New York City kicked off voting on Thursday on its third annual BigApps competition, which rewards apps that use its open data sets. But one of the most popular resources appears to be Foursquare, which is in use in more than half of the top apps. Read More »
Tech
Mainstream mobile users have been slow to embrace location-based services. But location apps could really see a boost through the smart use of voice activated AI systems like Siri, which can help users more easily unlock the world around them. Read More »
Life360, a mobile family safety app, has been on a tear and is now up to 10 million users. That growth has helped the San Francisco start-up pull in a $3.5 million Series A round from a host of investors. Read More »
Gowalla has had a good run in the location-based check-in market, taking on Foursquare before getting lapped by its New York rival. Now, Facebook is confirming it has bought the team behind Austin-based Gowalla to bolster its new Timeline feature. Read More »
Apple is not done taking on application makers with iOS 5. It just announced it is launching a new location-sharing feature called Find my Friends, that will allow users to easily share their location with other users. It should spark some competition with existing location-sharing services. Read More »
Last week I caught up with Naveen Selvadurai, co-founder of the New York-based startup, Foursquare. While I’ve spent a lot of time chatting with his co-founder Dennis Crowley, it was the first time I got to spend quality time with Naveen; here’s part of our conversation. 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 »
Location Labs has built a solid business with its location-finding and texting-while-driving prevention tools. Now, the company is taking its idea of family security one step further by launching a Facebook online monitoring tool, which will now be part of a suite of software safety tools. Read More »
Gowalla, like many other check-in services, has had trouble keeping pace with Foursquare. But the location startup is relaunching its service with an eye toward becoming more of a city travel guide, downplaying the role of check-ins in favor of discovery, travel and storytelling. Read More »
Echoecho, a Los Angeles–based startup, lets people request location updates from friends in their phone address book, who can decide whether to respond with their coordinates. The company announced Thursday that it has raised $750,000 in seed funding from Google Ventures and UK-based PROFounders Capital. Read More »
The Pew Internet Project found that 28 percent of American adults use some form of mobile and social location-based services to get directions, recommendations or check into a location. But Pew found that only 4 percent of adults use their phones specifically for check-ins alone. Read More »
As location-based services grow up, we’re seeing that games are not the appealing part of location and increasingly it seems like start-ups are acknowledging that games are tough to build a business on. Gowalla seemed to acknowledge that by killing its virtual items feature today. Read More »
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