Companies like Foursquare and Gowalla are trying to build businesses – and venture businesses no less – based on helping people share their real world locations. Local business review juggernaut Yelp recently bolted on social location check-ins to their iPhone app.  Twitter and Facebook are almost certain to turn on some sort of location based [...]

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 [...]

The last 24 hours has greatly solidified a movement and community that has been gaining steam for the last year or so – crisis mapping. Crisis or disaster mapping is a range of services/applications that are designed to help gather and spread information for and between first responders, NGOs, domestic and international governments and relief [...]

Friending and friend discovery are core concepts (maybe the core concepts) of social media. There are really three main friending choices for social media sites: follow only (i.e. RSS); friend request approval (i.e. Facebook); or anyone can follow anyone, no reciprocal follow required (Twitter model). As social location services evolve, how friending takes place (and is handled [...]

This just in from the Google Mobile Blog – they have turned on a “Near Me Now” link if you visit google.com with your Android or iPhone browser.  Clicking the “Near Me Now” link displays a menu of business types: Restaurants, Coffee Shops, Bars, ATMs, etc.  Clicking on one of the categories then shows you [...]

I’m involved as a mentor with a brand new San Francisco based incubator called i/o ventures.  It’s an all-star team, and the partners recently purchased a 7,000 square foot space (complete with cafe) in San Francisco’s funky Mission District.  Here’s the TechCrunch write up. If you are working on a location oriented project and are [...]

Just a few short hours after we said, “Word has it they are expanding to “everywhere” this month”, Foursquare went ahead and beat our expectations and just announced that users can now check-in from any location worldwide. Of course, users in new areas will still have to create locations in their city (which still isn’t [...]

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 [...]

Believe it or not, not everyone checks in with their mobile phones. Some of us actually use a new fangled device called a laptop, or an even newer fangled device called a netbook. With laptop/netbook weights increasingly (decreasingly?) becoming so light that you can carry them around all day without even knowing you have them, [...]

So Twitter has just bought Mixer Labs, the creators of GeoAPI, a location infrastructure service that provides tools and data to people building location related applications; stuff like reverse geocoding (translates lat / long to city name), neighborhood / city lookup, structured data about 16M POIs and local businesses, and more. I see a couple [...]