Hunch Tries Local Recommendations. Recommendation site Hunch has been going through a reboot lately. Back in June, it stopped showing results to people who are not signed in, and earlier this month it redesigned its home page to offer personalized taste recommendations across a wide variety of categories such as dog breeds, U.S. national parks, camcorders, soft drinks, luggage, and film directors. Now it is testing out local recommendations on a map with a sidebar showing restaurants, nightlife, hotels, spas, clothing stores, and more.
Hunch local tries to figure out which spots your friends on different services might like (you can sign in with your Twitter or Facebook account) and offers them up at the top of its local search results. Each spot has a corresponding pin on the map. You can filter by different types of venues, and there is also a slider which lets you select more personalized “unique” results or more “popular” ones. The restaurant recommendations it gave me are pretty decent for an early alpha. How Location Services Could Impact Health Care. Imagine a hospital that could respond to medical emergencies armed with real-time information about exactly where all its doctors were located. Inside the hospital, which cardio specialist is closest to the 4th floor? Outside the hospital - if an on-call physician is racing to get to a patient's side, how far away are they and when can they be expected to arrive?
From emergency to non-emergency to everyday preventative health care, location tracking technologies could make a big impact on our health and well-being in the future. While two million consumers use Foursquare today to find the best nearby coffee shops and bars, what if in the future they used it to locate the best pediatricians, emergency clinics, or even restaurants that catered to their unique health needs? Some intersection between location and health care has already begun, but what we've seen so far is likely only the beginning. For the Patient These kinds of strategies may be less far-fetched than they seem. Hot Or Not’s App Answers The Next Question: Close By Or Not? It was only a matter of time before this app came out. The folks over at Hot or Not have launched a location-based free iPhone app that will show you the hottest ladies and gents that are close to you.
If you aren’t familiar with Hot or Not, the site allows you to rate pictures of girls or a guys (depending on your taste) on a scale of 1 to 10. It’s a mindless site and game which has managed to gather a fairly massive user base. The app is fairly simple in what it does: it uses the iPhone’s built-in GPS technology to map out the hottest guys or girls registered on HotOrNot.com that are close to your location. Currently the site draws from a database of 4.8 million members. Hot or Not says that the app received more than 2,000 sign-ups its first day in the App Store. Last year, the startup also launched Hot Or Not War, which we covered here. The Wilderness Downtown. Location Is The Missing Link Between Social Networks And The Real World. Imagine a world where you sit at your computer and you never go outside.
Where you never see another human being. This is the world that sites like Google and Facebook want you to live in. Though they’d never admit to such a thing, the reasoning should be obvious: The longer you’re at your computer, the more time you’re spending on their sites. The more time your spending on their sites, the more ads you’re being served. The more ads being served, the more money they are earning. No matter why these sites originally started, or what features they add, that is, quite literally, the bottom line. They’d have us strapped to a chair with our eyes taped open like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, if they could. Thankfully, we don’t quite live in that world yet.
Social networking has been perhaps the most popular trend on the Internet over the past several years. Ever since the term was born, countless people have debated the implications of taking social interactions virtual. GeoAPI.com - location infrastructure, GIS, and geo-location services. The GeoAPI Launches For Places, Tweets, Flickr Photos, And More. Location, location, location. With the growing ubiquity of GPS-equipped phones, there is a virtual land rush going on right now to put geolocation capabilities in every mobile app. Today, Mixer Labs, the folks behind TownMe, introduced the GeoAPI, aimed at developers who want to add geolocation features to their apps in a plug-and-play fashion.
The GeoAPI is built on top of what was previously called the TownMe GeoAPI, which offered a reverse geo-coder for lat/long coordinates and geo-database of 16 million businesses and points of interest. But now it is its own separate product, and with today’s release the GeoAPI now includes geo-coded Tweets and Flickr photos, improved search, a dedicated short URL (http//:geo.am) for location-specific links, an iPhone SDK, and better intersection data. You can find out more details here. To get a basic feeling for how this works, check out these simple demos for geo-coded Tweets and Flickr photos in San Francisco. Booyah - Play MyTown! Go Out With Gowalla. GoWalla Worth Nearly $30 Million After Financing. Time To Make Your Move, Facebook.
