There are no shortage of whispers out there right now as to what Facebook’s plans for location are. With rival Twitter having recently announced its geolocation API, the pressure is on the larger network to deliver something. Tomorrow will bring a step in that direction, as Nokia will announce a new service at its Nokia World event that will utilize location within Facebook, we’ve learned.
Now, to be clear, this is not Facebook officially getting into the game itself yet, but it’s big enough that Henri Moissinac, Facebook’s director of mobile, will apparently be using his keynote address at Nokia World to unveil this, we’ve heard.
The app looks to be a direct result of the Nokia purchase of the location-based social network Plazes, in the summer of 2008. As you can see in the screenshot below, an Ovi Map (Nokia’s map property) will reside inside of Facebook and show where you are. It can also update your Facebook status with your location, and a link to it on one of these maps. → Read More
We all know how tagging makes the Web a richer place (by tapping into people’s desire to categorize things and share those categories, ad-hoc though they may be, with the everyone else). Tagging brings a bottoms-up order to the Web by making information more searchable and thus easier to find. Now it is time to start tagging the world. The real world.
In fact, millions of people are already doing so every time they upload a geo-coded photo to Flickr, add a review to Yelp, Tweet about a specific place, or use any of the dozens of geo-aware social apps springing up all over the place. They are not just tagging the world with keywords, they are commenting on it and annotating it in tiny little bursts.
Geo-coded communications are becoming more and more common, and this is just the start. I like to complain about the increased noise level that lifestreaming services are bringing into our lives. While that continues to be a growing problem on an individual basis for people who want to tune in and use these services (“You’re at the bus stop? Great. Keep those Tweets coming.”), on an aggregate level all the seemingly useless drivel has the potential to become useful meta-data. → Read More
Fresh out of Nokia Beta Labs comes Friend View, an experimental location and micro-blogging service which works both on mobile phones as well as on the web.
To show your location, the Friend View application is using the built-in GPS or the network if there is no signal available (you can also set your location manually). When you turn on Friend View, it locates you as an avatar on a map and shows you all your friends as well. Whenever you send a micro-message, it appears as a word balloon on the map, and you can get a quick overview of what’s going on with your friends with the ‘What’s Up’ feature. → Read More
Berlin, Germany based Plazes, a location based social network (and one of the first startups we ever wrote about here on TechCrunch, back in 2005), has been acquired by Finland-based Nokia, the companies are announcing today. The price is not being disclosed. We most recently wrote about Plazes new iPhone application in May 2008, which will take advantage of the cutting edge location technologies available on the phone (cell triangulation and GPS). The company has raised a total of €3.7 million in venture financing over two round, although the last round was closed in February 2007. This is the second “mobile social network” in Europe to be acquired in as many months – Danish startup ZYB was acquired by Vodafone in May for €31.5 million. Co-founder Felix Petersen told me in a hastily scheduled phone call that the company will maintain its Berlin office and all thirteen employees. The Plazes product will become Nokia’s Services & Software unit. In 2006 Nokia acquired Berlin based Gate5 for a rumored $250 million and turned the product into Nokia Maps, which is deployed in 300 markets. Petersen says the success of that acquisition gave Plazes a lot of comfort in working with Nokia. As a funny aside, a year ago Petersen was busted by his own product as he avoided one conference to attend another. Update: by Mike Butcher, TechCrunch UK: My industry sources are telling me that this was a smart acquisition for Nokia, which needed to have a consumer based offering outside the rigid maps infrastructure they have, since the purchase last year of Navteq. There is also a local story here. The Plazes office is in Berlin, physically close to the Gate 5 people, and we know from good authority that Gate 5 people are highly respected on the Berlin scene. It’s therefore likely that they had a lot to do with the acquisition thinking inside Nokia as they know the guys from Plazes. From what we know about Nokia, the purchase of Plazes fits in with their strategy in terms of context and location and what to do with it. Put together the Ad system they have, and they control a strong section of the mobile ecosystem from ad generation, delivery through branded channels, with good profile information about the user, especially since most new handsets from Nokia now have GPS built in. CrunchBase Information Plazes Nokia Information provided → Read More
