The service is for companies that want to quickly roll out a ride-sharing scheme for their employees – as is generally the case with such schemes, the advantages range from greater environment-friendliness to lower petrol costs and the need for fewer parking places. As Peter Graf, SAP’s sustainability chief, put it in a statement:

“We’ve combined our mobile and cloud technologies into a carpooling solution to help provide immediate economic, environmental and social benefits to companies and their employees. As such, we expect TwoGo to not only help people and businesses save money and greenhouse gas emissions, but to also connect people more closely with each other and with the company they work for.”

TwoGo works on the web and on mobile devices. Employees can enter their travel preferences, after which Nokia’s Here platform kicks in to display likely matches. Here is (in this writer’s opinion) Nokia’s big hedge against a post-hardware future, and this deal is significant for taking the location-based services platform into the enterprise. “We believe that location will be the new frontier of technology across industries,” Nokia mapping chief Christof Hellmis said in the statement.

Although it is particularly well-suited to large enterprises — the travel giant Thomas Cook is the first announced customer, having taken part in the beta program – SAP is also pitching TwoGo at smaller companies, as employees of neighbouring businesses can share rides too.

Handily, TwoGo also works with the likes of Microsoft Outlook and Google Apps (anything iCal-compatible will do) so that ride schedules can be integrated with corporate calendars. SAP has been using TwoGo internally for almost two years, and claims to have “generated more than $5 million in value for the company” through fuel and maintenance savings, lower travel expense reimbursements, cutting down on emissions and, of course, getting more employees talking to one another as they travel to work and back.

According to a separate blog post from Nokia, TwoGo is currently available for licensing by companies in the U.S. and Germany, with other countries coming online soon.

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Donna is the name of a new iOS app that blends location services, calendaring, reminders and push notifications to embody an actual personal assistant that keeps your schedule for you. It was created by the four founders at San Francisco’s Incredible Labs: former Twitter product lead Kevin Cheng, along with Scott San Filippo, Arshad Tayyeb and Spence Murray, who arrived from Gracenote, DoubleTwist and Netscape, respectively.

Siri is a voice-powered assistant — you ask Siri questions about anything, from directions to making reservations for dinner. Donna’s creators are less focused on search; this app asks the questions and triest to anticipate what you need before you even have to ask what’s next on your personal schedule.

In developing the app, they talked to personal assistants, executive assistants, and people who employ them to understand the attributes that makes for a good assistant. They didn’t just pick a random woman’s name — the app is named after an iconic television assistant: Donna Moss, the assistant to the Deputy White House Chief of Staff Josh Lyman on The West Wing –  and someone they think reflects the best qualities of a person in that position: proactive, strong, intelligent, Cheng said.

“Good assistants seem to be people who, you ask them something, and they give the information back to you,” Cheng told me in a call earlier this week. “But really great assistants are the ones that are a step ahead of you and gave you the information before you realized you even needed it.”

In that way Donna shares similarities with Google Now — which is Android-only at the moment. That’s a search product, but it also uses location and user habits to anticipate what you want. But it doesn’t quite mimic the schedule-keeping of an assistant.

Putting an app to work for you

Based on all the stuff she does, it’s clear Donna is intended for really busy people — people who use an app like AnyDO or Wunderlist may see similarities, but with an added proactive element. It takes your appointment details from your phone’s calendar, uses your contacts, your location and the location of where you need to be next to tell you where and when you need to leave to make your next appointment on time. It cuts out fiddling with your phone to figure out directions, the weather or what’s coming next on your calendar.

It does other things to mimic a real human assistant too: you get a push notification when it’s time to leave for your next meeting; you get an update at the end of the day about what’s on the schedule for tomorrow; and if it’s raining at the location you’re heading too it’ll let you know to bring an umbrella.

But the app is designed so that you actually don’t spend that much time in it: you simply get a notification for what’s next (or a call, which is in the works). And in order to not be annoying it only notifies you with something that immediately needs your attention — time to leave, time to get on a Skype call or Webex discussion, time to wake up, etc.

