Big Brother - PrivacyTransparency. Crowdsourced Map Shows Real-World Cellphone Signal Strength. Hypercities. HyperCities Egypt. Parallel Kingdom. Parallel Kingdom - In The Beginning. Parallel Kingdom Android App Review - AndroidApps.com. Geoli.st Search Classifieds. Hungry Garden -- place-based, blog-network and search engine for. HungryGarden prezi intro. GeoTime - Geo-Temporal Information Visualization. Geotime. ESRI - The GIS Software Leader | Mapping Software and Data.
Paula Abrahamson (NakdReality) THUNDRE - Hyper-local product finder and voucher network for bri. Press Release. London, United Kingdom - May 25, 2010. Location Wild is a worldwide startup competition to create the most interesting location-based application in a week, starting Saturday, May 29. Developers and entrepreneurs have until the following Saturday, June 5, to submit their applications online to locationwild.com and compete for the prize of $2,500 and an iPad.
The location-based applications must use the services of either NakdReality or SimpleGeo, which both offer "plug-and-play" location technology, allowing participants to develop their applications quickly. The judges are TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld, Slashdot's Rob Malda, Direction Magazine's Adena Schutzberg, and The Next Web's Chad Catacchio.
"Location-based technologies are getting increasing attention worldwide, so we felt the time was right to showcase how easy it has become to create a winning startup in this space," says Paula Abrahamson, CEO of NakdReality and co-ordinator of Location Wild. More about Location Wild. GeoAPI.com - location infrastructure, GIS, and geo-location serv. Geodelic. Geodelic Scores $7 Million To Boost Its Location-Aware Mobile Ap. Exclusive – Mobile application developer Geodelic has raised $7 million in a Series B financing round led by MK Capital, with previous backers Clearstone Venture Partners and Shasta Ventures participating. The round brings the total amount of capital injected into the company to more than $10 million. Initially incubated by Clearstone in 2008, Geodelic develops a free application for mobile phones that come with ‘search-less search’, meaning the app automatically browses and shows your points of interests in your immediate vicinity.
The company was founded by Rahul Sonnad, who previously founded thePlatform, a Web video publishing service he sold to Comcast back in 2006. The Geodelic app, which is available for iPhone and Android, lets you swipe through locations to quickly find a good coffee joint, closest bank, grocery store or favorite restaurant. The application is also capable of learning what you seem to like, presenting you results based on your profile. Geodelic raises $7 million, readies for big ann. Geodelic, the Santa Monica, Calif. -based mobile application company specializing in location-based services, has raised $7 million in a Series B funding. The round was led by MK Capital, with previous investors Clearstone Ventures Partners and Shasta Ventures also taking part. The company is known for what it calls “searchless search,” which means that the Geodelic app (available for the iPhone and Android devices) automatically searches points of interest such as restaurants, retailers, cafés and bars near the user’s location.
The application displays the results in a kind of carousel, which can be spun around on the touchscreen to find places of interest nearby and further away. Geodelic is aimed at businesses, who can use the Geodelic platform as a way to approach consumers under their own brand, as opposed to Foursquare-style cobranded campaigns, where the location service shares billing with the marketer. Geodelic is going to ramp up its business with the new funding. Locast MIT /RAI Mobile Experience Lab. What Locast can be used to create: Interactive Narratives Interactive narratives that are crafted by linking together videos and photos thematically, geographically, and chronologically. These stories can be explored by viewers in a non-linear fashion. Memory Traces by the Mobile Experience Lab, in partnership with the Consulate General of Italy in Boston Community Mapping Platforms Platforms that enable communities to document their surrounding spaces, promoting civic engagement while drawing attention to important issues.
Rio Youth Mapping by the Mobile Experience Lab, in partnership with UNICEF Media-based Guides Location-aware mobile guides that allow people to discover new information about places through layers of curated and user-generated media. RAI Local Abruzzo by the Mobile Experience Lab, in partnership with RAI New media. Project Gallery Background Open Locast is designed to enable the rapid prototyping and quick deployment of location-based media platforms. Locast: Location Based Mobile Social TV -
EveryTrail - GPS Travel Community, Share your GPS Tracks, Geotag. Interactive Trip Sharing Service EveryTrail Locates $1 Million I. Palo Alto, CA-based GlobalMotion Media has raised $1 million in Series A financing from the Band of Angels and a group of domestic and international private investors. The young company is probably best known for operating EveryTrail, a GPS travel community and interactive trip sharing service. The startup is today also announcing the release of its latest iPhone application, EveryTrail 3 (iTunes link), which allows users to easily record and share their hiking, driving, skiing, motorcycling, running, skateboarding or other trips.
