Did WHERE Patent Just Fence In Competition?
Yeah, I have a patent. But mine’s not even close to being as cool as this one from WHERE Inc. – assuming it holds up under claims of prior art and all that.
Patent number 7,848,765 is all about geofencing — a virtual geographic radius that, when breached by a person with a device (or even without the person I suppose) some predetermined action occurs on the device, such as an advertisement being fired off…
5 Questions for Pia Arthur of Gowalla
This is the fifth in a series of brief Q&As with leaders and up-and-comers in the local space…
Describe Gowalla as if a friend’s mother asked, “So what is this Gowalla?
Gowalla is a social network that inspires people to keep up with friends, share the places they go and discover the extraordinary in the world around them. Like a passport on your phone, Gowalla was born out of a desire to share remarkable places and life journeys in a fun, easy and social way. Since launch, people have visited, commented on and photographed 2 million places in 170 countries with Gowalla…
MapQuest Invites Itself to the Open-Social
MapQuest … You remember MapQuest, the innovator of online mapping from the ’90s. The innovator from the ’90s bought by AOL and turned into a cartographic ATM and then had the last drops of life wrung from it when it was splintered across the AOL organization with ownership of mobile (the most important element, mind you) in both many and no hands. The same MapQuest that clawed for enterprise and B2B deals while Google thanked them for their ignorance and promptly stomped them into the ground. Yeah, that MapQuest…
Examiner.com + Reuters = Enormous and Local
Examiner.com, the ongoing success story being written by thousands of local contributors and led by “local” vet Rick Blair (profiled by Locl.ly here) has announced quite a deal: Soon they’ll be teaming with Thomson Reuters to share contributors’ “local insights and topical expertise across the country.”
In an email and on his blog, Blair wrote:
“As of today, Reuters and Examiner.com have entered into a partnership as part of the Reuters America platform solution—whereby Reuters and it’s subscribers will have access to Examiner.com’s vast media network of localized, consumer lifestyle content.
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‘Location’ is at Apple’s iPhone Core (Patently Apple)
The site Patently Apple has a rather interesting observation about some of the recent patent filings by Apple related to its iPhone. According to PA via records it has surface Apple is attacking the big and the small around geolocation, with technological tweaks and improvements (that are actually
quite complex) and practical setups to solving common human needs like “what am I about to pass on my trip to grandma’s that I might be interested in?”…
Love the Gov? USA.gov Gets You Mobilized (No, Really)
YEAH yeah, we’ve all heard about the Gov 2.0 movement but has anyone outside the Washington Beltway actually positively, knowingly benefitted from it? Please correct me if I’m wrong but it feel like there has been a good deal of positive chatter and opening of kimonos and talk of transparency but not a lot of action, at least on the geo-mobile side. And by gosh there certainly could be, given the mountains of data and such trapped inside (i dunno) mainframes and steely rectangular gov’t-issued desks.
Oh but wait. Wait just one second…
Loopt Pushes Background Location, Geo-Messaging
In the geosocial battles Loopt was on the field before so many others even took up arms. Then they seemed to recede: not selling to Google, sort of yielding to some of the louder startups in the space (or perhaps they were just their ugly adolescent stage as VC Fred Wilson puts it, tho not about Loopt)…
7 Things I Want From My Phone for Christmas
I’ve been a goo… not horrible guy this year, Cell-a, really. And I’m not asking for anything current technology would not permit. So please bring me the following:
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