From there it does a lot of work for you: swipe the notification for a conference call and it will not only automatically dial you in, it will put in the conference code and mute you as well — to mimic a personal assistant dialing you in.

The app is free and the company won’t have any ads in Donna — the info you share with your personal assistant should stay personal, Cheng said — but they do have a business plan in mind: subscription access. But that’s only if they can make themselves “valuable” enough someday to charge, he said.

Donna is launching in private beta starting Thursday, so you’ll have to sign up for an invitation. Cheng says he hopes to open the app to the public soon after.

Incredible Labs has raised $2.5 million in seed funding so far from Khosla Ventures, Betaworks, Maynard Webb, Crunchfund, Ashton Kutcher and others.

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BusinessWeek broke the news of the Series D funding round early on Thursday, an article that was quickly followed by a post from founder Dennis Crowley on the official Foursquare blog — entitled “Continuing Foursquare’s Growth” — and posts from two separate partners at one of the company’s main financial backers, New York-based Union Square Ventures.

Crowley compares the challenges to Google

In his post, Foursquare founder and CEO Crowley describes the challenges ahead — including some fairly dramatic technical challenges, such as the need to index and filter more than 3.5 billion check-ins and other location data in something approaching real time, in order to successfully recommend to users a restaurant or other business that fits their needs. Crowley compares it to the kind of data wrangling that Google has to do in order to provide search results:

“To us, this is like when Google came and revolutionized web search. Suddenly, you could find things on the internet. The real world is the same way. Four years ago when we started Foursquare, it was really hard to discover a new retro arcade that opened up on a side street, or to make sure you weren’t overlooking the best dish on the menu, or to know a good friend was just around the corner. Sometimes, we think of Foursquare as having the ability to give people superpowers for exploring the real world.”

In a post at the Union Square Ventures blog, Albert Wenger talked about the potential for Foursquare to capitalize on its new focus as a platform for discovering local businesses — something GigaOM’s Eliza Kern highlighted in her post on the newly redesigned Foursquare app, which launched on Wednesday. In effect, the company is going head-to-head with local recommendation services like Yelp, and giving up its earlier focus on “gamification” elements like mayorships and badges.

Debt instead of a lower valuation

Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson, meanwhile, wrote a post on his own blog about the fact that Foursquare chose to (or was forced to) use convertible debt rather than equity. As Wilson explains, this kind of late-stage debt issue is often used when a company doesn’t want to (or can’t) raise equity because doing so would involve a “down round” — in other words, raising money at a lower valuation than it was given in earlier rounds. As he described it:

“Both of our firms have been investors in Foursquare for several rounds and both of us own a meaningful stake in the company. Valuation is somewhat immaterial to us as our stake in the company is not going to increase much in this round of financing. But valuation is very material to the Foursquare management team because $41mm of capital is going to be dilutive at any valuation that would make sense here.”

As Foursquare has evolved from being a fresh young startup with the hot iPhone app — which it was in 2009, when it launched at the SxSW festival — into a four-year-old company that has raised a total of $70 million in three separate rounds, it has faced increasing pressure to prove that it has a real business, along with questions about whether it can ever justify its earlier valuation, which was in the $600 million range. In a report in January, private-company research firm PrivCo argued that Foursquare could go out of business by the end of the year unless it raised more money.

In a much-publicized spat on Twitter last month, investor Keith Rabois — a former PayPal founder who is a backer of Foursquare competitor Yelp — said Foursquare’s only option was to be acquired, because it had failed to back up its valuation with any real business success.

