Notably, it’s also the first investment of London-based m8 Capital, a majority-owned affiliate of AGC Equity Partners, which is targeting mobile startups and technology. As a result, m8′s Joe Kim will be joining Rummble’s board as Chairman.

As well as recommending places nearby (users have generated recommendations in over 3500 cities, across 126 countries), Rummble also enables users to “check-in” and share their location with friends. A mobile web version is available, along with native apps for iPhone, Windows Phone and Android.

In particular, m8′s investment will be used by Rummble to “improve the user experience of its applications and expand the team”, with the company outgrowing its six employees. “The user interface has suffered”, says Founder and CEO, Andrew J Scott. “Now that we can hire we’re looking for awesome UI/Ux designers and software engineers in both London and San Francisco. Our Trust Graph technology and API are very powerful and we’re eager to deliver that power into users hands.”

That Trust Graph is what Rummble says gives it the edge, with recommendations being truly personal. Scott describes the company’s proposition as ‘page rank’ for the physical world.

It does this through a bit of nifty but fairly crude sentiment analysis, turning any tweet with the hashtag #rummble into something the service will understand. So, for example “Hanging out in Joes Cafe, 9th Ave, NYC. Great coffee and free wifi. 7/10 #rummble” would be interpreted as a check-in to Joes Cafe, giving it a Rummble of 7/10 noting the “great coffee and free wifi”

Obviously, the more information you can cram into 140 characters using trigger words such as “hanging out” or “just arrived”, along with the bare facts, the more accurate Rummble’s sentiment analysis will be. And, as noted, you’ll need to remember to include that #rummble hash tag.

It’s been a busy time for the startup. At last week’s South by Southwest Interactive, the company unveiled an improved Rummble friends list for their iPhone and Android apps which lets users see not only the updates of their Rummble friends but also people they’re following on Twitter and other location-based services such as Brightkite, Gowalla and Foursquare.

But if location-based services like Rummble are to become more useful and embedded into our daily lives, they’ll arguably need to become more passive, needing less and less intervention on the user’s part. I’m not sure that turning or rather interpreting a tweet as a piece of location-based data or ‘action’ should require the use of a specific hash tag at all.

Would it not make more sense to give users the option, once they’ve chosen to link their Twitter and Rummble accounts, to let the service interpret any tweet as a potential ‘check-in’ and review?

Although, maybe it’s here where the non-trivial nature of 140-character driven sentiment analysis needs a helping hand. “Computers reading natural language is always tricky; computers reading 140 characters is even trickier”, says Rummble on the company’s blog.

And on the newly introduced Foursquare and Gowalla integration, Rummble says:

“Living in a world with many different social location-based services to choose from should make it easier to know where all of your friends are located, but people often miss out on the action because there are a number of places to check out friend’s check-ins and location chatter. Rummble’s answer to this problem is to tell you where your friends are located, regardless of where that information was created.”

That makes a lot of sense to us.

The report found that while MLBS had experienced a number of false dawns from 2000 to 2007, improvements in handset UIs together with easier consumer access to an range of app distribution channels had led to greater interest from service providers in providing mobile location-based applications.

While service usage will be highest in Far East China over the next few years, greatest revenues will come from Western Europe, Juniper forecasts.

Revenues will come from sales of apps through application stores and other channels, but also from mobile advertising tied to those apps. In fact, the Juniper report notes that advertising will likely form an increasing share of MLBS-related revenues over the next five years.

In the words of co-author Dr Windsor Holden:

“Location-based applications are extremely interesting for brands and retailers in that they allow those companies to direct consumers to outlets in their vicinity while simultaneously providing information about the products on offer. When these are allied to measures such as mobile coupons and vouchers, you have the combination of information and financial incentive which can be compelling for consumers.”

This should sound like music in the ears of juggernauts like Google, Facebook and Nokia, as well startups like Foursquare, Gowalla, aka-aki, Loopt, Rummble and a couple of hundred others playing this extremely crowded field.

The feature is called “Local Heroes” and is billed as “the fun side of Rummbling” but it is quite obviously going to be Rumbble’s way of attacking the buzz surrounding the game of checking-in and becoming a “Mayor” of a location as propogated by the New York-based Foursquare. Local Heroes is a feature listed under “Empire” which suggests that there will be yet more gaming elements introduced.

Rummble has until now relied on its users to create content about places they visit and rate their friends’ ability to do so – what it calls the Rummble trust network. But clearly that’s not quite enough in the face of big players like Qype, dominant in Europe for local reviews, and Yelp in the U.S.

So Rummble is entering the social location gaming pushed by the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla.

Furthermore it has also implemented the Twitter’s new Geotagging API which provides accessible location context to tweets from Rummble check-ins and reviews. This works with new versions of twitter clients like Tweetie, Tweetdeck and Seesmic Web, which launched support for the Twitter Geotagging API earlier this week. That means Rummble users can geotag tweets with their current location (if they choose to share it) and any venue in the world. This real-time geo-data is consumable by everyone on Twitter, regardless of whether they are signed up to Rummble or not.