EveryTrail enables people to keep track of their trips, by uploading GPS files or geo-tracking their trails, and allows to them to accompany those with stories and geo-tagged photos. The web service is quite feature rich already, but it’s the mobile apps that make EveryTrail unique and very fun to use. That way, the EveryTrail community you see what you’ve been up to. Don’t have a GPS-enabled device or a file that you can upload? GlobalMotion EveryTrail. Yosemite Valley Trip. Seero - Putting Video on the Map. Inca X
Flook : Welcome to flook. FastMall Is Foursquare for Malls. This post is part of Mashable's Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. Name: FastMall Quick Pitch: Think Foursquare-meets-Yelp for shopping malls.
Genius Idea: FastMall is a website and an iPhone app that acts as both a mall directory/map/guide and a tool offering you local deals at stores, reviews of shops and eateries and fast access to information such as parking and restroom locations.Like many other red-blooded Americans who grew up in the suburbs of a major city, I love my malls. That isn't to say that I don't sometimes forget what mall has my favorite store or food court stand, or that when I travel to other places, I know the malls in those locales.
There's also a social element involved that lets you "check in" a la Foursquare to a store or mall and find deals at the shops near you.
LBS more 2. IRL Connect | Beta. Echoecho: Locating Your Friends Made Easy. Echoecho is a location-based mobile application that wants to make it easier for you to locate your friends, family members and colleagues in the real world. Echoecho only tries to get you to answer one straightforward question: Where are you? Unlike other location-based application, echoecho doesn't force you to constantly broadcast your own location. Instead, the application takes the opposite route.
Instead of telling people where you are, you ask others where they are. You could use echoecho to check where your children are, for example, or simply to meet up with your friend without having to give a long and complicated description of where exactly they can find you. Echoecho is compatible with the iPhone (iTunes link), Android, Nokia Symbian, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile. Where Are You? If your friend has already signed up for echoecho, the program will route your request through its own network and send a push notification to your friend's phone.
Permission-Based Location Sharing.
Brightkite. Brightkite/Layar advertising. Location-based social network Brightkite announced this morning that it has added what it calls the first mobile Augmented Reality advertising for U.S. markets to its AR layer in the Layar augmented reality browser. Augmented Reality (AR) is a class of technologies that place data from the web on top of a camera view of the physical world. Layar is a browser for a wide variety of AR data layers, from real-estate listings to government data to messages posted to networks like Brightkite. It is available for Android phones and was available on the iPhone until it was withdrawn from the marketplace last week due to excessive crashes.
The Brightkite ads appear to be just for electronics retailer BestBuy so far, and are displayed as unique markers in your field of view when pointed towards one of the stores. Big round circles have been added to Brightkite camera-view annotations, designating the location of nearby BestBuy stores. Will consumers find the ads more useful than invasive? Can Brightkite Beat Foursquare & Gowalla With a Universal Check- Location based social network Brightkite plans to launch a universal check-in API that will let users update their information on competing services like Gowalla, Foursquare and others later this month at South by Southwest, we believe. In a poll we ran last night about competing location networks, Mark Krynsky, founder of Lifestreamblog and CheckInBlog, left the following comment: "I'd like to see a a multi-checkin service make its appearance at SXSW that would allow me to check into all 3 mentioned in the poll (more if possible) at once.
Think Ping.fm for checkin services. " Brightkite co-founder Martin May replied: "working on exactly that. " Brightkite executives declined to share any further details before they unveil whatever it is that they are working on, but there are additional reasons to believe that we'll see a cross-system check-in tool from the company later this month. A universal check-in system is the next logical step for location based social networks. Launches LBPhoto Tips. If, while using a location-based service, you're going to laud a venue's decor, comment on its cute staff or decry the food presentation, it helps to provide photographic evidence along with your tip. Briefly put, a picture's worth a thousand words. The ladies and gentlemen at Brightkite have known and implemented this maxim for a long time, and now, they're letting users add pictures as well as text to their tips about the locations they love — or hate, as the case may be.
Like Foursquare's tips, these nuggets of knowledge are designed to impart granular information about a venue or location: The best time of day to visit, the best cocktail to order, the Wi-Fi situation, etc. Brightkite's tips can be shared just to your friends as a recommendation or to the world at large. In addition to adding photos to the "tip" paradigm, Brightkite also lets users "like" tips. Here's what tips look like on the mobile and web interfaces: Brightkite iPhone app goes iOS 4 native, adds notifications by friend proximity. Brightkite has upgraded its iOS app in what we’d call a major way, although the update is actually just 2.8, not 3.0. In addition to making the app iOS 4 native with fast switching, with high-res icons and a new look, the app has some other nice improvements.
