Pelago CEO and former Amazon executive Jeff Holden will be now be overseeing product development at Groupon and members of the Pelago team will be taking on roles in “Grouponnovations” after Whrrl shuts down on April 30th 2011 . No word yet 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 family.

We’ve always liked CEO Jeff Holden, the Whrrl team and the technology they’ve developed.  Their obsession with real-world serendipitous discovery, or Anti-Search, is core to Groupon’s mission.  It’s about discovering what you didn’t know you didn’t know, right in your own backyard. Jeff intimately gets consumer buying behavior and the importance of a great user experience, and his team is this awesome combination of data-driven creatives…the people who create smart products that are really fun to use.

With Jeff overseeing Groupon product development and many Pelago people taking integral roles in future Grouponnovations, Whrrl will be retiring on April 30, 2011. You can read more about that on Pelago’s blog at http://www.pelago.com/blog/announcements/2011/04/big-day/.

So here’s a warm welcome to Jeff and the team!”

Pelago had $22.4 million in funding from T-Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Bezos Expeditions, DAG, Reliance and Trilogy Equity Partners. Groupon of course is funded to the gills (hence the shopping spree) with $1.14B from NEA, DST and others.

“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 technology to what Cuban envisions. At a few points, main character John Anderton (Tom Cruise) is walking through a public place and a retina scanner picks up his unique eye signature and offers up customized advertisements and specials for him. “John Anderton, you could use a Guinness right about now!” American Express recognizes that Anderton has been a card member since 2037.

Even more in line with Cuban’s vision is when Anderton (now with another person’s set of eyes — long story) walks into the Gap and the eye scan allows the virtual greeter to ask how the last purchase he made has been treating him. To most people, this will sound extremely creepy and invasive. To me (and I suspect Cuban), this sounds fantastic. It sounds like the future we’re inevitably headed toward.

But it is still the future. Minority Report takes place in 2054. Sure, that’s just a random date picked out by the filmmakers, but Spielberg actually hired a team of consultants — so-called futurists — to come up with technology that is likely to be in place all those years from now. They’re trying to be as realistic as possible.

Yes, the retina scanning in the movie is more advanced than the facial recognition stuff Cuban is talking about. But I’d argue that it’s not really a matter of technology advancement that will hinder such things. Instead, it’s society being ready for these new forms of technology.

Think about the location space right now. Foursquare, the current company getting most of the buzz, is hardly the first player in the space. Not even close. But they came along at the right time with the right method. When Foursquare launched in 2009, it was actually co-founder Dennis Crowley’s second location-based service. The first was the similar Dodgeball, which was purchased by Google in 2005, but never really took off. Part of the reason is that application development on smartphones was basically non-existent before 2008 when Apple’s App Store came along. So Dodgeball was done through SMS. It was clunky. Mainstream adoption would have been very difficult to achieve.

The new wave of smartphones brought with them GPS and Wi-Fi triangulation. Location was now easily accessible — it no longer had to be manually input. And this is part of what Cuban is talking about when he takes the idea a step further by saying his facial recognition tech will replace the check-in because it will make it so “Individuals never do any of the work.”

I agree that next step is coming. But before we get to facial recognition, things such as background location with geofencing will come into play first. And those are still a little bit away from happening. The fact of the matter is that one of the key reasons Foursquare took off and quickly stole the buzz from services that were earlier in the space like Loopt and Whrrl is because of the check-in. It helped ease users into location because they were in control of it (and the game elements certainly helped as well).

Next, users will need an app to ease them into using background location and geofencing (which allows you to be checked-in to places automatically). It could be one of the current players, or it could be someone new. But that concept, which will have to be opt-in by virtue of installing an application, will be needed to pave the way for what Cuban is taking about farther down the line.

Cuban sees the future where this facial recognition accesses Facebook’s name/profile picture database to pull information. If you thought Facebook’s current privacy issues are a nightmare, this would be Armageddon. But again, that’s just looking at it right now. Down the line, people will grow more and more accustomed to this type of stuff. And perhaps the scenario Cuban lays out will be the norm.

But to say that the check-in is 2010 implies that 2011 is going to be the year this stuff starts coming into play. I say no way. We’ll be lucky if we see that kind of stuff in play in 2020. Not because the technology isn’t there — it definitely will be, and probably already is — it’s because we’re just not there yet as a society.

