location

Web analysts have been predicting a boom in online advertising for almost as long as there has been a Web. After years of steady growth in online ads, the long-awaited boom could be just around the corner.

According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PwC US, U.S. online ad revenues increased 17 percent in the third quarter of 2010 over the same period of 2009, reaching $6.4 billion, the highest quarterly mark ever recorded.

While online video ads and more traditional banner and pop-up ads continue to generate increased revenue, the text ads that accompany search results … Read more

Cooliris, which originally made a whizzy plug-in for displaying images from the Web, is finally expanding beyond just making software that leeches on the install of other products (browsers) and is delivering an actual unique business. It feels like a small play to me, but it's focused and addresses a real opportunity.

The company is re-releasing Liveshare, a mobile, social, photo-sharing app designed for venues and events. The idea is that people at an event, like a concert, will use the app to snap pictures on their smartphones. Since the phones know their location and time, it's easy … Read more

If at first, second, and third you don't succeed, try, try again.

Google is taking another crack at a social service, this time with Hotpot, a tool designed to capture local knowledge and recommend establishments such as restaurants or stores you might want to visit. Google unveiled an early version of Hotpot in a blog post yesterday, and I think Hotpot has some attributes that could help it achieve modest success.

"With Hotpot, we're making local search results for places on Google more personal, relevant, and trustworthy," product manager Lior Ron said in the post, calling … Read more

It sounds like a sweet deal: report your location to a social network and get a coupon for discounts and prizes. The price? The possibility that advertisers and other third parties will know where you are and where you've been.

A recent survey by the Pew Center's Internet & American Life Project found that only 4 percent of Internet users have adopted location-based services, as Cecilia Kang reports on The Washington Post's Post Tech blog. That survey was conducted in August and September, before Facebook and Yelp joined Foursquare and Gowalla in offering coupons to users who … Read more

I am not always awake, even when I appear to be clothed, eating, and mumbling.

So I am grateful to Google for waking me up the other morning with the news that it knew where I was. Of course, you always knew it always knew. But suddenly, as I was performing a Google search for a David Arquette Halloween mask, there was my location on the left side of the search page.

It felt like my neighbor had come in by the back door, sat down at my kitchen table, and helped herself to Weetabix and cookies. Well, not quite. … Read more

The first live Twitter messages from space were less than a year ago, but already astronauts have moved on to geolocation: Douglas C. Wheelock, commander of the Expedition 25 mission, earned the "NASA Explorer" badge on Foursquare for checking into the International Space Station on Friday morning.

Foursquare business development rep Eric Friedman said on the company blog that Wheelock was "the first human to ever use a location-based service from space," leaving open the possibility that aliens somewhere else in the universe may have developed their own social-networking services and consequently, as far as we … Read more

TomTom and HTC are teaming up in a bid to offer quicker and more accurate maps and directions for HTC mobile phone customers.

The two companies announced today that HTC Locations, the smartphone maker's new mapping and navigation service, will come preloaded with TomTom's "location-rich" maps. The service will initially appear on the Android-based HTC Desire and HTC Desire Z smartphones in Europe and Asia before rolling out to future smartphones models.

Since TomTom's maps will come preloaded, the companies are promising quick access to maps and locations.

"I am very pleased to be … Read more

Knowing where your friends are, and seeing their location are two very different things. Loopt's latest iPhone update, and soon-to-be Android update, illustrates this point nicely.

Today the iPhone version of the app is getting an update to finally include integration with Facebook's Places feature, which was rolled out to users in late August. Now Loopt users can check in to both networks at once, and see where friends are from both places on a single map.

Of course Loopt is not the first iOS app to map out Facebook friends (Sobees got there last month), but it'… Read more

Google executed a subtle yet important shift in its management structure today, promoting one of the most visible faces of the company to oversee a potentially important source of growth.

Marissa Mayer, Google's first female engineer and probably the only one who will ever grace the pages of Vogue, is taking on a new role at Google heading up its work on location-aware services and local markets after years of overseeing the user interface of Google search. She'll also be joining Google's operating committee, the cabinet-of-sorts for Google's ruling triumvirate of CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founders … Read more