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Tech

My resolution: Be a better manager

Dennis Crowley, the CEO of FourSquare, explains how as a company grows, the chain of communication changes and it’s a difficult balance to make sure the company can be as transparent with 100 people as it is with 20 people. Read More »

In a matter of hours, Facebook is going to host f8, its annual developer conference. By now we have all heard everything that is coming at the event. Sources say Facebook will make some sort of announcement around NFC technologies at the event as well. Read More »

 
 

The free FLYsmart app arrives on Android devices today, offering air travelers flight tracking, gate information and airport maps with support for indoor location. Software that helps navigate inside facilities isn’t new, but as FLYsmart demonstrates, location plus other contextual services will trump navigation-only mobile apps. Read More »

Google, Nokia, Microsoft and others are all fighting for outdoor navigation prominence, but what about indoors? Aren’t there opportunities for consumers who want locations and indoor directories? One company thinks so and it provides navigation in malls and airports, with more venues to follow soon. Read More »

Does Location Need a Special Purpose Device?

A patent filed by Qualcomm suggests that location could be tied to a module that you could use with whatever device you want. That means location on your phone, iPod or netbook whenever you bother to insert the module. But apps makers are skeptical. Read More »

Aloqa's LBS iPhone App Just Misses the Mark

From Loopt to FourSquare, it seems like every mobile-focused startup these days wants to hop on board the location-based application train. Aloqa launched an iPhone version of its free Android and BlackBerry application last week (the startup’s CEO, Sanjeev Agrawal, spoke during a … Read More »

So Why Did Apple Buy a Mapping Company?

Apple purchased digital mapmaker Placebase in July for an undisclosed sum, according to Seth Weintraub at Computerworld. Placebase, which we wrote about last year, is a Google Maps competitor that focuses on adding layers of public and private data to existing maps with … Read More »

Brightkite Is Set to Relaunch

Brightkite is ready to re-launch its service. Brightkite is the company that emerged after Limbo, a Burlingame, Calif.-based startup, merged with Denver-based Brightkite. The company offers a location-based social networking service that allows folks to broadcast their location and help find bars and … Read More »

Aardvark Launches an iPhone App

Aardvark, a San Francisco-based startup that touts a web-based answer service, today released a similar application for the iPhone that will let you ask friends in your social graph questions on topics, such as recommended restaurants or books, and receive answers directly from your … Read More »

FourSquare Gets $1.35M in Venture Funding

FourSquare, the startup behind the popular LBS mobile application of the same name, has received $1.35 million in first round funding led by Union Square Ventures and including O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. Union Square Ventures is also an investor in Twitter, which is launching Read More »

Will Trendistic Trump Trendrr for Tracking Twitter Trends?

As we saw with the death of Michael Jackson and the Iranian election protests, statistics on tweets help to reveal how information spreads across the web. For many, Trendrr has emerged as the digital tracking service of choice, lauded for its both … Read More »

Twitter Wants to Capture LBS Mojo

Twitter plans to launch a location-based feature that reveals the latitude and longitude from which an individual is tweeting, co-founder Biz Stone revealed in a blog post today, signaling that the micromessaging site wants to hop onto the hot location-based services trend (a topic … Read More »

More Must Reads

The mobile advertising business is the place to be these days. AdMob, a mobile ads specialist, is about to serve its 100 billionth impression — you can watch the numbers tick up on the firm’s home page. To be sure, the number on its own … Read More »

While a good number of consumer mobile applications have tapped into the cloud, so far, only a handful of enterprise mobile applications have done the same. And the members of a panel of VCs at a “Mobilize the Cloud” event earlier this week … Read More »

We are starting to experience the “problem of plenty” on the web, which is making it difficult to find information. It’s a problem being driven in large part by the availability of the vast number of tools that make publishing to the web a … Read More »

Nearly two years ago, I outlined five reasons Apple’s iPhone will change the wireless business, the foremost being increased web usage on mobile phones. I should have added another item to that list: catalysing location-based services and applications that use geolocation data to enhance … Read More »

Location-based services finally seem to be hitting their stride after years of promise. This year at the South by Southwest (SXSW) interactive festival in Austin, Texas, several LBS startups are launching. To understand some of the costs associated with getting a user’s location information, I … Read More »

The annual SXSW Festival is on, and this year I am surprised by the number of location-aware mobile services being launched in Austin, Texas, many of them for Apple’s iPhone. SocialBomb launched its Paparazzi game, which allows you to click and share photos of your friends … Read More »

Real-world games have been tried before, but population density has always been one of their biggest challenges. The gaming might be good in Shattrath, but go to Times Square and you’re alone. Could World of Warcraft’s loyal followers help it make the first big real-world MMO? … Read More »

Unsure where you are, or where to go next? Not to worry. The number of location-based services applications out there continues to grow, fast eclipsing the days of standalone mapping and GPS. As to why, look no farther than your mobile phone. Read More »

Our growing ability to use the Internet as a giant database, apply that information in a creative way to build interesting mash-up applications, and then apply them to markets — stock, real estate or fantasy — is an area that holds a lot of fascination for … Read More »

Nokia has placed some big bets on location-based technologies, including buying a handful of companies and making a $8.1 billion bid for Navteq. The company’s vision of the future revolves around making wireless Internet more context aware. In particular, Nokia is betting on applications … Read More »

Earlier this month, India surpassed the U.S. as the second-largest mobile market (by subscriber count) in the world. With close to 280 million subscribers, it now has enough of a user base to become a breeding ground for a new class of applications that take into … Read More »

Yahoo’s location based service enabler FireEagle is entering it’s beta testing phase today with an official announcement at ETech. The new web site of the service is still featuring an invite form, just as the alpha version did, so it might … Read More »

If in the first eight years of the 21st century contextual text advertising has proven to be the magic potion, then it is safe to say that the next decade or so is going to be about location-relevant advertising and marketing messages. LBA (location-based advertising) has … Read More »

Dash Navigation, with its network-connected global positioning system (GPS) device, has achieved what so many other companies have tried and failed to do — built a service that combines disparate data streams into one place where we can use them in everyday life. And as such, … Read More »

Microsoft said today that it has acquired online mapping services provider Multimap of the UK, a move it said “will play a significant role in the future growth” of its search business. Multimap will operate as a subsidiary of the Redmond giant, part of the … Read More »

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