This is one of the first social apps (outside of twitter clients) to use geo tweets. It adds geo lat/long into tweets for Twitter’s Location-api for status updates posted out of Rummble. This covers the user’s location, check-ins and tweets posted of Rummble reviews of a bar or cafe etc. Tweets from the Gowalla and Foursquare aps are geotagged if the setting has been switched on in twitter settings.

The 6 person Rummble is better known in the UK and Europe generally as a location based discovery tool and social search platform. Although on first appearances Rummble can look like a Yelp or a Qype with lots of information about a venue you are in or those nearby, it is in fact more focused on the people who visit a place and how trustworthy their recommendarions are. As a three-year old startup which has concentrated on location it has a lot more of a granular service where you can do a lot with your location. And although it’s not really a game like Foursquare, it has now released an API to enable anyone to build a gaming-platform on top of it.

Rummble is also starting to feed pure ‘check-in-like’ data’ directly from Twitter with it’s Tremors app, potentially making it quite powerful as a way to rate both places and people than Foursquare’s gaming system. However, it’s my view that Foursquare’s ‘pigeon-simple’ game (obessesively checking-in like a pigeon hitting a button to get food) has some way to run yet. It’s going to be an interesting battle.

Rummble was founded by CEO Andrew J Scott and CTO Clive Cox and is on @Rummble

Furthermore it has also implemented the Twitter’s new Geotagging API which provides accessible location context to tweets from Rummble check-ins and reviews. This works with new versions of twitter clients like Tweetie, Tweetdeck and Seesmic Web, which launched support for the Twitter Geotagging API earlier this week. That means Rummble users can geotag tweets with their current location (if they choose to share it) and any venue in the world. This real-time geo-data is consumable by everyone on Twitter, regardless of whether they are signed up to Rummble or not.

This is one of the first social apps (outside of twitter clients) to use geo tweets. It adds geo lat/long into tweets for Twitter’s Location-api for status updates posted out of Rummble. This covers the user’s location, check-ins and tweets posted of Rummble reviews of a bar or cafe etc. Tweets from the Gowalla and Foursquare aps are geotagged if the setting has been switched on in twitter settings.

I’ll start with the most exciting one imho: Kyte, the live video streaming enabler, is making its way to Android next September, likely marking the first entry of its kind on the platform. It will enable you to stream whatever you’re shooting with the built-in video of apt devices live on the Internet and from mobile to mobile.

Another cool one is BookDroid, which is essentially a mobile ebook reader for any written work that can be found in Google Books. Coolness: you can use your phone’s camera to capture a book label and it will automatically detect the ISBN and crawl the database for the digital version.

Also in the works is an Android app for Rummble, a location-aware social search and discovery engine for places that hails from the UK but delivers worldwide.

Finally, there’s TransDroid, which is a text-to-speech / speech recognition app for Android. The latter one is the only one that is already live on Android Market, the other apps should all be ready by September this year.

Google figured out how to find a mobile phone’s location for its own mobile apps, such as Google Maps, and is now opening that technology up as an API to outside developers. Two UK-based mobile startups—Rummble and lastminute— have already built the API into their services. The Google Mobile blog explains:

These two apps make use of the Gears Geolocation API. The API can determine your location using nearby cell-towers or GPS for your mobile device or your computer’s IP address for your laptop. Google provides this service for free to both developers and users.

Gears is available on IE Mobile on mobile and Internet Explorer and Firefox on desktop. To use the location-enabled lastminute.com and Rummble web apps you will need a Windows Mobile device that supports GPS or cell-id lookup (for example the Samsung Blackjack II and HTC Touch Dual, see supported devices FAQ). We are working hard to bring Gears to more mobile platforms, such as Android and others.

There is also more detailed information on the API on the Google Code blog.

aka-aki (from Germany) focuses on Proximity Networking, as in mobile social networking with Bluetooth-sensing capabilities which are pretty interesting. For instance, it will build a network of encounters with other Aka-Aki members even before you sign up, populating your network automatically. We’ve written a lot about them here.

Dial2Do (from Ireland) lets you do common tasks by calling a number and speaking. You can send email or SMS and post to Twitter for instance. It asks you two or three questions like “Do what?”, “To who?”. You say what you want, it recognizes what you said and completes the task. That would probably make it pretty handy for those tasks you’d like to do while driving but now can’t due to the increasing number of laws which band people from talking on the phone while driving.

Shout’Em (from Croatia) is a “roll your own” hosted mobile social network which has an Android client already. The video looks slick at least, but it will be interesting to hear more about them at the conference.

youlynx (from Spain) is a social media network, not unlike a mobile YouTube, but you can send pictures as well. It would be good to see if they have any plans to extend this idea as currently its a fairly simple video sharing site for mobile content.

Zipipop (from Finland) is a start-up that is developing Zipiko, a mobile service for sorting your social life on the go, as in, broadcast where you’ll be at a certain time in the day. Think Dopplr, but on a much more granular level perhaps.