But hopefully posts like Cuban’s which bring up the topic and dream of the future will help get us there quicker.

Loopt Star is in some ways a simplified version of Loopt’s regular location-based service. Rather than being a service that is continually updating your location in the background, the focus here is only on the idea of the check-in. And naturally, those check-ins take place at specific venues — some of which Loopt has deals in place with to coincide with the launch of the new app. We’re talking big, national brands such as Gap, Burger King, and Universal Music.

Loopt Star is sort of like a “virtual loyalty card,” is the way co-founder Sam Altman describes it. “As you go about the world and check-in, you get discounts and free stuff,” is the simplified way he puts it.

The way Loopt pitched it to advertisers is interesting. Those guys are familiar with the “cost per impression” model of advertising, so Loopt described this as being a more valuable “cost per visit” model. This is basically the same idea that another location-based service, Whrrl, has been trying to sell to advertisers (pay-per-visit). It’s about “driving foot traffic,” Altman says.

Along with foot traffic in stores, retailers get to brand themselves their way in the app, with their own logos. These can be used to reward Loopt Star users with special achievements — similar to the Foursquare “badge” model.

Loopt Star will launch with four brands Altman says, but the service will add about two a week after that, so the company can put a special system in place to ensure there’s no fraud or gaming of this system. Obviously that’s a concern when these partners are giving away free and discounted goods.

The most interesting aspect to all of this though may be the use of Facebook Connect. Altman says Loopt has used several features from the new Open Graph to build this app. And that the plan is to use Facebook’s social structure for all Loopt products going forward. The new ability for third-parties to cache data was the key to Loopt switching over, Altman says.

While Facebook has clearly been working on its own check-in based solution, Altman expects it to be more of a basic feature, and believes the social network will be more interested in federating check-ins from all the other services already out there. If true, this should help Loopt and its competitors gain even more users.

Loopt Star will be iPhone-only at first, but it will eventually roll out to all the other major mobile platforms.

Update: And below, find a video Robert Scoble took of Altman showing off Loopt Star.

Check.in is an HTML5 web app made by Brightkite that allows you to check-in to a venue on multiple location-based services. Those services including Foursquare, Gowalla, and of course, Brightkite. This works by taking advantage of those services’ APIs alongside some backend place matching that Brightkite does on its end. The result is being able to check-in across multiple services in a few seconds rather than taking a few minutes to load up the various apps and hit the required buttons on each to check-in.

Since Check.in went live in closed beta in March, over 6,000 users have tried it out, generating some 135,000 check-ins, I’m told. The average user checked-in 20 times, and there were over 2 million place queries in the beta period.

That last statistic speaks to why we need some sort of unified Places database (this app just does place matching, not unification). Brightkite had indicated they’d be willing to do something like that, but the problem is the other companies who are all saying the right things now — but may not be so quick to hand over their databases with the places they’ve collected. It’s also an extremely hard problem to solve since not all the data is perfectly aligned (misspellings, slightly off GPS, etc).

The point is, even if everyone seems to say they want it, it’s not happening anytime soon. And so we have Check.in.

Since the closed beta began, Brightkite has also added two new services to the check-in roster: Whrrl and TriOut. Each of these is still experimental alongside Gowalla, which is currently on Check.in thanks to an API work-around (Gowalla has a read-only API at the moment).

Some other data that Brightkite saw during the beta trial was that people check-in most often on Friday, and least often on Sunday. And most users opt to use two of the check-in services, followed by those who choose to use three. Four and five were much less popular (though Whrrl and TriOut weren’t available the entire time), and one was somewhat popular — though I’m not sure what the point of using check.in is if you’re only going to use it with one service.

Since it’s HTML5, Check.in will work with iPhones, Android phones, and yes, the iPad. Just point your web browser here to find it.

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 fatigue.

Seeing as location was this year’s Twitter at SXSW, and seeing as I write a lot about location, I wanted to try to use as many of the services as I could during the actual conference. I drastically underestimated how much work that would actually be.

At first, I was using all of the services I had on my phone to check-in when I arrived at a place in Austin. This included: Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Whrrl, Brightkite, Burbn, MyTown, CauseWorld, Hot Potato, Plancast, and (at certain places) Foodspotting. Even with great AT&T service, this would take a solid 10 minutes or more to check-in to all of them. And it took even longer when I’d have to pause to explain to my friends what the hell I was doing on my phone all that time.

