Monday, July 27. 2009

Foursquare News

It seems like Foursquare pops up in the news every few months. Otherwise, I hear almost nothing about it - perhaps because it's not yet come to my city of Boston.

This week a New York Times blog reports on the Town Holler, a Foursquare "meetup" of Mayors of certain areas (those who have the most points for visiting certain locations, the "point" of the location-based social network). The system went down just as the event launched, but came back up soon after. Mashable gushes how the app may be the next Twitter. One reason: it's like Twitter was before Twitter became big.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Social Networking at 08:06 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0) |

Wednesday, July 22. 2009

74% of Facebook Ad Revenue from Local Ads

Clay Dillow writes about that in Fast Company, noting ad research firm Borrell Associates estimates the $310 million in ad revenue expected for Facebook in during 2009, 74% will come from local, location-based ads. Compare that to MySpace's 27% and social networking at 20% from LBS ads. So, if true, Facebook is the big social network LBS winner thus far.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in LBS at 07:08 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Monday, July 20. 2009

AOL CEO Tim Amstrong: Fewer Ads, More Value to Advertisers on MapQuest

Armstrong (who joined the company from Google) was asked about his plans for the second 100 days on the job:

At a baseline level, you are going to see improvements to MapQuest. Some of the pages on MapQuest had 17 ads on them. We've just removed 10 of the ads. You are going to see us bring down the total amount of ads and concentrate on the value for advertisers.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in LBS, MapQuest at 08:27 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Verizon Opens Omnia - Now Users Can Choose GPS Apps!

Last week Verizon released CF03, a software update for the Sansung Omnia phone that unlocks the GPS for use with other apps other than its VZ Navigator. Verizon was one of a very few carriers locking down the garden...

- C|net

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in LBS, GPS, Satellite Navigation at 07:46 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Friday, July 17. 2009

Yet Another Local Mobile Search Play: Aloqa

Aloqa "sends you information about events, friends and other data based on your location." That's how VentureBeat describes the new product available for Android. The company has $1.5 million in first-round funding and taps as CEO, Sanjeev Agrawal, an ex-head of product marketing from Google and former vice president of products at TellMe Networks (now owned by Microsoft).

So, what's new an different in this play? It uses whatever location tech is available (doesn't need GPS). That's not new. The company is looking at white-label services as well as retail operations. That's a little new, I guess.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in LBS at 09:52 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0) |

Thursday, July 9. 2009

How Google Maps uses the W3C Geolocation API and Google Location Services

There's a lot of excitement (sample) about browsers (notably Firefox and Chrome, but actually any implementation that include Google Gears) implementing the W3C Geolocation API. Why? In the past few days Google announced that Google Maps (desktop) can now take advantage of it. All good. My concern: all this discussion may be "fuzzing up" what the API does and does not do.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Google, LBS, Standards, Wi-Fi at 17:13 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |