Gowalla

Veronica Belmont and Ben Huh join us on stage to talk about the brewing war between Apple and Google, pay walls on the web... and we also wage tiny cute little wars on each other as well.

Gowalla Tops Foursquare at SXSW Web Awards (But Benson Smokes 'em All) http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/03/sxsw-web-awards/

Google admits Buzz mistakes, tries again at SXSW http://venturebeat.com/2010/03/14/google-admits-buzz-mistakes-tries-again-at-sxsw/

Web guru Tim Bray takes Google Android job http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20000423-264.html… Read more

With the days leading up to this year's South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSWi) turning into hours, all eyes are on two scrappy rival start-ups, Foursquare and Gowalla, which both want to use the Austin, Texas digital-culture bash as a strategic playing field. They're the two most talked about start-ups in location-based social networking--using GPS on a mobile device to "check in" to places around you and announce it to your friends--and neither company wants to lose out to the other.

But in the real geolocation wars, these start-ups may be little more than toy soldiers. … Read more

"We're going to be giving away, literally, hundreds of tacos," Josh Williams, founder of mobile networking start-up Gowalla, said to CNET in an interview last week about his company's plans for the annual South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSWi), which runs March 12-16 in Austin, Texas.

"We're bringing, like, playground-style balls and chalk," said Dennis Crowley, the co-founder of Gowalla rival Foursquare. "You'll be able to win prizes at ad-hoc foursquare games that you see around the convention center."

Eighteen months ago, neither Gowalla nor Foursquare existed. But their similar &… Read more

With only a few days to go before the annual South by Southwest Interactive, location-based mobile networking service Foursquare has unveiled its plans for the Austin, Texas digital culture festival: 16 new "badges" that users can unlock by "checking in" to certain venues, with cryptic names like "Swimmies," "Decathlon," and "Survivor."

The company says users will be able to score temporary tattoos of the badges if they show the digital badge to a member of the Foursquare team at a designated location, meaning that there will likely be many SXSWi-goers … Read more

For certain brands, a "social media strategy" consisting of a Facebook fan page and a Twitter account is last year's model.

One of the trends you tend to see at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSWi) in Austin, Texas, is that it's where big, nontech brands show up to test edgy social-media marketing initiatives in the ultimate geek test bed. A brand we'll be seeing a lot of at this year's SXSWi, which starts Thursday, is the General Motors-owned Chevy.

A sponsor of the festival, Chevy is going all-out with just about every … Read more

The Android mobile app for game-like "check-in" app Gowalla is now live, as Mashable noted over the weekend. Launching its first non-iPhone app is an important step for the start-up as it competes fiercely with several other location-based mobile companies that are all trying to break away from the pack.

Additionally, Gowalla is set to announce a partnership with the Travel Channel for its series "Food Wars," a competitive reality show that pits chefs against one another in blind taste tests. When a Gowalla user checks into a "Food Wars"-featured restaurant, they'll … Read more

Pretty soon, you'll be able to learn a bit more about where your Twitter contacts' tweets are coming from.

CNET has learned that select third-party developers were informed earlier this week about some forthcoming modifications to Twitter's "geo API," the set of developer tools that currently allows Twitter messages to be accompanied by the latitude and longitude coordinates of where they were posted. (For example, if you're updating Twitter client Tweetie from your iPhone, you can opt to tag the tweet with your location and it'll be visible to people reading your Twitter feed.)… Read more

Among the new features is the idea of "checking in" to a local businesses, which will let you alert your Yelp friends that you're there--complete with a push notification. Yelp will also reward repeat visitors by denoting them as "regulars," with the most often visiting party getting a special badge.

Sound familiar? You might have used Foursquare or Gowalla, … Read more

Attention, suburbanites: You, too, can be the mayor of your local Home Depot.

That's because New York-based mobile location-sharing service Foursquare has made a subtle but big improvement. It's no longer restricted to a list of a few dozen cities in North America and Europe, which means that people anywhere in the world can use their mobile phones to "check in" through the service. (Foursquare currently has applications for the iPhone, Palm Pre, and Google Android, as well as a BlackBerry app in development and a mobile Web site.) The new feature is considered to currently … Read more