Scoble and others Pick Hot Startups to Watch: Many are Geo

Some of those on Scoble’s lists (part 1, part 2) have been covered in this blog including waze, Foursquare and Aloqa (post).

I’m looking for the ones of which I’ve not heard. Scoble includes NextStop, a site where users share guides to great experiences in different cities focusing on one theme such as vegan food or architectural landmarks. Those two are among the 42 guides now available for Boston. Each guide is a series of points of interest. Each POI has a thumbnail, which if clicked takes you to a full page with a map and of course, other recommended POIs nearby. You can “like” guides and recommend POIs. It may well be best of breed - but there sure are a lot of sites like this!

He also notes Redbeacon, a site where you can post requests for services (in an area) and make appointments with bidders directly. For now it’s only available in certain parts of the San Francisco Bay. Clearly, the plan is growth!

CitySourced is a “tell the local government where the problems are” type app. The idea is that cities would come to the company to develop specific apps for their city. Oh, and there are no products - yet. I wonder if this is a bit late since many city’s have their own iPhone apps (Boston does) and other solutions, like SeeClickFix are already in play.

Over at the New York Times Jenna Wortham identifies Five Tech Themes for 2010, including, no news to us, “Location, location, location.” Among her examples, “Hot Potato, Foursquare, Grindr and UrbanSpoon.” Grindr is a dating app and Hot Potato an event app. Grindr says of itself: “Unlike other dating or social network sites, Grindr is meant to be mobile.” Hot Potato‘s tag says it all: “Find events. Join the crowd. Share the experience.” The name makes me wonder which other childhood games will name location-based social apps.

In Craig’s Chicago Business Monica Ginsburg asks not what’s the next Twitter, since we know its Foursquare, but what’s the next Foursquare? Among the answers:

ShopSavvy - take a pic of a bar code and the app finds the product, competitively priced online.

GoMobo - key in an address and find local restaurants from which you can order and have the food delivered (2007 launch)

Groupon - city based deals are only available if enough people commit to a particular deal