July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

No more unauthorized lock screen access for you!

Apple has released iOS 6.1.3, an update to its mobile operating system that squashes a nasty lock screen bug that could allow unauthorized access to your iPhone, and improves Apple’s much-maligned Maps app.

The lock screen, which is supposed to increase security, was hit with two recent bugs that could allow people in possession of your phone access to your contacts, voicemail, and photos. The first was fairly complicated and the second was simpler, but both involved initiating an emergency call and then canceling it.

In any case, both should be impossible now (I’m sure Apple engineers have their fingers crossed).

Apple also updated its Maps app via the system update, saying that the app would now be better in Japan. That’s a little strange, as most improvements to Maps recently have been server-side, not requiring an app update — and certainly not requiring an operating-system-level update.

In the past few months, Apple has been feverishly updating Maps with new flyovers in 30 global cities including Berlin, London, and Rome, new 3-D building imagery for Milan, Barcelona, Dublin, and nine other cities, and new Chinese maps.

Updating the iPhone’s mapping capability via a system software update, however, suggests that Apple is tying Maps deeper into the base operating system itself. Apple’s Map Kit Framework Reference already enables embedding maps directly into third-party apps, as well as supporting annotations, overlays, and reverse-geocoding lookups.

Perhaps this update will precipitate a few new capabilities for app developers.

The update is available immediately, and was only 18.2 MB for me.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google already has five of the six most popular apps in America, with Google Maps, Search, Gmail, YouTube, and Google Play. But that is apparently not enough for the search-and-mobile-and-everything giant.

So the company is now extending Field Trip, the Android-based “guide to the cool, hidden, and unique things in the world around you,” over to iOS for both iPhone and iPad. And the app that was already awesome five months ago now has double the content partners.

To build Field Trip, Google partnered with Zagat, Cool Hunting, and multiple other partners to surface the most fascinating and relevant information about the world you’re living in as you move through it. Tell it what you’re most interested in, and it will highlight architecture, or entertainment, daily deals, or more.

New content partners include the Public Art Archive and Dezeen, the art and architecture magazine, and you can adjust the app to tell you more or less, depending on your time availability and interest.

The five-month gap between the Android and iOS apps launching did allow a non-Google competitor to jump into the mix. Wanderous does much the same thing, but is more focused on a particular route that you might be following. And it saves breadcrumbs of past trips. Realistically, Wanderous is now in a tough position: Google has the resources not only to build great mapping and location apps but, far more importantly, to stock them with the almost unimaginable gobs of data required for a great user experience.

The launch is U.S. and UK only, so you’ll have to wait if you happen to live elsewhere.

photo credit: Aesum via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Daddy’s definitely not happy. And he’s not sure he trusts what junior’s telling him.

Yesterday U.S. Magistrate Judge Paul S. Grewal ordered Apple to not only turn over more evidence in an ongoing iPhone privacy case but also to explain — in detail — exactly how it obtained the data. Apple had previously been ordered to turn over documents that relate to how its iOS mobile operating system tracked users’ location data, even when location services were ostensibly turned off.

Apple failed to turn over all the required evidence, according to the judge. And, according to Bloomberg, Judge Grewal says he no longer trusts what Apple is telling him.

“Luckily for the plaintiffs, Apple has provided more than enough evidence itself to suggest to the court that it has not fully complied with the court’s order,” Grewal wrote. “In light of Apple’s performance in this case, the court cannot rely on its representations that this time it really has or will produce all responsive documents.”

The trend of judges getting unusually peeved with Apple seems to be growing. In the UK, Sir Robin Jacob told Apple to apologize to Samsung publicly for claiming that Samsung had copied its designs and forced the company to redo the apology several times until it was acceptable. (The same judge is now working for Samsung, believe it or not.) Unfortunately, the company seems to be getting a reputation in legal circles for not complying fully, or minimally complying, very slowly, to judicial orders.

Speaking of slow, the iPhone tracking issue and subsequent legal battle has been ongoing for two years now. Apple blamed software bugs for the large databases of cell tower and Wi-Fi hotspot locations that some users found accumulating on their computers. When the issue received public attention, Apple limited the records to a trailing seven days of data.

Slow is not going to cut it in this current case, however. Grewal has requested the data today.

photo credit: &y via photopin cc

Google announced today that it has updated Google Earth for desktop with 100,000 new tours and a million photos from Panoramio, a geolocation-oriented photo share site that Google acquired in 2007.

“As you navigate in Earth, tour guide acts as a local exploration expert, suggesting interesting places near the location you’re visiting,” Google said in a Google+ post announcing the update.

Google last added significant amounts of new imagery to Google Earth in October last year, unveiling 3D imagery for 21 global cities. At the time, Google said it had 11,000 tours, such as the one below of  Rome. The tours are not all terrestrial; you can also explore Mars, the Moon, or a variety of Hubble Space Telescope images.

100,000 new tours means that Google has created 89,000 in less than three months — a fairly staggering feat. The tours include fly-overs, Wikipedia snippets, and the photos sourced from Panoramio. Panoramio focuses exclusively on natural photos of the planet, excluding photos of people or vehicles, but allowing city scapes.

No software update is required to view the new content.

Image credit: Google

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Life360, an app that helps families keep track of one another’s locations, will have 25 million registered users by the end of the year.

That puts it within striking range of another location-centric app company with a much higher profile, Foursquare, which hit 25 million users in September, 2012.

Both companies started in 2008, but Life360 has only raised $6.85 million to date, whereas Foursquare has raised over $71 million.

Life360 chief executive Chris Hulls told VentureBeat that his company will surpass Foursquare in audience size within the next couple of months, stating that Life360 has a much faster growth rate — though he didn’t specify exactly what that rate is. He also declined to say how many of those 25 million users are regularly active on the service, though he said that it was a “pretty high ratio.”

“We’ve really hit an inflection point in the company in terms of the family network going digital. We want to be the company that really owns your family life on the phone,” Hulls said in a phone conversation.

The company announced its user milestone in a press release this morning; unveiled a new, rainbow-colored branding on its website; and also announced two new features that should help the worried minds of modern parents:

• Life360 now has a “geofencing” feature called Places, so parents can set alerts that will let them know when a family member arrives at a specified location, such as work, home, or school.
• Life360 now integrates crime data right onto its map view, so you can see every reported crime in your neighborhood, and can click on each data point to see more about what happened, when it happened, and exactly where.

The Places feature seems potentially reassuring, especially for parents who are worried about the locations of wayward teens (did he really arrive at school this morning?) and are fairly sure that their progeny won’t be clever enough to ask a friend to take their phone to school for them while they go on a holiday to Great America.

Hulls also said that Life360′s geofencing feature, unlike other companies’, wouldn’t drain your phone’s battery rapidly. Referring to other family-location services and Geoloqi, Hulls said, ”None of them have really worked without killing your battery.” (Geographic data giant ESRI bought Geoloqi in October, 2012.)

