Is there any way to stand out among the glut of social, local, mobile services? Everplaces and Circleme, two new European startups just coming out of private beta, certainly hope so — and both are attempting to put their own twist on the combination of people … Read More »
Tech
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 »
HipGeo is an iPhone app that passively tracks your location and can easily turn your trips into travel diaries. On Thursday, the company will release its first public API and location widgets so that any application or website can mimic some of HipGeo’s geo-location features. 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 »
Rovio wants to take Angry Birds local by enhancing game play for users when they visit real-world locations. The feature builds off an NFC feature for certain Nokia phones, and unlocks new levels when users tap their phones together or tap in at a location. Read More »
Google has hit 200 million installs of Google Maps on mobile devices, said Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of maps and local today. The milestone highlights Google’s strength in location especially in regards to mobile devices, which is benefitting from the rise of Android devices. Read More »
Google said Friday it has added location-based news to its mobile version of Google News — not a huge development for the web giant, but another step towards offering news that is personally relevant to readers, something newspapers and other media outlets continue to struggle with. Read More »
Hot on the heels of the furor over Apple’s location databases, personal navigation device giant TomTom is in trouble for selling speed data to police. But both companies have shown how technology firms are too quick to dismiss the worries of their customers. Read More »
The news that Apple devices keep a record of your movements has generated plenty of coverage. Now, however, one researcher says not only has the knowledge been public for some time, but it’s already being used by security researchers and law enforcement agents. Read More »
Google may have more distributed data than any other company but it still takes user input to create smarter machines. Google’s Voice Search speech recognition, for example, began to improve when the service started to train itself and improve accuracy through the use of end-user data Read More »
Skyhook’s deal to provide the location information for Priceline’s Hotel Negotiator Android app illustrates the recent work Skyhook has done to get around an impasse with Google that has limited the reach of its location technology on mobile apps. Read More »
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