More geolocation Stories

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Geoloqi, ESRI, location based services
photo: Geoloqi

Geoloqi, a small Portland, OR startup that made it easy for mobile developers to add background location tracking and geo-fencing to their apps, has sold to ESRI, a longtime provider of mapping and planning tools for governments, companies and educational institutions. Read more »

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Global positioning systems provide better location accuracy over solutions that use Wi-Fi networks, but just how much better is GPS? Yelp sifted through its check-in data to see and not only found out the accuracy variance, but also an interesting location tidbit on iPhones vs Androids. Read more »

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Location data provider Skyhook has an update to its mobile SDK for Android that will provide persistant background location tracking with no or negligible impact on battery life. That could be a big help for location-based apps that have suffered because of battery constraints. Read more »

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It all seems so easy: You log into Facebook, update your status, tell everyone where you are and — voila! — your Timeline is geospatial. Only, while it’s just one extra step for you to add location, building that capability was a tad more complicated for Facebook. Read more »

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Ever since it emerged from Chicago’s small startup community in 2008, Groupon has had nothing short of a spectacular story in terms of its growth: With estimated annual revenues of more than $4 billion after just three years of existence, the poster child for the “group ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »

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Foursquare and Yelp are moving into more direct competition, feature by feature. On Monday, Foursquare launched a new feature that allows users to create lists of the places they’ve checked into or plan to visit, bringing it further into the review and recommendation space. Read more »

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Geo-location check-in services such as Foursquare are super trendy in tech and new media circles. But will they catch on with mainstream audiences enough to make big retailers pay attention? A new market research study indicates that the answer may be no. Read more »

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dealmap

Google has snapped up The Dealmap, an aggregator of nearby shopping deals, in an acquisition that furthers its Google Offers ambitions. The purchase, whose price was not disclosed, shows that Google is proceeding even without its unsuccessful $6 billion bid for Groupon last year. Read more »

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More than 10,000 developers behind some of the hottest mobile apps are using Foursquare’s application programming interface to tap into its location and places database, the company said Friday. The most popular apps running on Foursquare’s API include Instagram, Tweetdeck and Gowalla. Read more »

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If you think downloading yet another mobile app featuring photo-sharing, geo-location, and social networking is crazy, prepare yourself for a moment of insanity. MeetTrover, a nifty new iPhone app launched in May that perfectly fills the gaps left by Instagram, Foursquare and Yelp. Read more »

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Apple answered questions about location information and storage on the iPhone in a press release issued early Wednesday morning. The official statement follows last week’s revelation at a location services conference that Apple’s iOS 4 included an unencrypted location tracking log file. Here’s Apple’s full statement. Read more »

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Social commerce involves businesses using online collaborative tools — social networks, real-time feeds and user-generated contributions, for example — in order to sell products and services to consumers. The space is now more dynamic than ever: Hundreds of startups like Groupon, Zynga and CrowdStar have emerged, and it’s also attracting the attention — and cash — of online giants like Google, Amazon and Apple. This report examines the factors propelling the sector’s growth, how it will evolve over the next one to three years and what that means for those companies involved. We also examine factors inhibiting the growth of social commerce, and the likelihood of fragmentation as more local markets emerge. Companies mentioned in this report include Groupon, Foursquare, Gowalla, Playfish and LivingSocial. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »

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The always-unpredictable mobile space enters 2011 at a particularly dynamic time. Carriers are now bringing 4G networks online, even as their definitions of “4G” vary. Meanwhile, mobile data consumption is exploding and the FCC trying to settle on policies both to regulate the industry and to ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »

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“Local” and “social” go together like bread and butter. Add “mobile” and you’ve a trio of hot technologies that’s attracting capital from investors and big companies alike. For consumers, there are obvious synergistic experiences: mobility is local by definition, as are many social activities like physical-world ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »

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Originally intended to get shoppers out in full-force to start the holiday shopping season, Black Friday has become a holiday unto itself, where bargain hunters shake off their turkey hangovers to wake up before dawn and chase amazing deals. But as is the case with most ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »

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How big is big enough? When do new consumer technologies really start to catch on? What happens when they do? These are questions of critical mass, and there’s plenty of historical evidence to point at the ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »

