Asian e-commerce juggernaut Alibaba has paid $294 million for a 28 percent stake in AutoNavi, a location, GPS, and mapping company based in Beijing. The end goal, the companies said, is a combination of the two entities’ areas of expertise: physical location and online retail.

In a press release, AutoNavi states it plans “to share certain data, including AutoNavi’s map data and location-related information of the merchants on Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms. … AutoNavi and Alibaba will also cooperate in the areas of map engine, location search, navigation, and cloud computing services and will cross-promote their respective products and services, with a goal of developing new location-based business models.”

The deal itself is structured so that one of Alibaba Group’s wholly owned subsidiaries will purchase 28 percent of AutoNavi’s fully diluted outstanding shares. Alibaba executive vice chair Joseph C. Tsai and Eddie Wu, Alibaba’s mobile product president, will both gain seats on AutoNavi’s board of directors. The deal should close soon pending regulatory approval.

In a statement, Alibaba chief Jack Ma said, “This new alliance reflects our vision for the future of the mobile Internet.”

“With Alibaba’s support, AutoNavi will be able to establish a massive platform of points of interest (POIs) related to the kinds of services our users seek every day,” said AutoNavi CEO Congwu Cheng.

“The alliance will also enable us to create an innovative monetization model by providing consumers with a one-stop service application that integrates merchant information with POIs search, data mining, payment, and other e-commerce activities.”

AutoNavi was founded in 2001 and currently employs 2,000 people. The company had its $100 million IPO in the United States in 2010.

Image credit: fcasadei/Flickr

The promise of social checkins has always been that they’ll make money by revealing to marketers where you are and when you want to buy stuff. Payments startup Square thinks it can do ya one better: telling marketers where you already bought stuff and where you’re likely to want to buy more in the future.

In a chat with The Verge, Square discovery chief Ajit Varma said, “We can tell you that people who like X might also like Y, and it’s a true representation of what you’ve bought.”

Making shopping recommendations isn’t exactly cutting-edge anymore. After all, it’s how old-school behemoth Amazon sells you so much crap and how equally old oldster Netflix keeps you glued to your laptop screen watching old episodes of Breaking Bad long after you should have been asleep.

But Square has a very slight advantage: It knows not only what you buy, but exactly, geographically where you buy it. And it knows not what your interests or “likes” are, but what you actually put plastic to magnetic strip reader for.

The big missing piece in Square’s data treasure trove is something online retailers do very well: tracking what you almost bought and what you might want to look at again, and trying to predict when and where you’ll change your mind and push the button on a purchase decision.

Square has made some big pushes toward more rapid growth (which means more user data) lately. It launched a cheap-o, $300 Business-in-a-Box program to help would-be small business owners get off the ground. And it’s selling its credit card-reading dongles everywhere, from Starbucks to Verizon.

Currently, Square is processing around $10 billion in consumer purchases each year.

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

Leading VOIP and cheap call provider Rebtel asked 1,632 American adults what effects social networks had on them. In a classic can’t-live-with-it, can’t-live-without-it scenario, almost 20 percent of American adults said Facebook was the social network that has the “most negative effect” on their mood, and another 20 percent said it caused them the most stress.

However, Facebook is also the site that almost half of Americans said was the most positive.

In other words, Facebook is such a big part of our lives that our experience of the site pretty much mirrors our experience of life: sometimes our friends piss us off, sometimes they make us sad, but more often, they make us happy.

One thing that’s almost guaranteed to drive your friends nuts? Including them in status updates and location check-ins. 45 percent of us don’t like it when we appear in social media updates that others create, and 70 percent say that’s because they don’t like to broadcast their location.

LinkedIn, Twitter, and Youtube caused almost no stress, as did MySpace. In MySpace’s case, of course, that’s because no-one actually uses the site anymore. But the social media site that are the most positive are Instagram and Pinterest, with only .3 percent and .1 percent, respectively, saying they were stressed out by those services.

One other interesting data point the Rebtel survey highlighted is how social media makes us feel.

On days when we check into social accounts more frequently than normal, we’re typically bored. Of course … that might be the  reason we’re checking in in the first place. But on days when we’re checking in less frequently than normal, we’re typically feeling left out, like we’re missing out on something.

In other words, we’re addicted.

photo credit: Amir Kuckovic via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Three billion check-ins and tens of millions of tips ought to add up to something. In Foursquare’s case, that means the “Best of” series, which highlights “the most awesome places in cities across the U.S.”

The location-based social network, which has downplayed the competitive aspect of its service in which users get “points” for checking into various locations, has been focusing on local exploration and discovery. This new part of its website, launched today, helps people explore other places as well.

That means, apparently, that Mi Cocina is the best Mexican restaurant in Dallas. And that the 3 Crow Bar is the best nightspot in Nashville, Tenn.

