a part of their respective deals.
Although the terms of… → Read More
There’s a new concept for social networking services taking root, and it’s not about re-creating your offline social graph on the Web, like Facebook does today. It’s about discovering the people who are nearby you now – the ones you probably would like to meet.
This type of discovery mechanism is already being made possible by a number of services, including the checkin apps like Foursquare… → Read More
Mobile devices are shifting many individual computing behaviors, perhaps none more significant than how we search for and receive information. Right now, it’s moving at warp speed. In between the time I finish this draft and its posted, it’s entirely possible another company or service launches in this space. Every time we “swipe open” our mobile devices, we seek out dopamine hits from receiving… → Read More
In my previous post about Mobli, I claimed it would be the break-out photo sharing app of the year. I went to say that like Instagram, it has something special in between the pixels. I backed that up with a starting figure — users were spending an average of 33 minutes on the site. (The latest stat the company shared with me is that on average, there are 3.4 pictures added per user per… → Read More
Microsoft has set out a pretty lofty goal for whomever applies to their latest job listing — they want some deeply technical people who, among other things, will help “find the location of every Windows Phone device in the world.”
Useful location-based services like “Find My Phone” and Bing Maps have been baked into Windows Phone 7 since day one, but Microsoft seems to have something slightly… → Read More
Six-week old mobile application Banjo has been updated with a new feature that lets users virtually stalk locations, and the people there, in real-time. Banjo, for those unaware, is a new social discovery service which reveals the social network present at any given location at a particular time. To be clear, it’s not another social network, it’s a layer on top of social networks. With Banjo, you… → Read More
Your iPhone tracks you everywhere you go, and so do most phones these days. You knew that already. The reason this is a big story now is because it turns out that for the past 10 months Apple has been keeping your location data on a file in your iPhone itself where someone who knows how to get it, and has possession of your phone, could find it and figure out where you’ve been. For most people… → Read More
When disasters of scale happen, like the massive 9.0-magnitude earthquake that struck Japan and sent tsunamis rippling across the globe last month, one of our first reactions is to immediately try to establish contact with those we care about who might have been affected. By phone or by email, by whatever means possible, we scramble to get in touch.
Of course, natural disasters often wreak havoc… → Read More
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