The Facebook Places feature was unveiled a year ago and let users “check-in” to various locations. Many saw this as a serious threat to other social location services like Foursquare and Gowalla because Facebook has an incredible number of users. But by October you could already see that the feature wasn’t catching on, with only 6% of Facebook users trying the service.

As an alternative to the Places feature, Facebook will optionally add a location to status updates or pictures. But adding a location to a status is clearly not the same as checking in and getting the benefits of knowing where your friends are. So really, Facebook has folded the check-in the game in favor of a broad location idea that many users will likely not try. (Just as they didn’t try Places.)

Foursquare has to be happy about this, though the company declined to say anything about the death of Places. It did use the opportunity to toot its own horn.

“Far from concentrating on what others are doing, we’re 100 percent focused on continuing to build an amazing product that changes the way people experience the world around them,” a Foursquare spokesperson told VentureBeat.

The New York-based Foursquare has been on a bit of a roll with a slew of announcements the past few months. A week ago, the startup added the ability to check into events with friends, and in mid-July it partnered with several daily deals sites to offer better deals to customers who checked in.

As of July, Foursquare has more than 10 million users and has had more than half a million businesses sign up to offer specials. The company recently raised a $50 million funding round with a valuation of $600 million.

Personally, I never used Places because I already had Foursquare for check-ins. Another reason I wasn’t attracted to Places was because there are many people on Facebook I don’t know well enough to share my location with. My Foursquare friends, however, are people I’m comfortable with knowing my whereabouts.

What do you think of the death of Facebook Places?

Popular location check-in application Foursquare

With millions of consumers checking in to locations around the world, Foursquare has quickly become another marketing tool for companies. Previously, Foursquare had a less-than-stellar set of pages explaining how a business may claim a venue.

With today’s launch, the new page, dubbed “Quick Start Guide,” is much more dynamic, interactive and spotlight how a business or brand can attract customers using Foursquare. For example, rather than just claiming your venue, the company now explores several different types of campaigns that can be run, such as a Mayor Special, Frequency Special or Count Special to name a few. The guide also talks about how to promote specials, redeem them, and track venue stats.

Foursquare isn’t the only one who is trying to get businesses and brands to claim venues or create badges, competitors Gowalla and Scvngr also have a business page. While the basic copy is similar, one wonders if the new interactive and flashy Foursquare business pages are what’s needed. Though recent reports of bugs in Blackberry app versions won’t help to prove that the company is a legitimate business tool.

Foursquare, based in New York City and founded in 2009, has raised more than $21 million in funding. It currently has more than 40 employees in its hometown and a new engineering office that it’s opening in San Francisco.

I last spoke to CloudMade chief executive Juha Christensen when the company raised its second round of funding in July. At the time, he acknowledged that there are competitors (such as SimpleGeo) offering tools to create location apps, but he said CloudMade offers more than detailed data to power “hundreds of thousands of apps in different verticals.”

Yesterday, Christensen told me OneStepAhead’s technology advances that goal by managing the way mapping data is downloaded onto phones. That means CloudMade developers will be able to build apps where more of the data is stored on phones, so users can access maps when they’re offline. They’ll also use less mobile data since they’re not downloading maps again and again. OneStepAhead (which was self-funded) is based in Stuttgart, Germany, so that gives CloudMade an office near the German auto industry, which Christensen said has created a big market for location apps in that country.

Menlo Park, Calif.-based CloudMade has raised $15.7 million from Greylock Partners and Sunstone Capital. Its cofounder Steve Coast also cofounded the community mapping project OpenStreetMap, and CloudMade draws its data from its project. You can see some of the apps built on its platform at this website.

Retailigence takes inventory data from both sophisticated software (like that offered by SAP and NetSuite) and basic spreadsheets, then makes the information available through an application programming interface (API) to developers of location-based apps, shopping apps, and so on. So if a location check-in app is trying to lure you to a nearby store with the promise of a hot new product, it can use Retailigence to track whether that product is actually in stock.

In addition to DFJ and 500 Startups, ZIG Capital, Global Brain Corporation, and various angel investors participated in Retailigence’s $1.5 million seed round. The company was incubated at the Founder Institute.

Another hot startup called Milo.com offers shoppers a way to see what’s in stock on the shelves of nearby stores. It sounds like Retailigence isn’t trying to compete directly with Milo, but rather to provide the data for similar applications.

[image via Flickr/Fen Branklin]

Founded by Andrew Graham and John Warner in 2003, the duo originally envisioned a location-based app for tourism that would trigger relevant content when a visitor passed a certain location. But realizing that GPS on cell phones was still very much in a nascent stage, and that out-of-towners are not among the earliest of adopters, they shifted their focus to a demographic that is always eager to adopt new tech: Athletes.

The application, launched in February of 2006 and dubbed BiM Active, is purchased by an over-the-air download and costs a monthly subscription of $5.99 to $9.99 depending on the carrier. Once purchased, BiM Active tracks a runner or biker via GPS and calculates distance, speed, caloric burn, route, elevation, weather, degree of difficulty and allows you to wirelessly upload all this content all the data a central server, so you can show off your monster run to fellow enthusiasts. The program can also be used by snowboarders, hikers, rowers — pretty much any activity where it’s helpful to know how far you traveled and how quickly you did it.

The program gives some easy branding opportunities for companies in the same space. Currently, the program can be found at the Runner’s World website with the Runner’s World brand slapped on top. The company hopes to reach out and strike further sponsorships deals with other athletically-inclined brands.

Bones in Motion was, according to co-founder Andrew Graham, “one of the first LBS apps to go up on Sprint and Verizon. The carriers were looking for a very friendly face to put on location-based technology, something not so Big Brother.” The program has also garnered a couple of awards, winning the Navteq Global LBS Challenge in 2005, and the Brew Developer’s Award in 2007. The company has received only angel funding up until this point, with no institutional support, though Graham says that the company has been offered term sheets. However, Graham says, “Our next big carrier deployment will mean we’ll be able to cover 75 percent of the US subscriber base, so we’ll be getting to the point where it makes sense to get institutional support.”

Compared to what’s already on market, the most obvious advantage of BiM Active is price. A basic GPS unit for bicyclists from Garmin starts at around $250, or around 41 months of service from BiM Active. However, there are several things that may give hardcore athletes pause. BiM uses United States Geological Survey data, supplemented by GPS, to track altitude which is accurate to 10-20 meters. Garmin and others use barometric pressure combined with GPS to give altitude readings, which are accurate to about 3 meters. BiM Active also doesn’t have support for via Bluetooth heart rate monitors such as those put out by Alive Technolgies or Polar, which any athlete in training is going to want to see (though the application does support imported heart rate data from third-party applications). While runners probably won’t mind keeping their phone on an arm strap or pants pocket, bicyclists like to mount GPS units on their handlebars for easy viewing, something that may be difficult with a cell phone. Also worrying is that traditional GPS units are weather-proofed; cell phones, as I can personally attest to, are not.

Still, as GPS continues to appear on more and more cell phones, location-based apps that help track fitness training are going to become more popular, and Bones in Motion is well-positioned to be at the forefront of that particular niche.