But Life360′s crime data seems like it could encourage even more paranoia and obsessiveness about one’s neighborhood. Do we really need to worry about every car window smash-and-grab? Maybe, maybe not, depending on your neighborhood and your attitude toward situational awareness. Fortunately, like other Life360 features, you can turn this one off if it freaks you out.

The company says its customers have shared 150 billion points of location data since the company’s start in 2008, and that it currently helps families share more than 2,500 location data points every second. (To continue the comparisons, Foursquare has collected more than 3 billion check-ins since day one.)

The app is free, but Life360 charges $5 per month if you want to use it to locate family members who use phones other than Android or iPhone smartphones. Currently only a tiny minority of customers pay, Hulls said.

However, he’s got a plan to make money. In the coming year, Hulls said Life360 would expand its features to include more than simply emergency-oriented features. That will include communications and utility features, such as an “Onstar for your phone” feature that can help you find your kid if she gets lost, or call a tow truck for you if you get a flat tire.

Some of these features will be paid, premium features, giving Life360 its first serious monetization options, Hulls said.

Life360 is based in San Francisco and employs about 25 people.

Update 8am Pacific: Life360 will have 25 million users by the end of the year, not right now, as this story originally stated. Sorry for the mistake!

LocBox wants to be the alternative to Groupon, Living Social and the host of flash sales sites, and has raised over $5 million in its quest to win over small businesses.

The San Francisco-based startup helps businesses run marketing campaigns. The idea is that Groupon and the like can pull customers into a store to pick up a one-off promotion, but they can’t drive long-term loyalty.

Founder Saumil Mehta said he would inspired to create a product that his parents, both small business-owners, would actually use.

“I called hundreds local businesses early last year and discovered that they really needed help with sustainable revenue and foot traffic from loyal and new customers,” Mehta told me. He explained that traditional methods and channels (Yellow Pages, for instance) are no longer reliable but the channels were either overwhelming, unsustainable, or had tenuous return on investment (ROI).

Prior to founding the company, Mehta was the director of product at Kosmix, a social media technology that was later acquired by Wal-Mart.

“I decided to help them [small businesses] by building a product,’ Mehta continued. Using LocBox, businesses can better organize their efforts if Twitter, Facebook and email content is pulled into a single dashboard. In its beta phase, the technology is currently used by several hundred customers (primarily health spas and small medical practices) who have run thousands of campaigns.

The market is flooded with email and social media marketing tools that cater to small businesses, including MailChimp and Constant Contact. Many of these tools offer sophisticated analytics on the front-end so customers can tell if their campaigns are actually working. Mehta claims to have “better targeting algorithms” than the competition.

Sign up to the site, and a potential customer will receive an overview of their current online and social media presence, and a recommendation for a marketing and social media campaign. If they decide to run it, LocBox offers a flexible price that is based on previous, similar campaigns.

It’s a crowded space, but investors see a gap in the market for this kind of consolidated dashboard. Investors in the round include InterWest Partners, Google Ventures and 500Startups, with additional investments from angel investors including Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan of WalmartLabs, and Deep Nishar, senior VP of products and user experience at LinkedIn.

Image via Shutterstock

SAN FRANCISCO — Investor and author Guy Kawasaki joined renowned technology futurologist Robert Scoble for a frank discussion about the biggest technology trends.

Scoble, who travels the world interviewing thousands of big-shot technology executives and startup founders every year, didn’t hold back. Within minutes, Scoble issued a challenge to Tim Cook (refreshing in the wake of the hooplah around Apple’s event): “Without the Steve [Jobs] factor, many more people are considering Android than ever before.”

Read more here about Scoble’s technology predictions for 2012. 

Another one theme that resonated throughout the discussion was privacy. Kawasaki voiced his disapproval at the growing numbers of “privacy freaks” who fear the advent of geo-location technology.  ”I think that horse has left the barn,” he said. “It is procreating in the field already.”

The pair spoke at an intimate event hosted by Rackspace, the cloud computing giant based in San Antonio, Texas.

What are the biggest tech trends?

• Wearable computing: Think Google Glasses or Motorola Solutions’ new HC1 headset computer that you attach to your head and operate with voice commands (read our review here). This trend will become more prominent as the cost of computing falls.
• The “open world”: Android’s relative openness has encouraged “contextual apps” to emerge from the woodwork. “Apple doesn’t let them [developers] talk to the WiFi radio or bluetooth radio,” said Scoble.
• Weird databases and the rise of “big data”: “We are seeing weird databases spring up like mushrooms,” said Scoble. These include NoSQL, Firebase, and MongoDB. Big data is far more than just an enterprise mega-trend; it is paving the way for innovation in healthcare and education (read our inaugural list of top startups in the space here).
• The maturation of social networks: The leading social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are accumulating a massive store of user-generated data. What will they do with it? We’re still in the nascent stages of understanding how this data can be manipulated.

The power has shifted from investors to entrepreneurs

Kawakasi, who recently authored a book on the practice of self-publishing, talked about how the power has shifted from venture capitalists to entrepreneurs. “You can do a lot of damage for $50,000,” he said. For entrepreneurs, it’s cheaper and easier than ever before to bootstrap a technology company.

All you need is a little talent, a good idea, and a cheap hosting service. (See our seven tips for bootstraping a company here.)

For Kawasaki, if a company has raised hundreds of thousands — if not millions — on a crowdfunding site like Kickstarter or IndieGoGo, that is market validation. It enables the entrepreneur to bypass funding in its early stages.

There is a startup for everything (and it’s cloud-based)

Scoble speaks to thousands of companies per year and even catalogs them on his Facebook page. Currently, he is tracking 1,600 startups. Kawasaki and Scoble let slip a few of the young companies they are most excited about.

Among them, Zaarly, a proximity-based market to share goods, Shopify, one of many startups that wants to bring location-based data to retailers, and Highlight, an app that alerts you when your friends and connections are nearby.

Microsoft and Google have a shot in the race against Apple

In all the talk of future trends, there were a few moments to reflect on recent events. In the eyes of the tech experts, Apple isn’t the same without its enigmatic chief executive at the helm.

“The world is flatter because Jobs isn’t here,” said Scoble. One of the biggest changes, he said, is that app developers will increasingly turn to Android, which is far less rigid. “Now, Google and Microsoft can compete a little better,” he said.

Kawasaki has survived working with Jobs twice (the late Apple founder was a notoriously tyrannical boss) and was an early evangelist of the Cupertino-based company. “I agree, the world has tilted on its axis,” he said.

Geoloqi, the location-focused startup co-founded by “cyborg anthropologist” Amber Case, has been acquired by Esri.

Esri’s a longtime player in the mapping, geographic information systems (GIS) and geolocation arena — it was actually founded way the heck back in 1969 by husband-wife team Jack and Laura Dangermond. Now, Case and Aaron Parecki, her partner in life and in entrepreneurship, are joining the Esri fold.

