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 [...]

Who owns the address and phone number data associated with a local business?  On one level, the information is in the public domain.  I can walk into any merchant in the world, ask for their address and phone number, and likely get a response.  The closest thing to the owner of this information, the local [...]

* 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 Suicide.    And [...]

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 [...]

Well, that was fast.
Just as features like user profiles, status updates, and friend graphs have become standard fare on social media sites, it appears that the social check-in will soon follow.
With the entrance of big fish like Yelp into the social check-in space, and the rumored entrance of even bigger fish like Facebook and Twitter, [...]

Twitter’s new Local Trends function on Twitter.com is basically meaningless. It’s full of spam (just as the global Trending Topics is) and really isn’t all that interesting because: 1. lots of the same trends go across the limited number of places Twitter is offering right now; and 2. there is no context for the user [...]

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 asses [...]

Collective buying is not really a new idea.  At its simplest level, collective buying entails individual consumers banding together in order to get bulk or group discounts.  If you buy 1 taco, it’s $3.50, but if you buy 100 tacos, it’s $175.
Tragically, not many individuals can commit to buying 100 tacos at the same time, [...]