First of all, with iOS 4, the updated app, “supports background posting and photo uploads.” The photo uploads we get, but what is “background posting”? Is that checking in the background or is just status updates from where you’ve already checked in? However, the most interesting updates are features that make the app more social. Brightkite has done this by adding a setting that allows you to set notifications from your friends by distance.
Brightkite doesn’t get a lot of buzz, and recently one its founders left the company, but they have a large user base and continue to make steady – and in this iteration innovative – progress that shouldn’t be ignored. Oh, and we want an iPad app by the way.
LBS Government CityHall. Middleman. LBS Carriers/ phoneNetworks. Not a phone, but a URL. By now, you know the details of Google's first Google-branded, Google-sold "superphone," the Nexus One: huge AMOLED touchscreen, thin-and-light form factor, available unlocked or on T-Mobile, pervasive voice input, etc. And many have already reached for the easiest narrative in which to fit Google's announcement: the Nexus One is Google's attempt at an iPhone-killer. But regardless of the simple conflict stories that the Nexus One announcement evokes, the reaction on Twitter and the comment thread for our liveblog show that the tech-savvy public already understands that the Nexus One is just another Android phone—the latest and greatest Android phone, and possibly even the latest and greatest smartphone—but an Android phone nonetheless.
The Nexus One may or may not be an iPhone killer (it probably isn't), but it doesn't matter, because the Nexus One was arguably the least significant thing that Google announced today. Divide and conquer Aligning incentives, and the iPhone curse. Google.com/phone/ YC-Funded Whereoscope Gives Parents An Easy Way To Track Where Their Kids Are. Since the dawn of mankind, and probably even a while before that, parents have been asking themselves the same question: “Where are my kids?”
In modern times they’ve come up with a few, imperfect ways to answer it, like instructing their children to send them a text message whenever they arrive at soccer practice — which works well once or twice, until the child completely forgets about it. Now Whereoscope, a Y Combinator-funded startup that’s launching today, may have a solution that’s more reliable and easier to use than most other kid-tracking solutions on the market. Whereoscope consists of an iPhone application that runs in the background (you’ll need iOS 4, which enabled background apps).
During an initial setup process, you designate a handful of key locations, or geofences, that your children often visit — their school, home, a best friend’s house, etc. You can elect to receive a push notification whenever your child leaves or arrives at one of these areas. Google's Spin: We're Not Launching a Phone, We're Launching...A. Interesting how Google is spinning the Nexus One. From the release: Google Offers New Model for Consumers to Buy a Mobile Phone Launches Nexus One, contributing further innovation to the Android ecosystem MOUNTAIN VIEW (January 5, 2010) – Google Inc. There’s way too much coverage of this event to add much here, other than to say Google is walking a fine line, and there are plenty of players looking to push it off. Update: You know, I’m thinking about this a bit more, and I think I see where Google is going with all of this. Nexus One. There will be many posts focusing on the look, feel, and features of the Nexus One, so I’m going to focus on what Android’s latest incarnation says about the competitive landscape – what I’ve elsewhere called the war for the web.
Android vs. iPhone is one important front in that “war.” News from the front: a possible turning point for Android. I’ve been a huge iPhone fan, but after using the Nexus One for a few weeks, I find so much to like that I’m close to the point where Android might be my first choice. While I may yet go back to my iPhone, I’m conflicted. The key to the turning point is not how slick the phone is – even though it’s thin, fast, bright, and beautiful, with amazing sensor-based capabilities including noise-canceling headphones, automated brightness adjustment based on external light levels, voice-activated search, navigation and data-entry, different “home” screens based on whether it’s in your pocket or sitting in car-dock.
The Android Market rocks. P.S. Buzzkill: The Nexus One Was Never About a Phone. AT&T and Others Announcing Rival to Apple App Store. Two dozen mobile carriers unite against Apple's App Store | Medi.
Sensors. LBS mobile manufacturers. LBS search/computer/... LBS gaming / EcoMap. Whereoscope | See where your kids are. Neer. LBS Augmented Reality. LBS newsmedia. LBS independent. Advertising and LBS. LBS Social Networks. Maps. Companies. Aggregators. LBS art-culture miscellaneous. General info GPS , blogs , pearls etc: LBS events. Pearltrees i teamed up with.