Geoloqi’s Portland HQ will become Esri’s newest R&D center, and Case will become its director. While the terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, this wasn’t some acqui-hiring mercy-kill. Case said the terms of the deal were “great” and that she wouldn’t have to raise funding when she heads back into the startup fray again — which she undoubtedly will.

“It’s a strategic technology acquisition, and we’re keeping the tech as it is and growing on it,” Case said during a recent phone conversation with VentureBeat.

“I think of Esri as a big customer [that] allows us to do what we would normally do faster. … Esri is the company [Pareki and I] would have become if Geoloqi had grown up, if we had started earlier, in the ’60s.”

Geoloqi launched earlier this year, making the start-to-exit turnaround time as tight as anything we’ve seen in the less-nerdy but more overheated spaces of social or mobile applications. Case also spoke early this year at VentureBeat’s Mobile Summit, explaining how geofencing could create computer interfaces that required nothing from you apart from just moving around in the world.

But Case sees the exit as less of a finish line than a continuation of what she’s loved about her company. “I still feel ownership of it,” she said. “The best thing about it is, I’ll be able to focus on the thing that really matters … instead of looking at spreadsheets every night.”

We asked Case what’s next for her, wondering whether she’d settle into a nice academic rhythm with R&D for Esri or whether she’d jump ship and found another company.

“Definitely, absolutely,” Case responded affirmatively to the latter line. “I don’t know when, but it’s gonna be hard not to. I have some ideas. … I think of this as a beta test for the next thing.”

Geoloqi, which Case counts as her first startup in earnest, was a particular trial by fire. “It was the most difficult thing I’ve ever experienced,” she said.

“I was working 120 hour weeks. … The struggles were ridiculous,” Case said. “I got severely depressed in the middle of it, and I couldn’t let anyone know … as the CEO, you have to look happy all the time, and you have pressure on all sides from investors, from employees.”

But between Pareki’s complimentary skills and her emmployees, Case was able to keep the ship on course. “I’d get down, and the team would pick me back up. … It takes all of your energy.”

And as far as working with a life partner is concerned, Case said, “The idea is that you’re married to your co-founder anyway, so you better really get along. The traditional idea is that you have a significant other, and you go into startup mode and never see them again.

“This was great, because we’d have dinner and we’d figure out some cool, awesome strategy, and it made us happy. … When you find someone that complements you in every way, everything you do is larger than life.”

We also asked Case for her advice to young people, particularly women, who have challenges in the often male-dominated engineering and startup worlds. Case is still young, herself, and has made a huge impression on the tech landscape.

“The key is to be so nerdy that you’re neither male or female, just be a horrible nerd that nobody wants to talk to … then you’ll never even notice that you have a gender,” she said.

“I consider myself a person. If you’re interested in doing something, you just don’t have to worry about yourself. You create your own reality. … and you’re not in tech, you are tech.”

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Smartphones and apps sometimes separate us from the physical world even as we walk through it. But Google has created a virtual tool that will help us appreciate the wonder of reality.

Google’s new Android app Field Trip is a docent for your smartphone, telling you all the fascinating, relevant, and historical information about the world you’re living in as you move through it — without having to ask.

Tell Field Trip what you’re interested in — architecture, history, entertainment, deals — and as you move through your day, the app will bring up fascinating tips or shopping opportunities as you move from place to place. It requires no searching, no Googling, no quick check of Wikipedia: just information that you’ve asked for, appearing when you might want to see it.

It’s not local search; it’s local find — no questions required.

Field Trip has one of the most impressive introductory videos that I’ve ever seen. It tells a fascinating story about the vision behind the project, and it’s well worth a couple of minutes of your time. Keep watching to the very end, or you won’t understand what’s going on:

Google has partnered with the Food Network, it’s own Zagat, and Eater to find the best places to eat, and Cool Hunting, Inhabitat, and Remodelista, among others, for funky stores and products. Atlas Obscura – the self-described “compendium of the world’s wonders, curiosities, and esoterica” — and the Daily Secret add in flavor and seasoning, and Vayable adds unique hand-picked experiences such as custom tours, and local, insider events.

The danger, of course is annoyance: If the app tells too much, or if too little is relevant, users will turn it off. But it can be turned off, and the categories can be personalized to your interests. I’m optimistic this will turn out to be a very, very neat tool for both vacationers and those who are rediscovering the places in which they live.

The app is only available in the U.S. at launch, and while it is currently Android-only, an iPhone version is coming “soon.”

photo credit: Aesum via photopin cc

The latest installment of Instagram came with a nifty new photo journal feature called Photo Maps. Sadly, along for the ride was a not-so-nifty bug that temporarily exposed users’ private photos to the public.

Thursday marked the release of Instagram 3.0, the biggest update so far for the massively popular photo-sharing application. The almost Facebook-owned entity introduced a new way to browse photos on a map, but the Photo Maps feature came with an inadvertent bug on Android (that has since been fixed), as first discovered by Cult of Mac.

In a nutshell, all Instagram users on Android could access a private member’s Photo Map, which should only be available to approved followers.

“But Android users can see the Photo Map option on a private user and tap on it, which will then take them to a Photo Map … where they can roam around looking at all of the private users’s photos,” Cult of Mac’s Buster Heine detailed in a blog post.

Instagram assured us that the bug has been squashed for good.

“The issue’s been resolved; the server was updated to disallow access, and the latest version in the Google Play Store is fixed as well,” Instagram cofounder Mike Krieger said in a statement via email.

No harm, no foul? Not exactly. Location is no laughing matter for some. Photo Maps, while cool, are potentially risky for teens and adults who don’t realize that having their photos plotted on the map tells strangers where they are, where they’ve been, and what places they frequent. That the group of people who took the extra precaution to make their accounts private were affected in this instance is a little troublesome.

Male eye photo via Shutterstock

If you’re tired of Travel Channel reruns, New York City-based Tripl wants to offer you a more social alternative: a simple way to follow your friends’ travels via geographical information in their social media posts.

While it won’t compete with a well-crafted Anthony Bourdain show, Tripl could let you live vicariously through your friends’ experiences, and hopefully even inspire you to travel more. The site connects to your Facebook and Foursquare accounts to collect travel information from your friends, and it gives you beautiful daily digests of their postings.

Tripl was founded in 2009 in Stockholm, Sweden with the original goal of pairing travelers with locals. It released an early version of that web application last December, but since then the company has joined  NYC’s Dreamit Ventures Summer class and has pivoted to focus more on collecting travel stories.

“You hear about tons of startups going through a pivot phase during incubators. What we’re doing is really a ‘focus’ phase, by focusing 100% of our attention on 20% of the previous product we built,” said founder and CEO Pete Sullivan in a statement today. He says that the company is avoiding getting too feature rich quickly, even though there are plenty of cool additions the team is eager to jump on.

