location

Today is Halloween and parents are getting bombarded with messages that their kids are at risk. So is CNET News.

"One night every year, parents let their guard down in the U.S. and allow their children to wander the streets of town for hours in the dark," begins a pitch from a location-based app maker to CNET News. "The reality is that every 40 seconds someone's son or daughter is reported missing, totaling 800,000 missing children in the United States each year."

These stats are scary, for sure. They're also misleading* and … Read more

There are probably hundreds of apps and sites that will help you find good places to eat and cool places to hang out. And then there's that gorilla, Yelp. But even in this crowded space, the new Loku has a secret sauce that works. It's too bad the best part of the site is not obvious, and that there's not yet a smartphone app from this company. But this is still a good site to get to know.

Loku finds news and recommends places in neighborhoods based on its algorithms that apply natural language processing and sentiment … Read more

Moby, the free, multiplatform location-sharing app, has just extended its reach to Android.

Previously the app was only available on the iPhone and BlackBerry platforms, but it appears Contigo Systems, Moby's developer, is making good on its promise to connect families no matter what devices they may be carrying.

Considering the release of Apple's Find My Friends app and the continued adoption of Google Latitude, some might feel like Moby is pushing its way into increasingly dangerous territory. But to Moby's credit, it seems to be taking a different route from the others. While most of the … Read more

Foursquare has launched a new feature, called Radar, that helps iOS 5 users find out what's going on around them.

To get the feature to work, users can start following lists. Based on the focus of a respective list--Foursquare gave "101 Best Dishes of 2011" as an example--the application will find locations or establishments nearby that might relate to it and alert users. The service also lets users know when and where a group of friends might be meeting up nearby.

"The app doesn't even have to be open, it just works," Foursquare wrote in a blog post … Read more

The time has finally come, and iOS 5 will be available to the general public October 12. During the last four months, we have been covering some of the key features of iOS 5 to ensure we were prepared to help you on the first day of iOS 5's release. Below you will find 15 tips and tricks to help you master iOS 5, and maybe even allow you to show off a bit to your friends. … Read more

Walk down certain city streets and you can practically feel the ghosts around you. Who was walking here 100 years earlier? Which buildings survived from earlier centuries? Wasn't there a famous fire around here? An iPhone app aims to help you spot the ghosts, or at least inform your imagination. WhatWasThere lets anyone upload and view old photographs that are tied to a location via Google Maps.

The free app, and accompanying Web site for the deskbound, is a crowdsourcing platform for assembling a visual historic record of the world's streetscapes. People can upload photos and tag them with location and year.

Places with associated photos are marked on a Google Map. Click on a mark and a list of available photos pops up with thumbnail, label, year, and distance from your location. Click a list item and the photo comes up. Put the photo in full-screen mode, aim your phone's camera in the direction of the scene in the photo, and you can drag a slider bar between camera view and photo to get a now-and-then perspective.

WhatWasThere's developer, Enlighten Ventures, plans to release keyword-search capability based on title, description, and user tags, and the ability for users to make photo albums. Picture tags and so on like "Old Theaters of New York" or "Gettysburg Battlefields." Enlighten is also working on a way for users to tag any photo in the system, not just the ones they upload.… Read more

If you're a parent with some overly active children, you may want to consider the SecuraFone application.

SecuraTrac, a company more used to creating small personal emergency alarms for senior citizens and patients, is trying its hand at a mobile application called SecuraFone. It plans to launch the app--which will be available for the iPhone, as well as on Android, and eventually on BlackBerry and Windows Phone smartphones--later this month. The service will cost $8.95 a month.

SecuraFone doesn't break new ground with its features, but it does bundle them together in a tidy package. The application … Read more

In a bid to play nice with European regulatory authorities, Google announced yesterday that it will soon launch an opt-out option for owners of wireless access points the company uses to gather smartphone location data.

"Even though the wireless access point signals we use in our location services don't identify people, we think we can go further in protecting people's privacy," Google global privacy counsel Peter Fleischer wrote in a blog post. "At the request of several European data protection authorities, we are building an opt-out service that will allow an access point owner to … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--At the TechCrunch Disrupt conference today, the first product announcement came from Gowalla CEO Josh Williams. The new version of Gowalla will be bringing city guides to the service, leveraging the company's large database of places and updates from users.

The new version will launch shortly with more than 60 city guides using, of course, user content. But the service has new editorial partners, including Disney, National Geographic, and several universities.

With Gowalla, you can now create "stories" around events. Anyone you tag in a location and time becomes a full authoring partner of the post, and the presentation of these stories is quite good.

The question is: by focusing on the traveler instead of the resident, does Gowalla give up the nice deal-based transactional business that Foursquare and Facebook can run with? Perhaps, but the travel business is in many ways a much sweeter place to be. The advertising money is national more than regional, bigger, and more stable. You can still use Gowalla to check in at locations, so this is a bigger--and smarter--change than it may appear at first.

TechCrunch has the preview post … Read more