@dens @sriramk @hunterwalk great use of jargon. Maybe Hail Mary Bebo-style acquisition will bail you out.—
Keith Rabois (@rabois) March 16, 2013

Foursquare needs to prove it is a business

Foursquare’s biggest problem is that it hasn’t been able to generate any meaningful revenue from the millions of users and partnerships it has announced over the past couple of years — according to an anonymous source quoted in the BusinessWeek article, the company had revenue last year of just $2 million, which makes a $600-million valuation look almost ridiculous. According to Crowley, much of the new financing will be used to develop advertising products that can run next to Foursquare’s local recommendations.

Despite its inability to produce revenue, the company’s supporters remain optimistic about its chances of building a truly large-scale and profitable local recommendation service. Hunter Walk, a former YouTube staffer turned venture capitalist, said on Twitter “All I know is the financing allows them to continue building a product I love,” and Shai Goldman of the 500Startups angel fund said: “I hope they figure out how to monetize, I’m a fan.” Even John Lilly of Greylock Partners, which didn’t invest in the company, said on his blog that he thinks Foursquare has a chance to build a real business:

“What does matter is that they raised the money they need to give this a real go. I have high confidence in these guys that they’ll do well and build interesting products and a great business for a long time.”

Others, however, were less complimentary — and many seem to see Foursquare as a high-risk bet, much like email-offer flameout Groupon:

.@mdudas @jackgavigan @rabois @bijan I can only hope foursquare goes public. I didn't short Groupon nearly big enough.—
Rakesh Agrawal (@rakeshlobster) April 11, 2013

Post and thumbnail photo courtesy of Pinar Ozger

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Apigee manages, monitors and optimizes mobile application programming interfaces (APIs), which act as the glue connecting technologies, services and data sources across networks. So far Apigee has focused on the mobile industry, attempting to whip into shape the different network APIs used by hundreds of different carriers and present them to developers as a simple common interface.

Now Apigee plans to go after other industries such as healthcare and the airlines. Those industries have a lot of useful information, from frequent flier miles to health records, that developers would love to access if only it weren’t so fragmented. On Thursday Apigee announced what it’s calling the API Exchange, which essentially takes the model it’s devised for telecom and applies it to any other industry.

Healthcare companies and airlines actually have a lot in common in mobile carriers, said David Andrzejek, who heads up the Exchange for Apigee. Their industries are highly regulated and dominated by multiple, very large, vertically integrated companies using proprietary technology that is unfathomable to all but the most committed developer. “The barriers are normally just too high for any developer to build anything against,” Andrzejek said.

For the mobile carriers, the problem has always been that developers couldn’t just tap into a single API to use their location, presence or payment services – developers have to tap into the separate APIs of hundreds of carriers around the world. Consequently no developer wanted to deal with carriers, further marginalizing them. The mobile industry spent years trying to develop a common set of APIs that would present a unified front to the developer world. They failed spectacularly.

When Apigee took over the GSM Association’s OneAPI program, it pretty much gave up on the dream of standardizing under a single set of carrier APIs (which makes the program’s name a bit outdated). Instead, Apigee took to connecting all of the carriers’ different APIs to a single platform and then translating them into a single meta-interface that any developer could hook into. At Mobile World Congress this year, Apigee and the GSMA presented the initial fruits of that labor: an identity-management API any app developer could use to authenticate users via their phone numbers.

It’s still early days for the OneAPI project, but Apigee feels it’s learned enough dealing with the fickle mobile carriers to take on other big complex industries. Just like the carriers, airlines and insurance companies haven’t standardized under any common APIs, and for competitive reasons they’re unlikely to do so.

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Neighborhood-oriented products can either attempt to provide an entire social network for those communities, or provide information specifically for tourists or shoppers. But the trend toward neighborhoods makes sense, since people searching for information from a particular community are perfect targets for advertising, which relies on clear evidence of someone’s intent to purchase plus location-specific information for success.