Originally from the Greenpoint neighborhood in Brooklyn, Sullivan caught the travel bug at a young age thanks to his family’s love of international travel, he told VentureBeat in an interview several weeks ago. He continued to travel when he got older and quickly realized how much better his experiences were when he had friends in the area. That sparked the initial idea for Tripl, and it’s something that the company could still return to eventually.

For now, Tripl is focusing on social travel stories. The company aims to add support for Instagram soon and will launch an iOS app in the next few weeks.

Tripl raised $300,000 from three angel investors in Sweden last year as well as $300,000 in debt financing from High Peak Venture Partners and Quotidian Capital in March. The company has also received a private investment from a pro poker player, as well as a grant from the Swedish government.

Front photo via Shutterstock

Facebook has quietly added a new feature to its mobile and web applications called “Find Friends Nearby” that potentially lets you speed up the process of “friending” someone you’re already hanging out with.

Essentially, Find Friends Nearby takes you to a web page where you can see other people who are near your location and also looking at the FFN page. In an ideal situation, if you and a person that you just met want to be friends on Facebook, you could both could go to the FFN page rather than typing in each other’s names the old-fashioned way.

The new feature, which was first spotted by TechCrunch, can be accessed inside the iOS and Android apps by opening the menu and tapping Apps > Find Friends > Find Friends Nearby. You can also access it on the mobile web browser by going to the URL “www.fb.com/ffn“. To make sure the app works, you must allow Facebook to detect your location, something I usually keep off.

While this could theoretically speed up the process of friending someone near you, it also poses a privacy risk. If you simply leave the mobile app open on that page or open your web browser, you can see anyone else nearby who accesses the page. Just sitting here at my computer, I’ve already stumbled across a few guys who apparently live very close to my address, and chances are they saw me too. Under the circumstance, I’d rather just look up someone’s name to friend them rather than let random strangers see that I’m nearby.

It’s notable that Facebook has not officially announced this feature, perhaps because the company’s still tweaking it. The feature could also have something to do with Facebook’s recent acquisition of Glancee, an app that helped connect people with others around them.

Women using phones photo: conrado/Shutterstock

If you’re considering any of those things, you’re probably monitoring the global zeitgeist for any signs of intelligence at all. And that’s just gotten easier, with a little project published this morning on Github: Real-time geolocated tweets.

Argentinian developer Dan Zajdband created the site using four services: Tuiter, a library he developed himself to ease working with the Twitter API, Express, Socket IO, and of course, Google Maps.

The result is poetry in code. It’s a little hypnotic, actually, watching tweets fall from the sky and land on the planet:

This is not the first time we’ve seen tweets put on a map in something like realtime.

There’ve been similar projects, including TweetMap, TwitterNano and the seminal A World of Tweets, which is almost two years old. That site, however, only shows geographical distribution and concentration, which shows Twitter is pretty clearly a Europe and Americas phenomenon, with some serious input from south-east Asia:

Zajdband’s site, of course, is more a proof-of-concept than anything else. Still, it’s an interesting insight into the global spread of Twitter as a service, and a window into different places and cultures. For example, after being compelled by this tweet to look up the word “psyanka,” I now know it is a Ukrainian easter egg:

One can only hope that this northern European gentleman is watching a James Bond movie?

And Chomphead1988, who seems to be visiting Venezuela, has just been referred to as “my white friend.”

While it’s interesting to view personal conversations unfolding on a global level, the service also brings up privacy questions. Anyone who posts on Twitter posts in the public domain, of course, unless they protect their tweets. The theory and the reality of that fact, however, may be two different things.

In any case, it’s an impressive accomplishment for an individual programmer.

Two of the more interesting companies on the mobile-development landscape are announcing a new deal for developers today, and will be making great tools for location-based apps available for free.

If you’re into mobile development, Appcelerator and Geoloqi are probably both on your radar.

Appcelerator helps developers make all kinds of mobile apps on a variety of platforms, and Geoloqi brings mobile devs powerful, simple location features, such as proximity information and geofencing.

The two companies have been cozied up for a few months already. Now, they’re giving devs a two-month trial to test drive Geoloqi on Appcelerator’s Titanium 2.0 platform. In a word, this means better location tools will be available for more kinds of apps, and they’ll be easier to use for a wider range of developers.

Titanium lets devs work quickly to get apps live on Android and iOS devices natively, as well as on the mobile web. With Geoloqi plugged in, devs will also have a complete location toolkit (including true geofencing), battery management features, and real-time data storage and analytics.

“Appcelerator customers have been asking for a true, dependable geolocation solution and location-based analytics platform, and we found one in Geoloqi,” said Jeff Haynie, CEO of Appcelerator, in a statement this morning.

“It’s the first geolocation platform that enables individualized geo-triggered events within an application. This powerful toolkit is an essential addition to our app development marketplace, and we’re excited to offer Geoloqi technology to our customers.”

Geoloqi, which was founded by cyborg anthropologist Amber Case, was intended originally and primarily as a tool for large enterprises and government organizations. But Case told us earlier this year that the startup fully intended to bring its tools to the masses via partnerships such as this one.

“Appcelerator has been a fantastic partner, with a very impressive set of tools,” Case said in a release today. “We are thrilled to be enabling their developer base with the power of next-generation location services for their applications and look forward to unleashing the power of the creative commons with powerful, easy-to-use location features.”

To date, Geoloqi has raised $350,000 and is seeking future rounds of funding to continue growing its offerings, client base, and partnerships. Current clients include government and security teams.

Image courtesy of rangizzz, Shutterstock

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Frustration.

That’s the dominant note sounded by commenters at this week’s Mobile Summit, an invitation-only conclave of mobile-industry executives and investors sponsored by VentureBeat.

It’s polite frustration, to be sure. But again and again, I’ve heard on-stage speakers or members of the audience in various discussions allude to their difficulties working with carriers, with Apple, with Google, or with the vast profusion of platforms out there.

One hundred and eighty executives and investors came to the Mobile Summit at scenic Cavallo Point, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, for a one-and-a-half-day discussion of the biggest themes facing the mobile industry. Judging from various show-of-hands questions, I’d say about half the audience represented startups making apps of one kind or another. There was a smaller but very influential segment of carrier and infrastructure providers, including Verizon, AT&T, and Cisco. Larger corporations, many offering enterprise services, were also in attendance, including Google, Salesforce, Box, Intuit, and more. A swath of venture capitalists looking for opportunities rounded out the crowd.

Many of the conversations were tinged with annoyance at the lack of infrastructure in certain key areas, such as geolocation services. In other cases, such as mobile payments, there’s such a wide diversity of options that it’s hard to know which horse to bet on. And one recurring theme was the high cost of customer acquisition and the difficulty of retaining customers, especially for apps.

