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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]