So which are some of the startups tackling neighborhood data as a way to stand out? Here are a few that have caught my eye:

The neighborhood platform for travelers: Airbnb

When I first moved to San Francisco I stayed in an Airbnb apartment while conducting my apartment search, which was a perfect way to get to know the city before signing a lease. However, being totally new to both San Francisco and Airbnb, my selection of short-term neighborhood was pretty random. Now that Airbnb has become a de facto travel option for tech-savvy travelers, the company has smartly decided to release neighborhood guides for its major cities, giving travelers a sense of what they’re getting into with each neighborhood before they book, and perhaps encouraging travelers to look outside the most trafficked haunts. The guides are heavy on beautiful photos and light on text (they could benefit from a few more suggestions for popular destinations), but they do give you a sense of what you’ll see on the streets (just check out the guide to the Tenderloin for evidence). It’s easy to see how the company could introduce ads for local businesses or popular hangouts within those guides — in fact, the company has already partnered with local coffee shops to provide Wi-Fi and more city info.

The neighborhood platform for the civic-minded: Neighborland

Neighborland (see disclosure) at first glance seems very much like Quora, one of the more popular question and answer sites on the web, but a version of Quora used by your action-oriented neighbors who want to get things done. Want to rally local support around an issue? In San Francisco alone, Neighborland lets people come together on everything from getting more bike cars on BART, finding a more creative use for the old Bay Bridge, or getting more public fruit trees in town. It’s unclear if Neighborland can get things done, or if it’ll just turn into a platform for the naive and complainers among us. But CEO and co-founder Dan Parham said the next phase is “one hundred percent focused on turning intent into action,” and as it expands nationwide this week, the company is an interesting example of rallying digital support for local issues.

The neighborhood platform for families: Nextdoor

Providing any kind of personal information in a social network for neighborhoods immediately raises privacy concerns, which is why Nextdoor is so attuned to that issue and highlights its privacy features and civic-mindedness on the social network for neighbors. Having just raised $18.6 million in funding in June, it’s one of the most visible neighborhood-specific startups in San Francisco, and has been growing despite the fairly laborious sign-up process that’s intended to protect user privacy. The site allows users to create profiles for their families, filling out information on everything from children to pets, and then connecting with neighbors to find babysitters, coordinate yard sales, or note local crime. Because of its recommendation element, allowing users to look for local businesses to serve their needs, Nextdoor seems especially primed to eventually target local commerce.

Disclosure: Neighborland is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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The local reviews service is buying European peer Qype for $50 million (€18.6 million in cash, the rest in 970,000 Yelp shares).

Why buy? Jeremy Stoppelman (via release):

“With its strong local content in key markets like Germany and the United Kingdom, we believe that Qype will help Yelp become the de facto choice for local search in those markets.

“Qype’s established European sales force will also bring more local business owners into the Yelp ecosystem, which in turn will bolster our mission to connect people Yelp CEO with great local businesses all over the world.”

Yelp on Wednesday also guided observers to expect a Q3 net loss of $2 million on revenue of $36.4 million – above analysts’ average expectation of $35.79 million.

Founded in 2006 by German entrepreneur Stephan Uhrenbacher, Hamburg, Germany-based Qype was loaded with $23.1 million in investment from Advent, Partech, Wellington and others, according to CrunchBase - a string of European VCs.

This marks another European exit to a larger US category rival. But it is not one of the largest in money terms.

The outfit’s strength has always been its international breadth, operating in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Austria, Ireland, Poland, Spain, Italy and Brazil.

The startuppy name has always proved a bit awkward, leading to an amusing scene in the UK TV show The Apprentice when one contestant struggled to pronounce “Qype” but nevertheless used it as the inspiration for a pie shop.

Such services have eaten up traditional Yellow Pages directories’ classifieds business. Now Google’s integration of Google+ and its local listings challenges dedicated local reviews services, too. But Yelp has lucrative supply partnerships with Apple, for example, and Qype will now be injected in to that offering.

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Crowley said the site’s 25 million active users have generated more than 2.5 billion check-ins in its almost four years, and as a result of all that active and passive data Foursquare can evolve to fulfill Crowley’s true vision. “We want to change the way you interact with the physical world,” Crowley said.