If you were gettin’ all antsy in the pantsies about yesterday’s launch of the LG Expo and it’s detachable projector accessory, you might be a bit bewildered right now. A full day later, AT&T’s still showing no sign of the handset. WMExperts did a bit of digging, and found out that the Expo has been delayed for at least “a few days” due to shipping issues. When this sort of stuff happens, it’s generally because a cargo ship coming from Asia had to turn around for one reason or another, or otherwise never left the port. There’s no word just yet on a new ETA for the handset – we’ll let you know if that changes. Gowalla.
Location based Chat. SimpleGeo - Location is Hard. Make it Simple. SimpleGeo Locates $1.5 Million And Many Big Name Investors. There is a lot of buzz around SimpleGeo right now. The service, which participated in our RealTime CrunchUp earlier this month, also took home two prizes at the Under The Radar conference just prior to that.
And that was a big deal for the company considering it won the audience award even though it’s not exactly the most consumer-oriented project. But people seem to understand that the location space is getting really hot right now, and SimpleGeo, which provides its geolocation infrastructure to other companies, offers one of the best models to capitalize on that.
So it should be no surprise that they’ve attracted some big time investors. SimpleGeo has just closed a $1.5 million seed round of funding, we’ve confirmed. This round, led by First Round Capital, also includes from Redpoint Ventures, Ron Conway, Kevin Rose, Chris Sacca, Joshua Schachter, David Cohen, Debbie Landa, Tim Ferriss, Shawn Fanning, Gary Vaynerchuk, David Lee, and Freestyle Capital. The Great Location Land Rush Of 2010. Back in November, at our Realtime CrunchUp event, I sat on the geolocation panel with members of Twitter, Foursquare, SimpleGeo, GeoAPI, Hot Potato, and Google. At one point, I raised the question if location was going to be the next battleground between startups large and small, much like social identity plays (Facebook Connect vs. Google Friend Connect) and status updates (Twitter vs.
Facebook). All of the panelists indicated that it wouldn’t be, because they could all get along. How sweet. Sadly, I don’t believe them. I’m sure some of them would counter that because location data is fairly standard right now, and moving easily between services, all of them will win. Twitter co-founder Evan Williams writes today that “We will be looking at how to integrate the work Mixer Labs has done with the Twitter API in useful ways…” and notes that they’ll be working on adding contextual local relevancy to tweets.
In my mind, this is how this is shaping up. Game on. [photos: flickr/Serge Melki] It’s Time For An Open Database Of Places. With last week’s declaration by Twitter that it intends to start identifying places based on the coordinates of geo-coded Tweets, the location land rush is in full swing. A long list of companies including Twitter, Google, Foursquare, Gowalla, SimpleGeo, Loopt, and Citysearch are far along in creating separate databases of places mapped to their geo-coordinates. Mapping businesses, in particular, to the GPS locations near where people are checking in, Tweeting from or pegging a photo is the first step to be able to show them geo-targeted ads, which could help fuel local mobile online advertising in a major way.
Here is the problem: These efforts at creating an underlying database of places are duplicative, and any competitive advantage any single company gets from being more comprehensive than the rest will be short-lived at best. It is time for an open database of places which all companies and developers can both contribute to and borrow from. Image: Flickr/Nate Bolt. Mappiness, the happiness mapping app. Mappiness iPhone App Maps Happiness (Say That Three Times Fast) Officially launching today is Mappiness, a UK iPhone app that “maps Happiness” by pinging users with a survey in order to plot out their feelings during the day (happiness, in this case, is apparently user-defined). Using LBS, the app links responses and response locations to environmental data in an attempt to, according to lead researcher George MacKerron, “better find answers on the impacts of natural beauty and environmental problems on individual and national well being.” MacKerron, based at the London School Economics, elaborated on the idea of tracking happiness, “In the 19th century economists imagined a ‘hedonometer,’ a perfect happiness gauge, and psychologists have more recently run small scale ‘experience sampling’ studies to see how mood varies with activity, time of day and so on.”
Mappiness is the first project of its kind to add location to the mix. Now, thanks to the iPhone, we might get a better grasp on humanity’s happiness habits. GPSFILM - Location Based Moving Cinema. Neer.