Daily deals site Groupon has acquired Whrrl creator Pelago this morning. The iFund-back Whrrl is a LBS services app that allows people to check into places like Foursquare. No word on the price of the acquisition.
Groupon CEO Andrew Mason writes:
“Here’s a great way to start the week… We’re excited to announce that the minds at Pelago, creators of Whrrl, have officially joined the Groupon… → Read More
“Location Check in is so 2010,” Mark Cuban writes today on his blog. His thought is that facial recognition hardware/software installed in public venues is going to replace the need for users to actually check-in to a place.
I absolutely agree. But I think we’re ten years away from that happening. And maybe more.
If you’ve seen the Steven Spielberg movie Minority Report, it has a similar… → Read More
Back in January, we noted that Loopt was sending around a deck to advertisers showing off a new product. The product was focused on check-in specials (the kind popularized by Foursquare) and was entirely built on top of Facebook’s social graph. Finally, nearly 6 months later, that app is here.
Loopt Star is in some ways a simplified version of Loopt’s regular location-based service. Rather than… → Read More
Back in March, I wrote about the problem of check-in fatigue. That is, with so many location-based check-in services now out there, it’s exhausting to open each one every time to check-in to the same place across multiple networks. The solution, for now at least, is Check.in. And it’s ready to open to everyone tonight.
Check.in is an HTML5 web app made by Brightkite that allows you to check-in to… → Read More
I didn’t have the same problems at SXSW this year that some people did. Was it too crowded at some events? Sure. But there were plenty of alternative things to do. Did some of the keynotes bomb? Yes. But there were plenty of other things to listen to. Did AT&T fail? No. Actually, they did an awesome job keeping the network up. Instead, I had a problem of a different kind: check-in… → Read More
SXSW Interactive is now over. While a clear winner in the “Location War” has yet to be determined, the truth is that many of the location-based services won, as all of them got a huge amount of exposure over the past week. And look for that trend to continue in a big way, as Apple is now highlighting several of them in the App Store.
As you can see in the images in this post, Apple is… → Read More
Pelago knows that just about every location-based app in the world is seeking coverage right now just prior to SXSW where they will all battle Highlander-style. So they approached me with a pretty smart pitch: curing the “social rut.” What they mean by that is these days, despite the prevalence of social networks, people are actually less social than ever because they’re being roped into playing… → Read More
Much of the web is based around clickstreams. The latest version of Whrrl, a location-based application by Pelago, wants to take that concept into the real world, with “footstreams.”
Up until this point, since the launch of version 2 of its iPhone app earlier this year, Whrrl’s focus has been on storytelling. That is, allowing users to tag places they’re at with stories and pictures. But the… → Read More
We’ve been bullish about location-based social networks for quite awhile now, especially since Apple announced that it would open up the iPhone to developers. And with two significant developments in this space just this week (more on that below), we thought it would be a good time to take a step back and look at the options currently available through the Apple App Store.
What makes a… → Read More
Sometimes products are easy to sum up in single sentences, sometimes they are most definitely not. Whrrl, a new site by Pelago, is one of those that eludes definition. Hence, Pelago’s need to describe it unhelpfully as “a seamlessly integrated Web and mobile experience that is social, useful, and fun” (I admit, my headline’s not that much better). Let’s start with the… → Read More
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