Mobio’s Cheap Gas may help at $4.00 a gallon

Mobio’s Cheap Gas may help at $4.00 a gallon

Mobio has come out with a useful, cost-saving feature for your mobile phone called Cheap Gas.

This weekend, I choked when I pumped gas for $4.01 a gallon here in the SF Bay Area.

Mobio’s Cheap Gas application lets me locate the cheapest gas stations near any address and lets me filter search results by station brand. Cheap Gas provides a map to the destination station.

There are a number of other cheap-gas Web site offerings,… Continue Reading

Get mobile local info from ULocate, Ask and others

Get mobile local info from ULocate, Ask and others

ULocate, a Framington, Mass. start-up focused on giving you mobile information based on your location, has raised $11 million more in a second round of financing.

ULocate offers more than a dozen widgets that you can drag and drop onto your mobile phone — giving you things such as directions, ski reports, brewery finders, and even neighboring Twitter posts — and joins a host of competitors racing to give you similar services.

Ask yesteday unveiled something very… Continue Reading

Mobio — the useful mobile service

Mobio — the useful mobile service

Mobio, a Cupertino start-up, is distinguishing itself by creating simple, useful services for the mobile phone.

We wrote about the company when it released its movie service — which lists movie reviews, times and maps.

Today, Mobio kicks off a 100 more services, many of them handy for kicking round town. There’s everything from OpenTable, flower-buying, dating services to flight-time checks.

Mobio is just the latest mobile company to ditch your stupid, slow cellphone Web browser. Forget… Continue Reading

Roundup: Digg’s crisis, Odeo, Amidzad’s touch, Mobio’s movies, HAVA for Christmas

Roundup: Digg’s crisis, Odeo, Amidzad’s touch, Mobio’s movies, HAVA for Christmas

Happy Thanksgiving weekend, folks. Here’s a roundup of the latest.

The crisis at Digg — Digg, the San Francisco company that lets users rank news, is facing a credibility test. A fake story about Sony recalling its PlayStation 3 stayed on the site’s front-page for several hours, even though the content was clearly questionable — people blindly digged the article nonetheless. This led to some sleuthing by Niall Kennedy, who turned up evidence of some major spamming…. Continue Reading

Turn to target ads automatically

Turn to target ads automatically

After two years of laboring away in secret, advertising network Turn launches tomorrow saying it can target online ads with unprecedented precision.

Run by Jim Barnett, former chief executive of search engine AltaVista and, later, a top executive at Overture, San Mateo-based Turn has raised $18 million from Norwest Venture Partners, Trident Capital and Shasta Ventures. We were briefed on the company last week.

It calls itself the first “automatic” targeting advertising network.

Google, of course, is… Continue Reading