He said more users are downloading the app without ever intending to check in, and instead use it to get tips on restaurants, much like they would with Yelp. The site has also redesigned the app to emphasize local search and recommendations over check ins as a way to get users to choose Foursquare instead of alternatives. He also explains monetizing local search would look less like current web advertising and instead involve collecting a few dollars from a few million merchants as a possible revenue stream.

So the value for Foursquare isn’t just check-ins, but the passive knowledge the app collects as a user goes about their daily life. Foursquare uses that to offer recommendations personalized to the user about where they spend most of their time, “It’s not that dissimilar to rating something on Netflix (nflx) or clicking a rating on Amazon except we’re doing this in the real world.”

This extends to Crowley’s vision of a Harry Potter style map: when you open it on the phone, it can show you where you friends are and what you might like to eat. Eventually the recommendations and knowledge that Foursquare has about you means it could react to what a user’s needs at that moment based on where they are. Unfortunately, the processing and radio communications his vision requires would drain your battery.

Check out the rest of our Mobilize 2012 coverage here, and the live stream can be found here.

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Skyhook’s new Always-On feature, one part of its latest 4.6 version, allows developers to grab location data as frequently as every 30 seconds with accuracy down to 10-20 meters. Ted Morgan, Skyhook’s CEO declined to explain exactly how the company is pulling this off. But he said Skyhook is building off of previous location tracking work it’s done, which downloads more data up front and processes more of the location tracking on the phone.

The previous service, which tried to optimize bandwidth, CPU processing and radios, still meant losing an hour or two of battery life over the course of a day. Now, developers don’t have to deal with any trade-offs, he said.

“We’re now getting more intimate with the way the phone is working and we’ve tuned the system to take advantage of all that,” Morgan said. 

This could be a big help for apps that want to surface local offers, highlight nearby services or aid in local people discovery. Now, the apps that use Skyhook have a better shot at delivering real location services without a major sacrifice to the overall user experience. Skyhook is currently deployed on a couple hundred apps that reach 100 million devices.

Developers of location-based apps are getting more help from the likes of Skyhook and, also, Geoloqi, a Portland, Ore. startup that also offers background location processing with very light battery usage. Geoloqi’s SDK works on iOS, something Skyhook isn’t able to do. But Morgan hopes that Apple will allow Skyhook as it sees the need to enable more background location processing.

Skyhook’s updated SDK also offers location tracking for users in airplanes. So apps using Skyhook can determine a person’s location as they fly across the country. That might give rise to some virtual pilot apps that let people know what they’re flying over and nearby points of interest. It could also be a fun addition for location-sharing apps.

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I installed the free software and used it for a test call; it showed a fake user nearby me on a map. A nice touch is the routing button on the map. Tap the button and Mapfia will show you how to navigate to your friend. I love the concept, which reminds me of  Glympse, a similar app that I use often. Unlike Glympse, Mapfia doesn’t require any special action to share location. You simply use the app to make a voice call.

However, there’s a few items that may be sticking points for some and one relates to the reason I used the app’s test call feature instead of calling someone I know. Mapfia doesn’t have a dial pad, which sounds odd at first, but makes sense when you think about it. Both callers need to have Mapfia installed and be using it for the voice conversation. Mapfia says calls are free.

So how do you actually call someone with Mapfia? Upon installation you must give the application access to your phone’s contacts. There’s no way around this requirement that I can see. And once you do so, that app prompts you to invite any or all of your contacts to use Mapfia; this option you can skip. Of course, if you do that, you don’t have anyone to call and share your location with.

I’m not pointing this out as a problem with the software, because without both ends of the conversation using Mapfia, I can’t see how it would work. However, if you’re the type that doesn’t want to gain a service by sharing personal information of your own, or your friends, this isn’t the solution for you. I may keep it on my phone and add only my family members to the service as I’d most likely use it with them anyway.

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