Comments on: Location, Location, Location: SimpleGeo, Twitter, Flook

By: SimpleGeo Now Indexing 1m+ Locations Per Hour - www.Korallenkacke.com

SimpleGeo Now Indexing 1m+ Locations Per Hour - www.Korallenkacke.com — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 08:56:32 +0000

[...] company told Liz Gannes of Gigaom in November that it received 600 beta applications on its first day after announcing itself [...]

By: Twitter Acquires GeoAPI Maker Mixer Labs – GigaOM

Twitter Acquires GeoAPI Maker Mixer Labs – GigaOM — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 22:48:19 +0000

[...] Mixer Labs acquisition will complement Twitter’s already launched geo-tagging API, which it has made available to developers to allow their users to specify their [...]

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:56:32 +0000

Looking at that link - I think the geoAPI.com app is different in that it assists 3rd parties in scraping geo-specific information together to produce location based apps.

Flook is more like a location-based-wiki in that it is the users themselves that create the content which describes the world in any given place. The quality of the content that they place is rewarded by a Flook score in order to encourage excellent descriptions of the world around you. Mine is rubbish at the moment.

I'm finding it quite addictive. Though it may just be the robots.

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 10:28:14 +0000

Just when you thought there couldn’t be any more location-style apps three new ones come at once!

Particularly love the Flook site – http://www.flook.it – if only for the ROBOTS.

Why are there not more robots in my life?

By: Peter Batty

Peter Batty — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 22:53:19 +0000

No pun intended … they don’t compete locally either :) ! Actually the SimpleGeo and PublicEarth offices are only a few blocks from one another in Boulder. I know the SimpleGeo guys and am on the advisory board at PublicEarth. There’s quite a lot of interesting location stuff going on in the Boulder-Denver area.

By: Liz Gannes

Liz Gannes — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:21:12 +0000

Thanks Peter. “Remotely” pun intended or no?

By: Peter Batty

Peter Batty — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:33:26 +0000

Just fyi, PublicEarth and SimpleGeo are not remotely competitive. PublicEarth is all about location content. SimpleGeo is a platform for building location applications.

By: Katie Fehrenbacher

Katie Fehrenbacher — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:02:59 +0000

love the headline!

By: Liz Gannes

Liz Gannes — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 07:40:22 +0000

Thanks Elad. Would love to learn more.

By: Liz Gannes

Liz Gannes — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 07:39:38 +0000

Thanks Tom. Do you think that given the personal nature of such data, users will want to control it more closely? Or will it become yet another area we let our guard down?

By: Tom Tunguz

Tom Tunguz — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 06:57:56 +0000

Today, there were four key announcements related to location:

1. Twitter released geotagging of tweets a feature to users and as an API for developers
2. Facebook released ad targeting by location
3. FourSquare opened up 50 more cities (competing with GoWalla)
4. SimpleGeo launched a Platform-as-a-Service to build location aware apps (competing with TownMe)

Location is the next layer for the web

First there was content. Then there was social. Now there is location.

In the same way that social has penetrated the core uses of the web, so will location.
Facebook Connect is ubiquitous and is starting to influence e-commerce (Facebook marketplace powered by Oodle), question and answer (Aardvark), news (CNN), and many others.

Location will forge the same path as social into ubiquitous use. E-commerce: find me a deal on a gray sweater close by; question and answer: restaurant recommendation; news: hyper local news, and so on.

9% of US phones sport GPS and netbooks are shipping with location built-in, GPS units will become ubiquitous like web cams in laptops and cameras in mobile phones. As a result, users’ locations will become constantly available and be associated with all kinds of data. For example, a bar code scanning Android App, ShopSavvy, is now selling “UPC/GPS intent pairs” to advertisers.

Control the data to maximize revenue

The owner of users’ location data is king in this new world because the data is uniquely valuable and broadly applicable. Analyzing customer behaviors can influence decisions from where to place ads, where to place new stores, and co-visitation of stores. In short, data provides insights into where customers are and how to reach them. And this is true for almost any line of business…

http://expostfacto.posterous.com/the-race-for-location-and-the-parallels-of-so

By: Elad

Elad — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:39:15 +0000

GeoAPI.com launched a similar service about 1 month ago.

Initial coverage: http://bit.ly/3F5Nn
V2 of API launch picked up by washington post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/12/AR2009111211183.html

You can sign up for an API key here: http://geoapi.com/signup