As I’ve written before, the mobile industry is still highly fragmented, and it’s about to get worse. A lot has happened in the past five years, since the debut of the iOS and Android platforms. The playbooks that worked before were torn up, and new ones have not yet been written.

To take just one example, carriers used to control virtually every aspect of the mobile ecosystem, from the devices you could buy to the software you could run on them. Now they no longer control the operating systems or the apps. In some cases they don’t even control which devices can access their networks. Carriers have had to embrace innovation and openness to a far higher degree than before; Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint all now have innovation hubs aimed at making it easier for companies to create apps and devices that work on their networks.

Despite their efforts, carriers are still not moving fast enough, said Amber Case, founder of GeoLoqi, a geolocation toolkit provider, at the Mobile Summit. (Speaking from the crowd, AT&T’s senior executive VP of technology, John Donovan, took exception to that statement, and pointed out the many ways AT&T has embraced innovation and is trying to enable faster development and deployment on its network.)

But frustration is a signal of opportunity to savvy entrepreneurs and smart corporations, which is why the other big theme of this summit is entrepreneurial hunger.

In other words, the mobile industry presents a perfect entrepreneurial combination of chaos and uncertainty.

Smartphone usage has rocketed. Since 2008, an app economy has emerged that didn’t exist before, opening never-before-seen opportunities for even the tiniest of companies to reach out to mobile customers directly. Enterprises are struggling with a flood of portable devices they can’t control as easily or as completely as they could with Windows PCs.

And, thanks to the wide variety of platforms, devices, and carriers out there, just getting things to work in a predictable way is often a huge challenge, particularly for smaller companies and startups with limited resources.

Here are just a few of the areas where mobile infrastructure is lacking or fragmented, and where there are potentially huge opportunities for companies that can solve these problems:

Source: Heather Kelly/VentureBeat

Executives networking at VentureBeat's Mobile Summit 2012 at Cavallo Point in Sausalito, Calif.

Geolocation: GPS and other location-tracking technologies are now built into every smartphone, making it possible, in theory, to build amazing new apps that take advantage of your location. But there are still difficulties with accuracy and speed, as well as the reliability of getting a GPS signal. Plus, there’s no real ecosystem around location-based services: Every app has to build its own set of location services and use location in its own way.

Mobile payments: There are literally dozens of mobile payment providers, including mobile point-of-sale devices, mobile wallets. Many of these are not widely accepted yet, and are implemented inconsistently between devices (only a minority of phones in the U.S. yet support NFC, for instance). That makes it a challenge for anyone who wants to take or make payments via phone.

Car interfaces: Mercedes showed off a very slick SLS AMG (a $200,000 sports car) with a built-in, Android-based dashboard display. Ford has long had its own Sync system (powered by Microsoft) that integrates with many smartphones. GM has its OnStar network, which can be used by third parties to offer additional services (for example, RelayRides, a peer-to-peer car rental service, takes advantage of OnStar to let renters unlock and start a car via their phones). The problem is all of these systems are incompatible. If you want to make a car-oriented app for a smartphone or tablet, you need to customize it for each car maker, and in some cases for specific models.

Identity management: Smartphones and tablets are increasingly becoming the primary computing devices used by employees. In some cases, IT departments issue tablets to new employees instead of PCs. The difficulty is that with these devices, most of the data resides in the cloud, not on the device itself, creating new security and management issues for IT. In a way, this turns the old security issue (locking down individual PCs) into an identity management issue (making sure that people are who they say they are, and giving them access to cloud data and apps accordingly). Solving this problem could also create new consumer opportunities, by turning phones into authentication devices that help you identify yourself in a wide variety of contexts (your home, your office, your car, etc.).

Enterprise device management: As enterprises deploy tablets and smartphones to their employees, they also need a way to manage those devices appropriately. The challenge is you can’t just impose total control on these devices, as you could with PCs — particularly if the employees are bringing their own devices. A smartphone is simply a more personal thing, and people want the option to use Instagram or Facebook alongside the official apps, VPN, or CRM tool. How do you manage phones in such a way that allows for personal use while still keeping the enterprise apps under control?

User acquisition: This was one of the biggest topics of the Mobile Summit. Both Apple’s App Store and the Android Market have become victims of their own success. As they’ve filled up with apps, it has become harder and harder for customers to find the apps they want, and more difficult for app makers to find the customers they crave. Brian Higgins, the vice president of product innovation for Verizon Wireless, who I interviewed on Monday, had a key point: He said that one of the most important things companies hoping to work with Verizon’s innovation centers can do is figure out what channel model they plan to use. It’s no longer enough to create an awesome app and hope that customers will find you: You need to figure out distribution, too. In a fragmented world that’s controlled by the likes of Apple, Amazon, and Google, that’s not an easy question to answer.

What opportunities do you think are the most enticing to mobile entrepreneurs?

Photos by Heather Kelly/VentureBeat.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

With the rising number of mobile devices equipped with accurate geo-location capabilities, we’ve moved on from interacting with our computers via solid buttons and liquid displays.

Now, it’s all about “air,” according to Geoloqi founder and noted cyborg anthropologist Amber Case.

Speaking at VentureBeat’s Mobile Summit today, Case explained how her fascination with the way humans used computers led her to the field of cyborg anthropology, and ultimately drove her to start Geoloqi, a company dedicated to providing a toolkit for location services.

With location services “the entire world can be a button… your actions can be a button,” Case said. She started Geoloqi (pronounced geo-low-key) because she felt nobody was building a platform that really unleashed the potential for location tech.

One specific feature that Geoloqi offers is geofencing, or the ability to trigger actions when you reach a specific location. Case thinks battery life is a major issue for mobile devices when it comes to geo-location services, (and the entire Summit audience agreed with her). That said, Geoloqi’s SDK offers a way for developers to manage battery consumption.

Case called out carriers for their inability to push location service innovation, which struck a chord with AT&T’s senior executive VP of technology John Donovan. He pointed out that AT&T (like Verizon) has been running innovation centers to spur new technology on their networks for some time.

Case is well-known for her insightful talks at the TED conference, and has spent much of her life thinking about the future of computing. So, her predictions about the value of geo-location are worth considering. Speaking of future tech, Case said she was particularly annoyed by the pristine visions of the future from companies like Microsoft (she’s certainly not alone in that).

Longtime cyborg anthropologist Amber Case has spent the better part of a the past several years researching how people connect to computers; now, she’s launching a startup to make those connections more seamless than ever.

“I’ve been talking about the history of mobile and computers and the increasing connectivity between technology and human beings,” Case told VentureBeat in a recent phone call. “But people still weren’t building the solutions for real-life problem-solving in these sectors.”

Case saw a huge technology gap (and a corresponding huge opportunity) in the areas of location and proximity. “Location is an invisible interface,” she told us, “and I wanted to build something to bring that to life.”

Case’s new company is Geoloqi — pronounced “geo-low-key,” because it’s intended to be easy to use. With this startup, she told us, “I’m taking what I’ve learned in cyborg anthropology and applying that directly.”