This was at every venue we stopped at. The situation simply wasn’t tenable.

By the second day, I had cut the services I would check-in to in half. It still wasn’t close to being something I would consider doing on a regular basis. By the end of my time in Austin, I was down to using only two services — yes, the two in the midst of the “war” — Foursquare and Gowalla.

Pretty much everyone I knew in Austin were also using both Foursquare and Gowalla to send out all their check-ins. And all seemed to agree: it was still too tedious to use even just two services to do the same thing. In the end, there should be only one.

And so it should be no surprise that a few companies are already working on a solution for this problem. One is by the creators of Brightkite, who managed to obtain the killer check.in domain name. The team showed me a preview of the app at a party one night, and I immediately knew it was exactly what I needed (see a preview of it here).

And LocationFu is another (web-based) app that allows you to check-in with Foursquare, Brightkite, Fire Eagle, and Twitter simultaneously.

But there’s a problem with these solutions too. Currently, Gowalla’s API is read-only, which means you actually can’t use another app to check-in to the service. I spoke with CEO Josh Williams a bit about this just prior to SXSW, and he noted that the main thinking behind this is to maintain the user experience Gowalla is looking for (a very Apple-like argument). But, he did say that eventually he thinks they will open up a two-way API — maybe once they have time to create some best practices documentation, he noted.

Another problem is that currently each of these check-in services has their own places database. That means that a place on Foursquare may be slightly different than a place on Gowalla, even though they’re technically the same place. Worse, there are plenty of duplicates for some venues since people are allowed to create their own. Check.in works around this place problem by doing a look-up on each service and letting you pick the correct check-in spot. But it’s a bit slow, and still seems rather tedious.

A better solution would be for the various services to adopt a standard for places. The Activity Streams group is working on such a concept. Yahoo may also be able to implement such a system on top of its WOEID system. Of course, any service that adopts such a standard would be risking at least part of their business since these place databases are one of the keys to each service.

Meanwhile, Facebook is thinking about aggregating data from both Foursquare and Gowalla for its own upcoming location implementation. Might that be the one location stop to rule them all (of course, the writing back to Gowalla would still likely be an issue)? Not if Twitter has anything to say about it.

I love that all these startups are emerging around location right now (at least a dozen more have emailed me just since I’ve been back from SXSW). But I’m starting to worry that this is going to turn into a repeat of the social wars, where we all have 15 different profiles we constantly have to update across a range of networks.

During our Realtime Crunchup last year, I brought up this issue during our panel on location. All the players on stage (including Twitter, Foursquare, Hot Potato, Google Latitude, GeoAPI, and SimpleGeo) seemed to want to say that they could all get along and play nicely together for the betterment of location as a whole. I didn’t buy it then, and I’m definitely not buying it now.

From a business perspective, it doesn’t make sense for these guys to all play nicely with one another and make it so you don’t have to use their services. The need to take steps to ensure that you will use their service, and will do so instead of a rival service. That’s the way it works, and that’s the way it has always worked. And that’s why it’s a war. Right now, it’s just the early stages where all sides are arming themselves. Soon, they’ll try to kill one another. And that may not be such a bad thing.

[photo: flickr/intagiblearts]

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 highlighting five of the key location players both in the App Store on iTunes, as well as on the App Store on the iPhone itself. On the iTunes version, the apps have their own area right below the “New & Noteworthy” area. On the iPhone, the five apps takes up the top five slots of the “What’s Hot” area. Simply put: This promotion is huge.

So what are the five apps? The names should be familiar to you because we’ve covered each very recently. Foursquare (our coverage), Gowalla (our coverage), Loopt (our coverage), Whrrl 3 (our coverage), and MyTown (our coverage). I’d like to think Apple picked these guys to feature after reading TechCrunch, but who knows what goes on behind the doors of the secretive company.

As any app developer will tell you, having your app featured can make or break it. Even the two most-hyped players, Foursquare and Gowalla (the two key players in the most recent Location War), stand to benefit from Apple’s ability to reach all kinds of different audiences with the App Store. Foursquare announced earlier that it had gained 100,000 new users in just the past 10 days — that type of growth may actually continue as long as Apple keeps featuring the app.