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There’s been a flurry of activity lately in local mobile advertising, which is often called the Holy Grail of marketing. Players like Google and Facebook have an edge thanks to their sheer size, but smaller players will have a place at the table if they keep ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »

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location

Location-based shopping services (LBS) have made many headlines recently, and studies have shown that users actually like receiving ads and offers well-targeted to their interests. Couple that with an influx of Tier 1 venture capital and the show-stopping Facebook Places, with which several startups have already joined forces, and it’s no wonder LBS is suddenly such a hot topic in the mobile sector. That doesn’t necessarily mean LBS shopping apps will be easy to implement. A number of challenges — privacy concerns, scaling issues and check-in integrity among them — provide a potential barrier to widespread adoption. This note examines both the drivers and inhibitors for making location-based shopping services a mainstream phenomenon, and includes focused profiles of Facebook, Twitter, Google, Loopt, Foursquare, BrightKite, Whrrl, Gowalla, Plancast, Groupon, AisleBuyer, Bizness Apps, Offeretti, ShopAlerts, Shopkick, Bakodo, Stickybits, Yelp!, Geodelic Sherpa, WHERE, MyTown, InCrowd, SCVNGR, Waze and Layar. Read more at GigaOM Pro »

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HTML5 isn’t yet fully ratified, but browser vendors are  nonetheless starting to implement some of its features. This presents a huge opportunity for forward-thinking web app developers, which in turn will spell good news for ever-growing number people who uses web ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »

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Samsung Electronics, world’s second largest mobile phone maker as a customer says it will use Skyhook Wireless’s geo-local services and build them into its smartphones starting with Samsung Wave. Skyhook now counts Apple, Dell, Motorola and Samsung as its device customers along with startups like Foursquare. Read more »

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Location, one of the hottest segments in mobile, is a key component not just in navigation apps but also social offerings such as Foursquare, Google Buzz and even Twitter. There’s plenty of opportunity in mobile location. And there will be for quite some time. Read more »

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Location is a nascent space with plenty of wrinkles to iron out, including thorny privacy concerns and less-than-pinpoint positioning technologies. But there are plenty of opportunity in location, and there will be for quite some ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »

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The investment into the next generation of location and augmented reality applications is as big as the buzz around them. Novel and clever applications are appearing that connect the applications environment into the vast pool of content on the web. While we see amazing apps and ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »

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Geodelic, a developer of location-based applications, has launched an iPhone application and signed a major deal with Korea Telecom to provide a special Seoul version of its app. The company is riding the geolocation wave. It eventually wants to open its publishing system to consumers. Read more »

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Nothing gets buzz flowing like a security scare. A tape recording suggesting that Sprint provided law enforcement agencies with customer location data over 8 million times in one year has been made public. This is a sticky issue, but Sprint Nextel has a rebuttal. Read more »

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Apple has posted details on a new full-time position at its Cupertino headquarters for an iPhone Software Engineer who will join its newly created Maps team. On the job description web page, Apple says it wants to “…take Maps to the next level,” and “…rethink how […] Read more »

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As another week draws to a close, the App Store expands even further with a torrent of new toys and tools. As ever, I’ve hand-picked four recent iPhone releases for you to take a look at. This week I’ve given our picks a creative vibe, selecting […] Read more »

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As you may already know, one of the improvements that came along with iPhone 3.0 was mobile Safari’s ability to access the iPhone and iPod touch’s geolocation services. Geolocation is quickly becoming a feature that more and more web developers are looking at implementing, especially given […] Read more »

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If you’re using the new Release Candidate of Firefox 3.5, and many of us are, it’s worth looking into the posts at the Mozilla Hacks site to get to know how some of the most powerful new features in the browser work. There are more than […] Read more »

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Since Apple doesn’t provide detailed release notes with each of their beta installments, it’s understandable that details about less obvious features and changes would only come to light gradually, as people poked around and tried different (and sometimes unusual) things with their devices. Computerworld’s Seth Weintraub […] Read more »

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Compete, the web research company, has come up with some interesting findings about location-based services and their use among smartphone users. According to a survey of 1,000 such people: 1 in 3 currently use a LBS at least once a month. Smartphone owners who use LBS […] Read more »

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