A Pew Research Center report finds location-based services are used by a small, but growing, number of Americans. – In its first report on the use of “geosocial” or location-based
services, the Pew Research Centers Internet amp; American Life
project finds that four percent of online adults use a service such as
Foursquare or Gowalla that allows them to share their location with
friends and to find others wh…
Motorola snaps up Aloqa for its location-based services and Google Android compatibility for an undisclosed sum. – Communications giant Motorola announced the acquisition of
Aloqa GmbH, a privately held developer of location-based software and
technologies that are designed to enable the discovery of relevant Web
content by mobile smartphone users. Terms of the transaction were not
disclosed. Aloqa has joine…
Foursquare June 29 said it raised $20 million in funding from Union Square Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. The money will be used to help the location-based Web service hire more engineers and build out infrastructure to expand its appeal beyond today’s 1.8 million users. Foursquare, along with Google, Twitter, Gowalla, Brightkite, Loopt and others, is seriously investing in location-based services to stimulate more interaction among users. The idea is that the advertisers will then go where the users are. – Location-based service Foursquare June 29 said it raised $20 million
in series B funding from Union Square Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and
Andreessen Horowitz.
Foursquare’s 1.8 million users vie for points, badges, mayor status and sometimes discounts by checking into bars and restauran…
Facebook is expected to enable location sharing in its users’ News Feeds, a move that could automatically make the social network the dominant platform for location-based Web services. Twitter already has a geolocation feature that has been spotted in the wild. Meanwhile, social location upstart Foursquare will offer a free analytics tool and dashboard to give business owners information and statistics about visitors to their establishments. Google is also heavily invested in the future of location and social networking.
–
Facebook is expected to enable location sharing in its
users’ News Feeds, a move that could
automatically make the social network the dominant platform for location-based
Web services.
A March 9 report in the New York Times cited sources saying that Facebook would
announce the ne…
Google sees value in using location-based services, such as Google Latitude and Google Buzz to connect to disparate Web services and provide recommendations, but the search engine believes it’s important to mitigate the potential privacy scares associated with such services. To do this, Google product manager Steve Lee said making such services opt-in is crucial. There would also have to be a mutual understanding between the friend providing the recommendation from an app and the recipient of the recommendation for this to work.
–
Google sees value in using location-based services such as Google
Latitude and Google Buzz to provide recommendations by connecting
to disparate Web services.
But the search engine believes it’s just as important
to mitigate the potential privacy scares associated with such servi…
Twitter promises to release a location API to let third-party programmers build out location-aware services to help users connect based on latitude and longitude. The company would join Google, Loopt, Brightkite and others in offering such Web services, which helps users find friends, restaurants and other businesses via applications on their Web-based mobile phones.
– For several weeks in his company blog, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has been
alluding to APIs Twitter programmers have been working on to improve the
service, but he has declined to peel back the curtain to give users a glimpse.
On Aug. 20, Stone quit teasing users, saying that Twitter will soon …