The other three, have all benefited in the past from previous Apple promotions. Notably, this helped MyTown surpass both Foursquare and Gowalla in size in under a month after its launch.

Game on, says Apple.

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 games like Farmville and Mafia Wars for hours on end. Sitting in their rooms. Alone.

While that may be a part of social networking (a rather large, hugely profitably part), it’s not really social. That’s why location-based networks excite me: they have the potential to bridge social networking with actual social activity. And that’s exactly how Pelago is positioning the latest version of its location-based app, Whrrl 3.

The core idea behind the new iPhone app (which launched in the store today) is that people inspire others to do things. So when you see a friend is out doing something fun, you may want to join them. Or it may entice you to go out and do something else, and hope others see it on Whrrl and join in. It’s the grouping of people with similar interests into “Societies” that is a key to Whrrl 3. For example, a basic society is that each venue in the application has its own set of “regulars.” If you visit the place enough times, you unlock the badge making you a regular, and giving you access to member-level activities, such as recommendations and specials nearby.

One of these societies, launching alongside the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas this week is the Austin Underground which “will provide members with at-your-fingertips access to the hottest parties, events, and other fun things to do at the conference,” according to Whrrl. Over 50 merchants in Austin are participating to provide exclusive offers, apparently. To unlock the membership, you have to check-in at some of the following places: Four Seasons Hotel Austin, Outback Steakhouse, Cool River Cafe, Chuggin’ Monkey, J Black’s, Red Fez and Third Base, and others.

Other key features of Whrrl 3 include Recommendations — you create these (with photos, if you choose), to let others in your social graph (or your society) know fun things to do in an area. Ideas, are recommendations served up to you from societies you’re a part of, your friends, or Whrrl’s algorithms. Fun Facts are shown each time you check-in to a venue, with information about it. And of course, there is a point system (Influence Points) that turn the whole thing into one big game. What’s interesting about Whrrl’s game is that you can get point by inspiring others to do things with the app. Points also allow you to level up in your societies for more special deals.

All of this is an extension of the “footstreams” idea that Whrrl launched last December. That’s where they also first introduced the society idea as well. The key to both of those is about real people doing real things in the real world.  That, in turn, shows what you’re interested in, and allows Whrrl to clump you into these groups with out like-minded people.

So that all sounds great, but will anyone use the app? After all, adoption has been a problem in the past and this isn’t the first time Whrrl is pivoting its product. In fact, they actually did exactly a year ago with Whrrl 2 just before SXSW.

Their main problem is convincing people to use Whrrl instead of the current location-based darlings, Foursquare and Gowalla. That’s going to be difficult because those networks are quickly building up social graphs and once those are established, users are less likely to leave. So Whrrl needs something to differentiate itself, and while their pitch to me is good, it’s an entirely different matter convincing users. And the things that would seem to help differentiate networks like Whrrl actually hurt them sometimes. For example, since location-based services are still new to so many people, it’s best to keep things as simple as possible. But Whrrl is piling on features that, while maybe cool, are likely to confuse new users.

Still, if Whrrl is able to secure some solid deals around Austin to get people using the app and checking-in, that could certainly get people using it. Of course, Foursquare and Gowalla have their own deals too. Then the problem becomes one I’ve had this past week while testing out all these location apps: fatigue. I can’t possibly check-in with each of these apps each time I move from place to place. The people I’m with have started rolling their eyes at me while I take my 10 minutes to check-in to all the different apps.

I’m not saying there can be only one. But one would sure be nice.

Find Whrrl 3 in the App Store here.

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 latest version shifts the focus towards creating a digital record of all the places you go in the real world, Pelago CEO Jeff Holden tells us. “It’s about places, not location,” he says.

While the distinction between the two may not be that obvious at first, it becomes more clear when Holden continues to talk about how the core idea of Whrrl is discovery. That is to say, it’s not about playing a game, or knowing where your friends are at any given time (which rivals Foursquare, Gowalla, and Loopt are all about), instead it’s about building up communities and location data surrounding places. And that leads to another major addition for the site, with “Societies.” Basically, this is a feature that looks at where you go in the real world and serves up other places you might like to “discover” based on other Whrrl users who are members of similar Societies as you.

