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 [...]

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 [...]

* Quick update: Marshall has written a nice post on this same topic over on RWW.* The backlash against social check-in services like Foursquare, Gowalla, BrightKite, Rummble, Yelp, PlacePop, etc. is beginning. A few days ago, BusinessWeek proclaimed that check-in type services have “limited appeal.”  Last week, Andrew Hyde of TechStars committed Location Based Service [...]

Unless you’ve been on Neptune the last few weeks (you’ll need to show us your check-ins to prove it), you’re almost assuredly aware of the iPad, Apple’s supersized iPod Touch. Assuming that Apple will sell millions of these things (regardless of whether people need them or not), and other companies also release portable, multi-touch tablets [...]

I spent some time this weekend playing with MyTown – an iPhone app with a location component that is claiming more than 500K users.  You may know them from blog titles such as “Foursquare Who? Gowalla What?” that reference MyTown’s reported 500K users and 31M check-ins. So what’s the deal?  Is MyTown really kicking the collective [...]

The social location landscape changed dramatically this weekend. Yelp, the 800 pound gorilla of local social media, revamped its popular iPhone app in order to let users check in to locations. So how will this affect social location services like Foursquare and Gowalla? I think it’s a devastating development for them, a brutal punch in [...]

There are a bunch of  social location apps out there.  Here are some of the ones I have on my iPhone right now: Rummble, Loopt, Brightkite, MyTown, Whrrl, Stalqer, Buzzd, AroundMe, Flook, iSpy, MeetMe, and DoubleDutch (a project that my company is working on). But as of right now, New York based Foursquare and Austin [...]

Hello World! There’s a new data point emerging in social media that promises to change the way that web meets world. Location. Services like Gowalla, Foursquare, Loopt, Google Latitude, Yelp, BrightKite, Flook, Stalqer, MyTown, Rummble, and many more are racing to integrate location to provide deeper, richer, and more social services than what were possible before. [...]