Today Plazes CEO Felix Petersen gave us a peek at iPlazer, the upcoming iPhone client for the geo-tagging social networking site. The app will be available when Apple’s official App Store launches in mid June. Plazes has been around for a while – it was one of the first companies to be covered on TechCrunch. Since then it has switched gears a couple of times, but it’s best described as Twitter with geotagging, points of interest, and social networking features. Right now iPlazer seems like a combination of Twitter and Dopplr. The phone detects the user’s location through the iPhone API, then presents the user with a number of suggested descriptions (for example, opening Plazes from our office presented us with choices of “TechCrunch HQ” and “The Mansion”, both of which were assigned to the coordinates by previous visitors). After choosing a location label, the user is prompted to send “activity” messages to their friends (it’s basically a tweet tagged with location information). These activity messages are compared by the server, and Plazes notifies you if you’re in the same neighborhood as one of your friends. You can get a feel for the app in the screencast below. Plazes is also launching a new version of their main site, which will enter private beta next week. Most notable about the launch is the introduction of Twitter integration, which is strange because Plazes seems to mimic Twitter in some ways. For the time being Plazes stands to gain by allowing Twitter users to send geo-tagged tweets, but things may work out differently in the long term. The new version of the site also introduces a Dopplr-esque nearby friend notification system and support for iCal integration. You can request an invite here. Readers may remember Felix Petersen as the guy who got busted by his own product. Petersen backed out of a speaking gig at a conference, telling them that one of his kids was sick, then proceeded to party at a different event (while Plazes told the world). The whole thing was overblown, but it was amusing nonetheless. CrunchBase Information Plazes Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
The Next Web Conference was held in Amsterdam last Friday (June 1). The organizers had a last minute speaker back-out: Plazes CEO Felix Petersen emailed them the day before the conference to say that he couldn’t make it because they were dealing with bugs on their new product, and that his “9 month old daughter has become sick.” The problem, though, is that Peterson didn’t stay home to work on their product and take care of his daughter. He was actually attending a competing conference, Reboot, in Copenhagen. How was this discovered? The Next Web guys used Petersen’s own Plazes, a service which shows where users are at any given time. Peterson’s Plazes account clearly showed him in Copenhagen at Reboot on June 1, drinking wine and beer, listening to music, and enjoying “incredible conversations.” “Reboot just rocks,” he writes. Needless to say the Next Web guys were somewhat offended. And they outed Peterson in a big way today. Next Web co-founder Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten wrote about the whole incident on his personal blog. He writes: Ok, Reboot seems to rock after some dinner, beer and wine. Great. The amazing thing is not that Felix would rather go to Reboot. I respect that. The amazing thing is that someone would lie about the health of his children to be able to drink beer at another conference and then assume that no one would find out. I have an email in to Peterson for his side of the story. No word back yet. Update: Felix Petersen writes: I must say I´m really confused by the commotion. My kid was sick on Tursday and it wasn´t entirely clear wether I could attend thenextweb the next day. In addition did we have some issues with the new Plazer (http://blog.plazes.com/?p=157#comments) and Stefan, my co-founder was coming to Reboot on Friday. So for professional and personal issues I decided to cancel since I wasn´t sure at that point that I could make it. Boris forgot to mention the last part of my email: “And to be fair to you guys I rather cancel now than trying until the last minute and then not being able to come afterall.” So I can´t really see what the commotion is about. Best, Felix I actually don’t care that much about the specifics – I think it’s fascinating that Plazes can and is being used to check up → Read More
Plazes, headquartered in Zurich and Berlin, is a social community that connects you and your friends to the places you spend your time. They’ve been around for a while (we profiled Plazes on the day TechCrunch launched in June 2005), and they recently raised €2.7 million in a venture round. Plazes lets users tell others where they are and what they are up to. Currently, users have to download software which auto-determines user location based on IP address, network IDs from routers and other information and then places you on the Plazes map. If it was a location no Plazes member had visited before, you could name and describe the place and add Flickr photos. As good as Plazes was, the friction from requiring users to download software and use it whenever they changed location created friction and slowed user growth. Taking pointers from the simplicity of Twitter, Plazes is changing the way it handles location, and is also adding time and activity dimensions to the product. The new features roll out next week. The client software will no longer be required to set location. Instead, users can simply add a place via a Google maps mashup (and are helped along the way with a suggestion mechanism), and can also say whether they were there in the past, will be there in the future, or are there currently. Users can also say what they are up to, a very Twitter-like activity. Users can give Plazes this data via the Plazes website, the client software or by texting it in via a mobile device. An instant messaging interface is coming soon. The new version will also preserve a user’s update history and allow them to post locations for the future, allowing you to plan, or chance encounters. The timeline will also allow your friends to get a comprehensive look at where and when you hang out. Friends can subscribe to people or places and see a data stream from that source. Groups can also be formed that include both people and places, and the feed information shows what those people are up to when they are at selected locations. 250 of Plazes 50,000 members will get access to the update before next week. Plazes draws a crowd that is 60% from the U.S., with the remaining mostly European. Plazes is clearly trying to lower the participation hurdles to get more users → Read More