For example, maybe you’re an indie music lover. Checking into different record shops around a city would make you a member of this society, and this opens other social discovery pathways, Holden says. And when you keep going to the same place, you become a “regular,” a concept that should be familiar to users of Foursquare with “mayors” — only there can be many regulars.

The new Whrrl also features fun facts about each place you visit. You can see, for example, how many times you’ve been there, and how many times your friends have been there. “An important part of who you are is expressed in the places you visit,” Holden says. And all of this information will reside on a completely revamped website launching today as well.

Pelago was actually one of the first companies funded by Kleiner Perkin’s iFund just prior to the launch of Apple’s App Store in 2008. But despite the big time deal, the service has seen rivals, first Loopt, then Foursquare and Gowalla, steal much of the spotlight. And that’s why Holden is trying to position themselves a bit differently. Whether that will work or not, remains to be seen.

The company also has plans to make money. Naturally, with all this footstreaming data, they can do things with local advertising — “pay-per-visit” advertising, as Holden calls it. There are also opportunities within individual places. Holden notes that they already have one deal to allow a shopping marketer to tailor an experience for someone inside of a store from within Whrrl.

And despite the iFund investment, Pelago plans to expand Whrrl beyond the iPhone. Already, there is a mobile web version that works on many phones, like the BlackBerry. And eventually the plan to build native apps for other mobile platforms as well.

Looking ahead, Holden thinks the next major release of Whrrl is already just a few months away. At that time, “the full iceberg will be revealed.” By that he means the full discovery experience for users. If they can get enough people using their new iPhone app — which looks quite nice and is fast — perhaps they can deliver on that.

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 “location-based” social network different than a normal one? At least as things stand today, location-based social networks run primarily on smartphones that have the ability to determine a user’s current location, usually by leveraging GPS or cellular tower triangulation. The social network then uses your location to reveal nearby friends and places of interest. See our Location Technologies Primer for additional information.

Currently there are six major location-based social networks available for the iPhone (click on the comparison chart to the right). All of them tell you how far away other members are from you, with most focused on helping you find your friends but some designed primarily for discovering strangers. A few of them chart the location of your friends’ on an interactive map (something I actually think all of them should do). They provide a wide range of privacy settings, but all will stop reporting your location when you simply close the application (Apple has yet to release its push notification system that will let these apps constantly report your location in the background). They also vary widely in how precisely they identify the locations of other members, although all but one of them work anywhere in the United States.

After testing this entire batch, I’ve come to the conclusion that none of them is quite ready to achieve mainstream usage. I believe most, if not all, of the following things must happen before location-based social networking becomes the new “killer app”:

• They need powerful notification systems that actively inform you when someone of interest is nearby. Such a system could be set up manually by individually indicating which friends are “of interest”. But it would be even better for the system to learn from your interactions (messages, pokes, wall posts, etc) and affiliations (profile information, common friends, groups) and automatically identify certain people you’d like to meet up with.
• These applications absolutely need to update your location while the phone is sitting in your pocket. Right now it demands too much from users to open the application whenever they want to inform friends where they are. Serendipitous encounters would be far more common with a fully foolproof and automated location-updating system.
• When inviting friends to a service, you need the ability to determine which of your friends actually have a supported phone. Otherwise you’re just spamming a large number of people who matter to you and with very little yield.
• These apps need to get more stable; they crash way too much.
• We need more hooks into web applications so we can share our location and location-based activities not only with other mobile users but with the web at large.
• Those apps that let you see and meet strangers nearby need to highlight both friends of friends and those who share common interests and affiliations.

These are weaknesses shared by all of the current iPhone location-based social networking apps, each of which we cover briefly below.

The Veteran – Loopt

Perhaps the most well-known of these companies, Loopt has been working for years to get its technology on a variety of phones (the iPhone being just the latest and most functional of them). It is also perhaps the most developed of the batch, and the most generic. Use it primarily to see on a map where your friends are located nearby. Restaurant and other local reviews are secondary, having been brought into the app through a partnership with Yelp. Get directions to other users, view their latest status updates (which are often accommodated with photos taken on-location), and ping them when they haven’t updated their location for awhile.

The Mountain View-based company has ventured into the matchmaking business this week by adding a new feature called “Mix” that shows you, for the first time on Loopt, strangers in your vicinity. You can see all of the people nearby who have turned on the Mix feature, and you can filter by types (age, gender, tags, dating status, community) as well. This is Loopt’s attempt to help people hook up at bars (an idea that gets thrown around by many entrepreneurs and has always puzzled me). But if it takes off, it may have even greater sociological effects than Loopt’s core friend-finding capabilities.