The Geoloqi platform is device agnostic, language agnostic, location-source agnostic and carrier agnostic. It gives devs a complete location toolkit (which includes geofencing), battery management features (long a stumbling block for GPS-heavy apps), and real-time data storage and analytics.

The startup has been the buzz of the Internet for a couple months, but today marks its official launch as well as the availability of its fully agnostic SDK for iOS and Android, as well as its proprietary API.

Case describes Geoloqi as a complete stack of geolocation tools that allows developers to unlock the full potential of real-time, location-based services.

We asked Case about similar toolkits such as those from NeuAer or SimpleGeo (which was recently acquired by Urban Airship). “SimpleGeo never had persistent background GPS or true location-based analytics or true geofencing,” said Case, “and I think people really wanted those. There was this missing piece that needed to be there in location.”

Case’s missing link is currently aimed mostly at large enterprises and government organizations.

“You can send an alert to everyone in a certain location if there’s an emergency,” Case offered as an example of how Geoloqi could be used. “A security team could use it to track and communicate with each other. You can request a cab and watch it arrive in real time. You can use it to limit access to files based on location, such as only letting someone access a file if you’re at your headquarters.”

Case said the technology could also be used for home automation.

Currently, some of Geoloqi’s customers military/security customers are using the platform for personnel recovery. “When they’re deployed, they need to make sure they’re safe,” Case explained. “If there’s a sniper, they can draw a geofence. And if someone is within that boundary, they get an alert.”

Geoloqi has a long queue of would-be customers in the retail, government, and security verticals, but Case couldn’t reveal the exact number of clients when we spoke. Currently, the startup has six full-time staffers and is recruiting heavily.

“We’ve raised $350,000, and although we’re making a good chunk of revenue … we’re poised to grow very quickly,” said Case, adding that future, larger rounds of venture capital are definitely “a possibility.”

Also, Case and team are engineering strategic partnerships to bring their product to other verticals such as healthcare — which in turn would add up to more revenue for the young startup.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Thirty percent of online adults in the U.S. are familiar with geolocation applications, but less than six percent of online adults use these apps, and only two percent use them once a week or more, according to new data from research company Forrester.

Forrester conducted an online survey with more than 37,000 respondents ages 18 to 88 in August 2011 and found that just two percent more of online adults have started using location-based applications since its 2010 report, but awareness of this class of applications grew by 14 percent during the same period.

The study was not limited to location-based social networks such as Foursquare, Loopt and SCVNGR (and formerly Gowalla), which are defined by their ability to allow users to share information about their whereabouts with their social graph. It looked at awareness, adoption and user demographics of the broader category of geolocation applications.

Geolocation app users, according to Forrester, are predominately young and male, but female users are on the rise. Forrester found that the percentage of female geolocation app users grew from 22 percent in 2010 to 37 percent in 2011. Generation X users account for 32 percent of all geolocation app users, while Gen Y users account for 43 percent, which means that 75 percent of all geolocation app users are between the ages of 23 and 45.

Forrester detailed its findings in a report entitled “Marketing Via Geosocial Apps: Why and How,” and offered suggestions for marketers looking to leverage location-based social networks. Marketers, according to the company, should specially target geosocial app users because they skew younger, are early adopters, and are twice as likely as the average adult to “share information about products they are considering purchasing or have purchased, or a product review.”

The findings are not surprising — Foursquare may have 15 million users, but the idea of explicitly sharing one’s location with social network friends is a foreign concept to most. And the data does leave room for what seems obvious: mobile devices are becoming inextricably intertwined with location services.

“All online adults are increasingly using location-based features on mobile devices, accessing the mobile Internet from many locations, looking for deals in exchange for brand interaction, and interested in what their friends are doing and what they think,” Forrester said. “We predict that location will no longer be a specialized service but, rather, embedded into all mobile activities, making location-based marketing a key tactic for marketing in the future.”

The chart depicts that five percent of online adults use geolocation apps in total, but Forrester told VentureBeat that the figure is actually closer to six percent (the lower figure is due to rounding of each category of response).

[Image via JPott/Flickr]

Needium, a “social media customer discovery platform,” could make that possible. The company announced an upgrade to its service today at Demo Fall 2011, a product showcase in Silicon Valley.

The company monitors and filters social media to look for tweets relevant to its customers’ businesses. Those customers are usually small businesses and merchants who are eager for real-time, local intelligence about potential customers. When Needium finds a matching tweet, its community managers respond on behalf of the matching merchant, creating a conversation and hopefully roping in a new customer.

Thanks to the geographic data embedded in many tweets, the company is already indexing a vast amount of local data: more than 400,000 tweets per day in Boston, over half a million in Toronto and upwards of 1 million tweets per day in the Los Angeles area.

Needium estimates that about 10 to 15% of local tweets are related to food, entertainment or travel needs. For example, every day:

• more than 500 people in Los Angeles tweet “I’m hungry”
• more than 300 people in Atlanta tweet that they have a headache
• 25 people in Washington, D.C. complain about their wisdom teeth
• dozens of people in Toronto tweet that they need to clean their their house, room or car
• more than 30 people in New York tweet about being locked out of their home, car or apartment

The company says that its Ruby-based platform can scale to handle the complete firehouse of Twitter updates, while its real-time indexing layer can process tens of thousands of messages per second in a distributed architecture. Activities streams are exposed in an internal, JSON-based API on a Ruby on Rails stack, which also handles the application logic. The company says it will soon make this API available to external developers.

Customers access Needium via an HTML5 and CSS3-powered browser-based dashboard, which will also form the basis of future desktop and mobile apps.

Needium was founded in 2007 and currently has 16 employees. It has raised $3 million in funding to date from St. Lawrence Capital. The company is based in Montreal.

Needium is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2011 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

The photo sharing service is now letting account holders cordon off custom geographical areas, called geofences, and set specific privacy controls for those locations.

“For example, you might want to create a geofence around the your home or school that only allows Friends and Family to see the location of the photos you geotag in that area by default,” wrote Flickr engineer Trevor Hartsell on the Flickr developer blog.

Five years ago, Flickr introduced geotagging, a feature that let users specify the location where the photo was taken and placed the photo on a map. (Many new cameras and smartphones automatically add this information to photos.) Since then, around 300 million photos and videos have been geotagged on Flickr.

“A few years ago, privacy controls like this would have been overkill,” wrote Hartsell. “Geodata was new and underused, and the answer to privacy concerns was often, ‘You upload it, you deal with it.’ But today, physical places are important to how we use the web. Sometimes you want everyone to know exactly where you took a photo. And sometimes you don’t.”

In the past, the privacy settings for geodata have had to be managed by hand on a photo-by-photo basis. With geofencing, photos around your designated areas will automatically have their own privacy settings.