“We use signals like tips, likes, dislikes, popularity, local expertise, and nearly three billion check-ins from over 30 million people worldwide to determine how much people love a place,” Foursquare said in a blog post. “The Best of Foursquare pulls together lists of the places people love most in cities across the U.S., from cafés and pizzerias to museums and bookstores.”

The new service is great for checking out what might be a good place to visit when you travel. But it’s also yet another nail in the traditional Yellow Pages-style directory — and a direct shot across the bow of a Yelp, which has owned local business recommendations, especially in the entertainment space.

Frankly, it also makes even clearer the competition between Foursquare and the more hotels-and-flights focused TripAdvisor as well as even the new graph-search-enabled Facebook.

Now, if only Foursquare could figure out a truly viable business model to go with all its wonderful data.

The new app for business owners, which allows them to monitor Foursquare check-in activity, check out top customers, and monitor analytics data, and the recently added feature enabling businesses to promote events might help with this.

So this is why it’s hard not to get at least a tad excited for Foursquare for Businesses, Foursquare’s new companion app for its existing merchant dashboard.

With the app (which is only available for iOS and Android, alas), business owners can monitor Foursquare check-in activity, check out top customers, and monitor analytics data — all from their smartphones. Owners can also use it to activate and deactivate specials, which they’ve only been able to do from their computers.

The app’s release comes a few weeks after Foursquare started giving businesses more detailed check-in data on users.

Foursquare’s angle should be pretty clear: Businesses are becoming massively important to Foursquare’s bottom line. The more information Foursquare gives them, the more attractive Foursquare becomes. That means an actual way to make money — and perhaps confirmation that Foursquare has a sustainable business model behind all of these check-ins.

Photo: Nan Palmero/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Give 2 Charity from location-analytics company Placed offers a new spin on digital giving.

By letting this new app track your location, you can earn points that work as donations to selected charities, including the American Red Cross, Habitat for Humanity, and the Make-A-Wish foundation. The app is currently available for Android, and it’s coming to iOS soon.

Placed uses the location data for its analytics business, and it aggregates it with data from thousands of other users. It also promises it doesn’t share your data on an individual basis and doesn’t use it for ads. While the idea of constantly sharing your location data may seem like a massive invasion of your privacy, Placed may be able to convince consumers to look past that in order to help charities. (And, of course, its own collection of location data will become more valuable in the process.)

Using the Give 2 Charity app is pretty simple: Simply install it, go through a quick survey, and allow it to use the location services of your phone. Afterward, it’ll run in the background to poll your location data to earn points. You can also earn additional points by sharing points on social networks and recommending your friends to the app. You can choose to disable the location tracking for up to one week.

“Placed sees location is the new currency of mobile measurement, and Give 2 Charity is making that currency charitable,” said David Shim, Placed’s founder and chief executive, in an e-mail.  “This is one of the simplest and low friction ways for smartphone owners to help charities year round.”

Shim says he was inspired to create Give 2 Charity after launching Placed’s recent Panel app, which earns you points for rewards. People downloaded the Panel app more than 250,000 times since its launch in October, and he also noticed that users were eager to donate to charities once Placed added that feature.

“The launch of Give 2 Charity is to build upon that initial response, and reach a wider audience of people who want a simple way to give back to the world,” he said.

The Seattle-based Placed has raised around $3.4 million in funding from Madrona Venture Group and others. The company won the top prize for infrastructure startups at our MobileBeat innovation contest in July.

Image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Twist promised to be the perfect app for the perpetually late when it hit the iPhone in July – instead of shooting an “OMW” (on my way) text, the app lets you automatically ping friends with updates on your location. It may not prevent you from being late, but at least your friends know how far away you are.

Today the company is bringing Twist to Android, as it aims to double-down on solving the “when” dilemma (as in, when the heck are you getting here) for mobile services.

“I think that the next generation of web applications and apps will all have a time component,” said Bill Lee, chief executive of Twist and noted serial investor. For the most part, the current trends in apps have focused mostly on social and location aspects, but haven’t dealt much with time.

Lee, an early investor in companies like Yammer, Hootsuite, and Tweetdeck, leveraged his own frustrations with meetings to create Twist. With his experience dealing with hot young companies, he was eager to get ahead of a potential trend. Twist competes with the location tracking company Glympse, as well as some recent features added to Waze, but Lee is quick to point out that he thinks Twist offers a far simpler experience.

Twist’s Android app works just like its iPhone sibling: Simply create a Twist from within the app by choosing where you’re going and who you’re meeting. When you leave your starting point, the app sends your location progress to your contact, and it also includes information about potential traffic snarls. Best of all, Twist works even if the recipient doesn’t have the app — you can also send a text or e-mail to a Twist web app.

Instead of building a native app, Twist decided to rely on HTML5 for Android, co-founder Mike Belshe noted. “HTML5 is not where it needs to be today, but we do want to put our bets and chips behind that,” he said.