Rummble (from UK) is a location based discovery tool and social search platform we wrote about here and here. Rummble’s idea is that location will soon be a “given” (via FireEagle, Google or GPS) on the mobile, as will social networking, so the value lies in filtering all this data to make it relevant in the mobile experience.

ViaMobility (from France) is a mobile widgets and applications startup with a Mobile Widget Player. France seems to have a penchant for mobile widgets as another startups called Goojet launched there recently.

And if you’re free in the evening, come over to the TechCrunch / Mobile 2.0 Europe Party at Shoko Club near the beach with speakers, organizers, startups. Check out details for the party and the sponsors after the jump.

So if you want to come to the party let us know why in the comments below and we’ll try to get you in.

TechCrunch Mobile 2.0 Party Sponsors

Nimbuzz offers a social interaction service combining presence, IM, and VoIP. The free application is available on the mobile, PC and Web, for (group)calling, instant messaging, (group)chat, file sharing across popular IM communities, including Skype, MSN, GTalk, Yahoo!, AIM, ICQ, plus 23 social networks including Facebook and MySpace. Nimbuzz works on over 600 mobile phones worldwide. The free genuine VoIP works worldwide on Symbian S60, and Windows Mobile devices over 3G/Wifi. Users on GPRS connections, or using Java devices, make international calls at local dial-in cost – in 50 countries. Social networks can incorporate the application, to offer their users fully integrated real-time communication services like voice calls, chat, file sharing and access to friends in the most popular IM communities. The users’ online social networking experience can even be extended to the mobile phone, to become completely connected. Nimbuzz has positioned itself to become the largest global communications platform for seamless IP-based communication among mobile devices and social media platforms.
Nimbuzz is headquartered in the Netherlands, with offices in Argentina and Brazil. The company, founded in 2006, received VC and strategic funding by Mangrove Capital Partners (Skype), Naspers/MIH (Tencent, Mail.ru, Gadu-Gadu, Mweb, Sanook, Tradus) and Holtzbrinck (StudiVZ).

Fjord is a strategic design consultancy based in Berlin, Helsinki and London. We think about convergence, mobility and the future of digital touch points. We are working with clients like the BBC, Nokia, Orange and Nokia to create transforming solutions. Our passion and goal is to deliver elegant simplicity.

my247.mobi: The guys at my247.mobi officially launch the Global Guide to Going Out on July 4th. The free service available online, on mobile and on facebook allows you to share your favourites’ and help find new restaurants, bars, clubs, plan gigs, events, catch-ups with friends 24 hours a day, 7 days a week! preview today @ www.my247.mobi – on your pc or mobile.

Admittedly not all of these sites have significant funding. Some are little more than Google Map mashups just ticking over on a server. But it’s quite clear that not all will survive, and the US market, which is further down this road, is providing an early view of what might happen next.

In the US right now there is a shake-out happening amongst sites which allow people to create local reviews. Judy’s Book is shutting down operations. Other players have fallen in the last year, including Zipingo, while Insider Pages was sold for a tiny profit to CitySearch. One of the few remaining, and doing OK, is Yelp, despite fierce competition from Yahoo! and Google.

So does the shakeout in the US provide an indication of where the UK is headed? Suddenly the US market seems to have worked out that local reviews might have something to do with the mobile phone. Whrrl is a new, principally mobile, service that allows users to aggregate information as they visit different places. Reviews based on location are filtered based on ratings via the accompanying social network. Some commentators are calling it ‘Yelp plus Twitter’.

A wiki format in Whrrl enables users to write reviews, add photos etc. But the key with Whrrl is that you can filter your searches based on your trusted network before expanding the search outside that network. This Facebook-like approach means users have a lot of control over the information they publish and make visible to their network. Client software on the phone is supported on about 10 handsets for the AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile networks. Whrrl’s parent company, Pelago, has raised $7.4 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Jeff Bezos and Trilogy Equity Partners.

Over here in the UK Rummble, founded by Andrew Scott, is doing something similar, but with a twist. Currently in closed beta and privately funded, Rummble could be the Whrrrl for the UK.

You build your social network on Rummble with a basic relationship (i.e. friend, relation or business) but then apply tags to that. Rummble has an algorithm which works out which reviews by users in your network to trust, based on your behaviour and relationship to them. Three years in development and re-launched from its former incarnation as Playtxt, Rummble is hoping its functionality between web and mobile – and ultimately GPS-enabled mobiles – will give it the edge when some consumers tire of networks which don’t intelligently filter results or deliver a decent experience to the mobile.

Rummble still needs to be proven once out of private beta. I doubt we’ll be dumping Twitter for microblogging, or sites like Trusted Places, for local reviews, just yet. But the more I have looked into Rummble the more I have noticed several types of services incorporated into it, from Socialight and Loopt to location services like Plazes. There is a lot more to this service than meets the eye at first, and it’s emphasis on mobile is definitely the right instinct.