As Hartsell explains it, “Geofences are special locations that deserve their own geo privacy settings. Simply draw a circle on a map, choose a geo privacy setting for that area and you’re done. Existing photos in that location are updated with your new setting, and any time you geotag a photo in that area, it gets that setting, too.”

If you move a previously uploaded photo into a geofenced area, it’ll get the geofence privacy settings. If you upload a photo from an overlapping area between two geofences, Flickr will select the more conservative of the two privacy settings. In the case of an overlap between a friends-only zone and a family-only zone, Flickr will make the geotag private.

For many users, this new privacy setting should allow them to upload photos with much more peace of mind about who sees what and who knows where they’ve been.

Image courtesy of Flickr, dunstan.

Launched in March last year, the startup currently provides three solutions to enterprises — an app that helps conference attendees stay in touch at events, one which lets field workers exchange information on-the-go, and another that enables local brands to interact with their communities.

Enterprises can license these applications and customize them by providing their own branding and content. Already on the startup’s customer list are an impressive suit of companies, including Cisco, HP, Adobe, Gannett, and TED.

DoubleDutch is based in San Francisco. Its $1.2 million seed round was led by Lightbank, an investment fund started by Groupon founders Brad Keywell and Eric Lefkofsky. Other participants included Charles River Ventures, Launch Capital, Accelerator Ventures, Venture51, and Zig Capital.

The features, while not likely to matter in the short term to Google’s ad-driven revenues, signal the Web search giant’s intent to stay on the cutting edge of mapping technology as it expands into the potentially lucrative market for local, geographically targeted search.

Most notably, Google’s Street View, which looks to digitize much of the world’s accessible areas through photos from its 360-degree camera-equipped van, has been fully integrated in the new version and allows users to zoom-in from outer space right to someone’s door step in one swish. The feature previously required users to click on Street View icons in available regions.

Additionally, for nature-lovers among us, Earth 6 boasts the introduction of 80 million 3D trees in Athens, Berlin, Chicago, New York City, San Francisco and Tokyo, which have been “digitally planted” using models of dozens of species of trees. The company also plans to work with environmental outreach programs such as Africa’s Green Belt Movement, Brazil’s Amazon Conservation Team, and Mexico’s Conabio to help model the planet’s threatened forests.

The ability to browse historical imagery on a location has also been made more easily accessible. Whenever there is a historical image of a location — allowing you to see how it looked back in time — a status bar will now be shown at the bottom.

The tool was previously updated back in June with version 5.2, adding an integrated Web browser and visualization of walking and biking tracks.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

SimpleGeo, a service for adding location-based features to applications, just announced that former Digg CEO Jay Adelson will be its new CEO and join its board of directors.

The company’s former CEO and co-founder Matt Galligan will now act as Chief Strategy Officer, so that he can focus on what he says are ”company strategy, evangelism, and new concepts around the integration of location services.”

In a post on SimpleGeo’s blog, Galligan goes on to outline Adelson’s career:

Many people are familiar with Jay from his role as CEO of Digg, where he helped transform a relatively unknown startup into a global brand, and also as founder (and current Chairman) of Revision3, a leading Internet television network. However, I feel like Jay’s time at Digg and Revision3 were really the outliers in his career.

Previous to both Digg and Revision3, Jay founded Equinix, a billion dollar international company that operates data centers and provides network connectivity services for companies around the world. Currently, well over 70% of the world’s Internet traffic depends on Equinix to reach its destination. He also co-founded Digital Equipment Corporation’s Palo Alto Internet Exchange (PAIX), one of the largest Internet aggregation points in the United States. Before that, Jay was a founding employee of Netcom, one of the nation’s first ISPs.

SimpleGeo isn’t the only company looking to bring in seasoned veterans to help run their location-based services. According to Business Insider, Facebook grabbed early Foursquare engineer Nathan Folkman to work on its new Facebook Places feature — a good pick-up as the company ramps up its newly released “deals” feature.

SimpleGeo has been working hard over the past year. The Colorado-based company, founded in 2009, recently announced a second round of funding for $8 million and has been on a hiring spree — going from 4 to 23 employees in nine months, according to Galligan’s personal blog.

The startup has partnered with 20 universities for its launch, out of which it is launching pages for Harvard, Stanford, and Syracuse today, with the rest likely to follow in the coming weeks. Representatives or eager students from universities not currently in the program can apply to join.

Once equipped with a page, universities can have students “follow” their accounts, and use the page to broadcast messages and activities. Students and staff, meanwhile, can share and discover “Tips” when they check-in — information on buildings, landmarks, traditions, secrets, shortcuts around campus, etc. — and earn badges and discounts. For example, the campus bookstore may choose to run a special for people who hold the “Bookworm” badge, earned by checking in frequently to the library.

The geolocation service already has somewhat of a reputation for its young, urban “hipster” demographic, and this is a sensible move to reach out to a broader, yet similarly poised audience. College students may not be based in as urban a location as the service has targeted to date, but there are lots of them, and you can bet they want to keep up with the latest new thing in town as much as anyone else.

Universities have been a great traction point for startups looking to gain critical mass. Lest we forget, they were almost single-handedly responsible for Facebook’s emergence. So it’s not surprising to see Foursquare seek out that direction.

Foursquare is based in New York and was founded in 2008 by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai. The company raised $20 million back in July from Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.

Getting content noticed is a challenge for everyone making apps. We’ll cover the topic at DiscoveryBeat 2010. Startups and big companies alike should consider entering our Needle in the Haystack discovery business idea competition. Early bird discounts are available until September 22. Sponsors can contact us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To buy tickets, click on this link.

Using the iPhone’s GPS and accelerometer, the app lets you track not only your pace, distance, and calories when you go out for runs, but visually maps your run routes on Google Maps, showing you where you went and at which exact points you sprinted or slowed down.

Unlike previous Nike+ iPod offerings, no special sensors or kits are required for the app to function.

A couple of features worth mentioning are voice feedback — which lets you know how you’re doing — and the ability to tap on the map at anytime to see how far you’ve come. Additionally, some will appreciate its integration with the popular PowerSongs feature from other Nike+ apps, which lets you setup and play specific songs for different types of runs.

The app also syncs with Nikeplus.com, Nike’s online community, which has grown to over 3 million members since its debut back in 2006. Using the site, users can set challenges and track and share their progress through Facebook and Twitter.

While designed for the iPhone, users with an iPod Touch and iPad can also use it, albeit without the GPS tracking capabilities. The app is available on Apple’s App Store for $1.99.

We’ve covered a couple of similar applications before. RunKeeper launched an iPhone app that maps runners’ progress back in March of this year. And the San Francisco Country Transit Authority launched something similar for bicyclists in November 2009 called CycleTracks.

“We are finishing designing our application soon and hope to offer it soon,” he said, according to attendees. (The Ustream recording of his talk is embedded below. It seems to skip the part about location, but several attendees including The Financial Times’ correspondent Tim Bradshaw retweeted Zuckerberg’s comments.)

