Stalking your friends could be big business. $3.3 billion location-based social network economy by 2013?
While even the popular social networks nowadays aren’t making that much money (Facebook expects to make $350 million in revenues this year), the burgeoning field of mobile social networks could be big business shortly, a new report by ABI Research indicates. Specifically, location-based mobile social networks could earn revenues of $3.3 billion within five years.
This is great news for many of the location-based mobile networks out there now such as Whrrl, Loopt, Where and Plazes…. Continue Reading
Super-secret Plinky makes its first big hire
Plinky, the secretive service that can right now only be vaguely described as a social content encouragement startup, is getting less secretive. It finally has a website. (Well, a place-holder for one anyway.) And now it’s making a high-profile hire.
Today the company brings on board Ryan Freitas as the director of product design. If you don’t know the name, you know the work. Freitas (pictured below) was the director of experience design at Adaptive Path… Continue Reading
Location buzz continues: Nokia buys Plazes, Verizon backs Loopt & NIM
Nokia, the world’s largest maker of mobile phones, has agreed to acquire the Swiss-German start-up Plazes, the companies said in a statement today.
Plazes, based in Berlin, Germany is a service that lets you share your location and leave a brief message — akin to Twitter — about what you’re doing. Your message is placed on a map. In other words, it’s like Twitter, only with the added feature of location tags. Plazes’ most recent… Continue Reading
Location, location, location: The iPhone with GPS nears
There’s smoke, there’s fire, and then there’s a volcano the size of Olympus Mons on Mars erupting and turning the ground into an ocean of burning lava. Such is current state of speculation surrounding the 3G iPhone.
There’s really no point in beating around the bush at this point. The new iPhone is coming on Monday. You know it. I know it. We all know it. If Apple were not to announce it at this point, it… Continue Reading