The New Kid On The Block – Moximity

Launching into private beta just this week, Moximity is a new location-based social network out of Austin, Texas that wants to help you find both your friends and local establishments. Taking Paul Bragiel’s marketing advice, Moximity is rolling out one geographical region at a time, starting with Austin itself. Everything is local – the restaurant listings, the users, and even the advertisements (yes, this is the only one of these networks actually monetizing on the iPhone right now).

One major quality that sets Moximity apart is the way it handles user accounts. When you join and start configuring, you don’t make “Moximity friends”. Rather, the service pulls in your contacts from Facebook (and later, other sites as well) and lets you track those of your existing friends who also use Moximity. When you post a status message, it also gets pushed out to your Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Moximity would benefit from an interactive map that uses pins to show where your friends are located. However, unlike Loopt, which gives you the precise street address of your friends, Moximity always matches you with particular places (restaurants, stores, etc) so individual pins for users might not be appropriate. Co-founder Bryan Jones says some breed of mapping functionality will be included in the next release.

If you live in Austin, you can get into the service immediately by emailing your name and zip code here.

The Bezos, T-Mobile and iFund-Backed Contender – Whrrl

The best-funded of the bunch is a Seattle startup named Pelago with an app called Whrrl that centers around identifying and reviewing nearby establishments of all types. Locating friends takes a bit of a back seat to the idea that you should share Yelp-like reviews with the people you know.

The information about places is comprehensive. You can find cuisine types, prices, hours, phone numbers, websites, street addresses, ratings and reviews. While you can view the (5-star) ratings and reviews from every member, you’re encouraged to focus on those of your friends. When you view a friend’s profile, for example, their reviews are displayed prominently. That said, you can “fan” strangers if you like their tastes (although apparently only through Whrrl’s thoroughly developed web app).

Whrrl also identifies events that are going on in your area. The combination of event and place information is great but I get the feeling that this app will have to depart a bit from its “reviews” roots to become a widely embraced service. More generic social features (such as walls and notifications) are needed to get me to use Whrll when not looking to share or gather opinions.

Pelago has raised its funds from the iFund, Jeff Bezos, and T-Mobile (among others).

The Schmorgesborg – uLocate’s “Where”

Where is an iPhone app developed by a Boston-based startup called uLocate that has received a considerable amount of funding (at least $15.5 million) over the last several years. It has everything but the kitchen sink. Along the bottom of the app is a dock-like menu that shows a variety of sub-applications, each meant to help you find something in your area:

• Buddy Beacon: find nearby friends
• GasBuddy: find nearby gas stations with low prices
• Starbucks: find nearby Starbucks franchises
• Quibblo: see location-based poll results in your area
• HeyWhatsThat: identify mountain peaks in your vicinity
• The Skymap: learn about the stars and constellations in the sky above you
• Zipcar: find pickup points for Zipcar rentals
• Yelp: find nearby places listed and reviewed on Yelp
• Eventful: learn about nearby events and their venues

The UI needs a bit of work (too many popups) but regardless, this app is handy for quickly finding the nearest of some particular thing on an interactive map (coffee, friendship, wheels, etc).

The Categorizer – Limbo

Limbo is provided by a company that seems to have undergone quite a few transformations over the years. We reviewed the company in May 2006 when it was a bizarre auction service based on text messaging. Back then it was located at 41414.com and you can still see that ancestry in the current logo (just look at the reflection).

The app is, at its heart, more focused on locating strangers and learning about what they’re doing than any of the aforementioned apps. All users are categorized by four types: Members, Contacts, Friends, and Faves. You can opt to share your location with each or all of them, with “Members” being everyone you don’t know, “Contacts” being people pulled in from your phone’s address book, “Friends” being people more important to you, and “Faves” being the most important people to you.

Users are further categorized based on their current “activity” (or status). They are either socializing, eating, playing, chilling, working, feeling, or enjoying a bit of “me time”. You can view users by their particular categories on a “What” page that displays the categories in a grid.

Limbo neither shows you your friends’ locations on a map nor gives you their exact locations (just their general regions, e.g. San Francisco). Both would make this app a lot more useful.