The company has said that it’s been working on location for some time. Its most recent privacy agreement suggested that people would be able to notify friends of their whereabouts, as well as announcing that they like physical places in the real world, much as they declare that they like movies, musicians, and celebrities now on the social network.

From what we’ve heard, Facebook’s approach to location isn’t designed to be mutually exclusive of other startups in the space like Foursquare or Gowalla, which currently let their users broadcast their location on Facebook. The social network perceives itself as the platform for a host of place-related experiences and the initial design for location might be relatively simple, like attaching a location to a status update, an approach similar to the one taken by microblogging service Twitter. A product that is relatively conservative at first might also allow the company to avoid rekindling privacy concerns.

That said, Facebook has experimented with more ambitious location technology. At its most recent developer conference in April, attendees could use a radio-frequency ID tag to “like” different venues around the building. You’d take a Facebook RFID tag, tap it on a device, and it would post a status update saying you had been to a kiosk at the conference. It wouldn’t be hard for the social network to partner with a concentration of local businesses in a specific city like Palo Alto and do a real-world beta of this technology soon.

http://www.ustream.tv/flash/video/7808898

The company hasn’t launched geotagging or “checking in” yet. But in the most recent version of its privacy policy released last year, the company said it would allow people to add “a location to something you post.” They’ve made that a lot vaguer now. Instead, you can tag posts with a “place” like a Fan Page.

Making geotagging compatible with Fan Pages could make Facebook’s local pages a lot richer and maybe even competitive with Google’s Place Pages or Yelp’s listings. If you could tag an update or post with a venue, you could probably attach comments, mini-reviews and photos to the Fan Page.

More specifically, if you read the policy itself, it sounds like other people will be able to tag places with your name. It’s a subtle but important distinction between the way other location-sharing apps work. With Gowalla, MyTown or Foursquare, you decide to share your own location, not those of friends.

Here’s an excerpt from Facebook’s privacy policy:

If another user tags you in a photo or video or at a place, you can remove the tag. You can also limit who can see that you have been tagged on your profile from your privacy settings.

From what we’ve heard about Facebook’s location strategy, the company perceives itself to be a platform to host a whole range of location-related experiences. While you may be able to “check in” or share your location on Facebook, the way they’ll implement location may not be exclusive of other services like Foursquare. That said, some of the biggest location-based apps like Gowalla, Loopt and Foursquare will have to find ways to differentiate themselves and offer something above and beyond the simple act of “checking in” to survive.

Two-year-old BrandFolium will turn on its Navid (pronounced nah-VEED) website today at DEMO, calling it an online connection between advertisers and publishers of social networking sites.

The Navid marketplace works pretty much like the way advertisers and publishers have worked together for decades. An advertiser looks for publishers whose readership closely matches the advertiser’s target market. The advertiser provides some information on Navid as to what target audience it’s looking for. Then the site’s Match-Mapping engine serves up several possible options. The advertiser can then contact a publisher and engage in a two-way conversation in a little text window (140 characters max, of course) to discuss terms of the contract, negotiate a price, decide when and where the ads will run and seal the deal.

The social media market is currently buzzing about what Twitter’s advertising model may be, and while BrandFolium wants to get a piece of the Twitter market, it’s also thinking beyond Twitter, said co-founder Guillaume Dumortier, in Sunnyvale, Calif.

“A lot of rumors have come out” about Twitter, Dumortier said. “We’re starting with Twitter but we’re going to add more social networks.”

The company also wants to arrange geolocation-based advertising deals tied to the Foursquare mobile application, delivering ads to nearby restaurants based on the customer’s proximity to them.

Forrester forecasts “interactive marketing” spending to reach $55 billion by 2014, or 21 percent of all marketing spending. That’s not just on social media sites, though, but also search, e-mail and mobile marketing.

BrandFolium has raised more than $500,000 from angel investors in Finland, France and the UK, Dumortier said.

To do so, it’s aggregating check-ins from other services that are publicly shared on Twitter through its mobile apps. That way, users can see where their friends are regardless of which service they use to temporarily share their whereabouts. The company will parse natural language on Twitter like “I’m having a drink in the W Hotel Bar” to derive locations, and it will also pull check-ins that are tweeted from services like Gowalla and Foursquare. (See the bottom photo from Tremors, a special Rummble site that lists the busiest places according to tweets.)

It’s not a perfect solution, considering that many people don’t publish their check-ins from these apps on Twitter. But Rummble, which says it has 100,000 active users, believes it will eventually be able to add full real-time data feeds, or firehoses, from other location startups. SocialGreat and SimpleGeo recently became among the first services to pull in data from Foursquare’s firehose, a special anonymized feed of check-ins.

“People will still check-in with whatever service they prefer. They don’t have to switch from Foursquare or Gowalla,” said Alex Housley, Rummble’s vice president of business. “We’re more of a reviewing service. We help users with serendipitous discovery of what to do or where to go.”

Rummble CEO Andrew Scott says the company, which predates Foursquare’s launch by more than two years, has always been about personalized recommendations for things to do or places to go. The service was built around “trust algorithms” that generate a personal profile for each user by calculating who they trust and share tastes with when it comes to places like bars or restaurants.

It later began adding features like the “check-in.” and its own variation on gaming incentives — like mayorships and badges — after Foursquare popularized them. Its version of a mayorship, called a Local Hero, isn’t about checking in the most though. It’s about being influential and reviewing the most places in a specific category or neighborhood, like bars in New York’s East Village, for example.

Now that basic location-sharing is becoming commoditized, it seems that Rummble wants to return to its original mission by leaving some of that work to other apps.

Aggregating check-ins and dealing with the overwhelming number of location services was a big topic of conversation at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin over the weekend. Developers from another early player in the space, Brightkite, are gearing up to launch check.in, a way to share your location via multiple apps from one place.

But it’s hard to say whether the companies with the largest number of active users will be so willing to share data, due to privacy concerns and because they might want to preserve their leads. Companies are only as open as it strategically benefits them. Right now, Foursquare’s application programming interface allows developers to create apps that let people check in from other places, or visualize location data. But it and other companies that have launched APIs like Gowalla have to be careful not to expose location data to an external developer without explicit user permission.

Facebook may not turn out to be so much of a Foursquare killer.

In fact, the world’s largest social network drives the largest share of the location-based game’s web traffic, accounting for 33 percent of all upstream visits last week, according to web research firm Hitwise. Google follows closely behind, with a 22 percent share, and then Twitter clocks in at 8 percent.

Foursquare, the location game from Dodgeball creator Dennis Crowley, has been on a tear as of late, breaking past 500,000 registered users and logging 275,000 check-ins yesterday alone.

Although some blogs have speculated that Facebook’s forthcoming location features may spell the end for smaller startups, we hear that the social network is inclined to serve as a platform for a whole host of location-related applications.