Last week we reported on Frazr, one of Germany’s many Twitter clones (if you’re eager for more side-by-side comparisons, see Sloggen, Wamadu, Faybl or 1you, which all launched in March or April). Frazr is symptomatic for the state of Web 2.0 in Germany and to get a better understanding for the many international developments, this post starts a series of regional profiles on Web 2.0 around the world. I’ll start the tour with a closer look at Germany, home to Europe’s largest population of internet broadband users. Hype vs. Hesitate Just as this week’s Pew Internet Study stirred a debate on the view of Web 2.0 in the US, Germany has seen similar arguments on the size of the phenomenon locally. For a long time, several indicators had hinted that Germany was falling behind in broadband penetration compared to other European countries like Sweden or Norway. But a recent OECD study painted a very different picture: looking at the total number of households (as opposed to per-capita penetration), Germany comes out on top in Europe with 14.1 million subscribers in December 2006 (followed by the UK at 12.9 and France at 12.7 million). So the crowds are here, but where can they go? “Web 2.0” is a term that brilliantly translates around the world, but many of the sites that are commonly associated with it have a language barrier for international audiences (take MySpace for example: it officially launched its German version only in March of this year). While English certainly isn’t foreign to Germans, it has still slowed their adoption – and network effects, which have been a driving force, are often tied to language and reach as well. What’s been the consequence in Deutschland? A mushrooming of German copycats that have localized and copied their US role models, sometimes down to the last pixel. Copy/Paste Innovation Whether you’re looking for social bookmarking, photo sharing, video posting or a college social network, Germany’s clever entrepreneurs have done the translation for you and some even fared quite well. The best example by far is StudiVZ, whose name stands for “student directory.” Launched in October 2005, it now claims to house 2.1 million users. Despite a myriad of security problems and controversies, new users kept coming in, which only speaks to the universally strong demand for such networks among students. In January of this year, Germany had its mini-YouTube moment when → Read More
Plazes, which is based in Zurich and Berlin, is announcing its first institutional round of financing this morning. They raised €2.7 million, or about $3.5 million, from Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures. We first profiled Plazes on June 11, 2005 (the day this blog started). It’s evolved significantly since then, obviously, but the core idea is the same – Plazes tracks your physical location and shows you other Plazes users and places nearby. Plazes also integrates with Skype, has a widget to place on websites that shows your current location and other information, and a SMS service to find out the current location of your Plazes friends. I spoke with founder Felix Petersen earlier this evening. He says Plazes continues to see “strong growth” and has 40,000 active users currently. Those users are “predominantly users from the US (40%), followed by Germany, UK, Netherlands, Canada and Switzerland.” A thousand or so users are online at any given time. → Read More
Company: Plazes What is it? Plazes made an announcement at Reboot 7.0 in Copenhagen on June 10, 2005, although the service has been around since at least January. In their own words, “Plazes is the first global location-aware interaction and geo-information system, connecting you with the people and Plazes in your area and all over the world. It is the navigation system for your social life and it’s absolutely free.” To gain full functionality, you must install a 1.11 mb file on your computer. I did this, and it had trouble syncing with my router. I’m not surprised, since my internet connection is down and I am currently “borrowing” wifi from one of my neighbors. Anyway, I was able to logon and create my very own plaze in Manhattan Beach, California (see the third screen shot below). This is a very useful application, and I can see using it to find friends and meet new people. The design is well thought out and the social networking tools are as good as we’ve seen. As their blog indicates, the product is still in beta mode and functionality is being added continuously. Service Features: – Discover Plazes anywhere in the world – like hotspots, restaurants, offices, based on search or your current location. – Hook up with people nearby – see people (and their “metadata”) who are online and near a “plaze”. Message with them. – Stay in touch with your friends – Plazes has social networking tools like invite, messaging, status, karma etc. Friends can see your currentl location (or keep yourself invisible) Screen Shots: People Involved: Felix Petersen “Stefan“ Relevant Links: What’s Plazes? Plazes FAQs Plazes Blog Felix Petersen Blog Plazes Merchandise Robert Scoble on Plazes Christian Heindel on Plazes → Read More
San Francisco, CA
