location-based

Now you can play Foursquare anywhere

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

Data crunch: Where did people go during Internet Week?

Just how powerful can the data behind a location-based application be? Extremely.

Earlier this month, the second annual Internet Week New York took place, and Dropio founder and certifiable data nerd Sam Lessin crunched a bunch of numbers based on what his contacts on urban navigation and friend-finding service Foursquare were doing. Lessin was working with a group of fewer than 100 contacts, almost all of whom are involved in the tech and new-media industries (this is the scene that birthed Foursquare and its predecessor Dodgeball, after all), and yet it's a fascinating peek at just how much this … Read more

Podcast: Glympse launches mobile location sharing

Location-based services like Loopt have been around for a few years, but a new player-- Glympse, is launching its public beta service. Glympes CEO and co-founder Bryan Trussel says that his service is easier to use and safer because a user allows him or herself to be tracked for a specified period of time--never more than four hours--so that once it expires they are no longer transmitting their location.

AT&T launches family-tracking service

AT&T is offering a new service that allows parents--or potentially jealous spouses/boyfriends/girlfriends--to track loved ones using their phones.

AT&T's service, called FamilyMaps, allows people to track the location of any cell phone on AT&T's network from a mobile phone or PC. The person being tracked receives a text message informing him or her that he or she is being watched. The service periodically informs the tracked individual that he or she is being watched, just in case one text message reminder wasn't enough.

Users can either track someone in … Read more

Mobile start-ups Brightkite, Limbo to tango

Brightkite, one of the half-dozen or so companies vying for market share in the location-based social-networking space, has merged with another mobile start-up called Limbo. The official branding of the company will be Brightkite now, but its home base will now be at Limbo's headquarters in Burlingame, Calif.

Limbo's focus is on mobile games, as well as text-message alerts: sports scores, celebrity gossip, weather, horoscopes, and the like.

It's not totally clear how the two will merge their technologies, but a little bit of background was provided on the Brightkite blog. Brightkite will have access to Limbo'… Read more

Yelp to release new iPhone app

A full five percent of reviews site Yelp's traffic comes from its downloadable iPhone app, the company said Thursday. In response, it's revamping the iPhone app, originally launched last year, to add new features that place a fresh emphasis on location awareness. The new download will be available in the iTunes App Store in a few days.

The most significant upgrades are the ability to post 140-character (read: Twitter-length) "quick tips" from the iPhone, a wholly new feature, which other members can give a Digg-like thumbs-up to. Popular ones may eventually be displayed on that business' … Read more

Does location-based networking need some direction?

AUSTIN, Texas--There's Loopt, Brightkite, Whrrl, FourSquare, Rummble, uLocate, Google Latitude, Yahoo Fire Eagle, and goodness knows which other ones we haven't heard of yet. The location-based mobile networking space has been front and center at this year's South by Southwest Interactive Festival as hundreds of tech enthusiasts from around the country have been eager to find their friends and learn what's happening.

Perhaps it's fitting that in one of the festival's last panels on Tuesday afternoon, a handful of executives and high-level developers from the location-awareness space got together for a discussion called "… Read more

FourSquare: Life in the SXSWi hot seat

AUSTIN, Texas--"I couldn't be any more psyched for how it's taken off," FourSquare founder Dennis Crowley said of his brand-new mobile social-networking application, which made its public debut here at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival. "It's been, like, 5,000 times better than I expected."

We were wearing bathing suits. A fellow hardcore FourSquare user, media consultant Rex Sorgatz, had used the service to announce a "bikini flash mob" at the rooftop pool of the Omni Hotel on Monday afternoon. When about 20 people had showed up, Sorgatz--in a … Read more

Skyhook teams up with Texas Instruments

BARCELONA - Skyhook Wireless announced on Monday at the GSMA Mobile World Congress here that Texas Instruments will use its hybrid positioning technology in its mobile chips, so that cell phones can provide more accurate location information.

Skyhook has developed a hybrid technology that uses GPS satellite technology and Wi-Fi to help provide geolocation services. Skyhook's technology is used today on Apple's iPhone, among other services and devices.

The way it works is that Skyhook will use Wi-Fi access points to triangulate and get a fix on known Wi-Fi hot spots. The company has a database of where … Read more