You Think Foursquare is a privacy risk?  Try going to Harriton High School.
With the interwebs buzzing about privacy and location, we couldn’t resist pointing out one suburban Philly high school’s hamfisted and Big Brotherish attempt to spy on its students.
Here is what we know so far.
Harriton High gives out laptops to its students.
These laptops are [...]

Well we were going to have to talk about this at some point.
If you check in somewhere, you are presumably not home.
And if you are not home and that information is publicly available, someone with bad intentions could try and rob your home.
Oh.  My.  God.
To highlight this opportunity / risk, there is a brand new [...]

As it does almost every year, TED has gotten people excited about the next big thing – and this year that next big thing is augmented reality. Well, actually it’s more likely to be the big thing in 2011 or maybe even 2012 (we would humbly suggest that check-ins are the big thing [...]

In one of our favorite Valentine’s Day posts of all time, Chris Dixon posted about the “geo stack” – a model for how to think about the various layers of the geolocation ecosystem.  According to Chris, the stack looks something like this: lat long detection > lat long translation (into venues, addresses, etc.) > user [...]

This post was originally published on November 30, 2009 on Sexy Widget.
In light of our recent claim that Google Buzz is unlikely to kill Foursquare due to the check-in process being significantly more complicated, we thought the discussion around ease vs. proliferation was worth another look.
Conventional wisdom tells us that the easier an action is, [...]

No, Plancast has not hired Owen Van Natta as its VP of Business Development (although there is a plan for his welcoming party). Nevertheless, Plancast is a hot startup – as well it should be, because essentially the idea is what we consider to be half of a location-centric social network.
If you are not familiar [...]

Six clicks, plus typing content into your phone.
That’s what it takes to share your location with Google Buzz.  Here is the break down:
1 Tap on your Google Buzz bookmark2 Tap on “Nearby”3 Tap on the list of Nearby places4 Select a location5 Tap on “share what you’re thinking”6 Enter content (required)7 Click post
Compare this to [...]

The announcement yesterday of Google Buzz all but guarantees that Google has given up on its poorly thought out location experiment, Google Latitude. We’ve held off dropping Latitude into the deadpool in the hopes that Google would innovate around it and make it much more appealing. Turns outs, they decided to go down another path – instead [...]

Another week, another major business development win for Foursquare.  According to the New York Times, Foursquare has signed a joint distribution deal with restaurant guide Zagat, not unlike the Bravo deal they closed last week.
Specifically, this deal entails custom Zagat badges for Foursquare users checking in at Zagat-rated restaurants, and Zagat recommendations included in the [...]

As millions of iPhone/iPod Touch and soon to be iPad users know, Apple’s SDK’s biggest drawback is single-tasking (i.e. no background processes). As the dominant mobile platform (we don’t want to debate “best” or “most used” – Apple’s SDK is the first mobile platform almost all developers develop their apps for first, so it is [...]