The Wall – Zintin

Zintin has gone even further in the direction of helping you communicate with strangers nearby, rather than helping you find your preexisting friends. Users in the vicinity are displayed in all-inclusive list along with their current status messages. When you select a particular user’s name, it takes you to their Wall, where short notes, photos, and scribbles can be posted by any user.

The Wall is the central, and pretty much only important, feature provided by Zintin (so-called “bulletin boards” are also provided but they’re essentially Walls for particular regions). If you find someone with particularly cool stuff on their Wall, you can request to exchange your contact information and meet them. But most people will just use the app to see what kind of juvenile stuff others around them have decided to share. If you’ve turned on the “allow mature content” setting, then that content is primarily explicit material, so be warned.

Zintin, which has been in development by a few Stanford CS grad students since late 2007, is mostly a curiosity at this point. However, the scribble feature, with which you can make quick doodles and post them for others, should make its way into other apps.

The Elephants In The Room – Facebook and MySpace

Neither of the big American social networks have added location-aware services yet, but they’re coming. Expect them to eclipse several if not all of these services after learning from them.

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 fundamentals and go from there. Whrrl is at heart a social network, as are many websites we see these days. But it’s a social network with a purpose (or, several related purposes, as we shall see). Members primarily use Whrrl to share their opinions and knowledge about local outfits, such as restaurants, bars, retail stores, and hotels. In the spirit of Yelp, users can find basic information about establishments and then, more importantly, share reviews of them (with brief descriptions and a star rating system). You can also write simple notes that correspond with particular locations, notes you can choose to share with all Whrrl members or just your friends.

Whrrl is also a mapping service of all the establishments that can be reviewed. After signing up for the site, half your screen will be dedicated to an interactive map provided by Google on top of which Pelago has dropped identifiers for your local establishments. Scan the map to find local outfits and click on their dots to pull up reviews and basic information about them. If a certain store or restaurant has been reviewed favorably or unfavorably overall, its dot on the map will indicate that fact. Opt to see indicators for establishments that have only been reviewed by your friends, or choose to view the map aggregating everyone’s contributions.

If you don’t want to find establishments using a map, you can use the Whrrl Sifter tool to perform a keyword search and then specify criteria (e.g, cheap, open now, baked goods, within 5 miles). No matter how you explore local destinations, Whrrl is intended primarily to help you share your experiences with friends. If you click on someone’s name anywhere that it is referenced, you’ll be shown on the map some of the places they have reviewed or rated.

Whrrl is also a mobile application for two main reasons: Pelago provides a full-featured version of the site for mobile devices, and soon you will be able to track your friends via GPS (if they let you). While most of the reviewing will take place on a computer (since many people don’t have mobile devices that make typing easy) you can access the site’s reviews on a map using your handheld. This makes it easier to figure out where to eat when you’re already out on the town. You can also post images and receive alerts about your friends activities from your phone. If your friend rates a place nearby, you can bookmark it for later.

As for the GPS, Whrll will be competing with other tracking services like Loopt to provide a way for your friends to find out where you are currently located. If you install the software on your phone and choose to share your location with friends on a white list, they will be able to see you real time on Whrrl’s map. Pelago says they have been working on a patented probablistic model to ensure that people’s locations are reported accurately. The system will report the actual establishments your friends are at, so you don’t even need to look at a map. The GPS functionality is all optional of course, and if you turn it on, the software on your phone will even ask you from time to time whether you still want it on. This is to prevent someone from tracking you without your knowledge.

As for the future of Whrrl, the company is adding more support for events. Currently you can use the system to tell your friends when you’ll be at a certain location. In the future, there will be more information in Whrrl associated with events (you’ll be able to add reviews of them, for instance). Pelago is also working on more ways to get information into the system. They contracted out to a team in the Philippines to manually collect all of the basic information about food and drink establishments currently in Whrrl. In the future, they will collect more information about non-restaurant establishments and eventually will turn the system into a wiki of sorts so users can edit most everything.

Pelago raised $7.4 million last November from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Trilogy Equity Partners. They are currently running a promotion campaign with American Eagle to get the word out to Whrrl’s target demographic, 18 to late 20 year olds. Robert Scoble recently recorded an interview with Pelago CEO Jeff Holden.