Twist’s  iPhone app is currently native, but Belshe, who also invented the SPDY protocol while part of the Google Chrome team, is looking forward to the day when he can power it with HTML5 as well. At that point, the company will easily be able to develop and update Twist more easily (which is the typical mantra of HTML5 fans).

The company has also developed some patent-pending methods to reduce battery consumption while using its apps, Bershe said. That’s important, because the Twist app needs to run in the background as you travel to your next meeting.

Twist is based in San Francisco, Calif. and has raised $6 million in funding from Bridgescale Partners, eBay co-founder Jeff Skoll, former Netscape CTO Eric Hahn, Yammer CEO David Sacks, and others.

The U.S. Senate has just passed a bill that would take the teeth out of online and mobile stalking by creating new rules for location privacy.

The bill, first brought to the Senate by Sen. Al Franken, would keep companies — apps, OS makers, and mobile carriers — from secretly monitoring your location. If the bill becomes law, consumers will have to give consent for any location information can be shared or even collected.

Most reputable applications, such as Google Maps, Foursquare, and Facebook, already take steps to get your consent. But the bill would make that mandatory.

“I believe that Americans have the fundamental right to control who can track their location, and whether or not that information can be given to third parties,” Franken said. “But right now, companies — some legitimate, some sleazy — are collecting your or your child’s location and selling it to ad companies or who knows who else.”

Franken says the practice can lead to or enable stalking and even domestic violence — and the fact that many companies do location-gathering and location-sharing in a way that actually promoted such behavior is something we’ve talked about quite a bit in the past.

The bill was first brought to Congress back in June 2011. A few legislators have expressed concerns about the wording of the bill, but most said they’d be willing to work with Franken to get the bill passed into law.

Here’s the full text of the bill:

S. 1223

Image courtesy of Couperfield, Shutterstock

With the new updates, cardholders can get location-based offers based on their preferences. AmEx already allows cardholders to load offers on to their credit cards in partnership with Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare. Now, they can be alerted when they are within 2 miles of one of those businesses.

More interesting to me is that offers can be triggered based on swipe activity. I’ve long said that AmEx is the king of checkins, because the user doesn’t have to take an explicit action just to check in. AmEx is now using that data to generate offers. If you swipe your card at Pottery Barn around dinner time, you might get an offer for a California Pizza Kitchen nearby.

AmEx is also allowing cardholders to redeem points from its Membership Rewards loyalty program for electronic gift cards that can be used instantly at the Gap, Banana Republic, Old Nay, Pottery Barn, and Williams-Sonoma. More retail partners are available. Although I think it’s really clever and shows how broadly AmEx is thinking, redeeming Membership Rewards points for gift cards isn’t usually the best value. (For the record, the best return on spend is to use AmEx’s Starwood Preferred Guest credit cards and eschew Membership Rewards altogether.) The digital cards also solve a problem I frequently have — leaving the pieces of plastic at home. This feature is also available on Android.

That feature might come in handy around the holidays. According to an AmEx survey, 32% of consumers plan to use a smartphone during their holiday shopping, a big increase from 8% in 2011.

It’s a rare feature I won’t be rushing out to test. I’ll be saving my points for travel.

Rocky Agrawal is an analyst focused on the intersection of local, social and mobile. He is a principal analyst at reDesign mobile. Previously, he launched local and mobile products for Microsoft and AOL. He blogs at http://blog.agrawals.org; and tweets at @rakeshlobster.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Yelp, Foursquare is gunning for you.

The social network is adding to its iOS app and website a fairly minor yet hugely significant feature: Ratings. With the addition, Foursquare says its service will tell users where people actually like to go, not just the places they’ve visited.

To get the numbers, Foursquare uses a secret formula that combines seemingly every feature in its toolbox: likes, popularity, loyalty, tips, and, of course, the data from its 3 billion check ins.

Yelp should be horrified.

Instead of being the app that people use once they get somewhere, Foursquare now wants to be the app that sends them there. This means its going after the same market as Yelp and Google Places, both of which have controlled local listings until now.

While Foursquare is a newbie to the space, its massive data trove means it knows things that Yelp and Google don’t. And the social network is clearly exploiting that data with its recent updates.

Photo: Flickr/Dpstyles

Foursquare’s homepage is now  a whole lot more useful– even if you don’t use Foursquare.

The location-based social network is opening up its Explore recommendation engine so that visitors don’t need a Foursquare account to take advantage of it.

While Explore has been a part of the service’s mobile experience since 2011, it didn’t get a web interface until this January. So while mobile is the company’s bread-and-butter, it’s clear that Foursquare isn’t ignoring your desktop.

But Foursquare’s latest move has a larger, more obvious focus — compelling new users to sign up. Because the service is only as useful as the information Foursquare has on users’ habits,  visitors to the new homepage will be better served by actually creating their own accounts. And that’s exactly what Foursquare wants.

“The more you check in, the smarter it gets,” Foursquare’s head of product Alex Rainert told VentureBeat way back in January.

But while check-ins are a clear focus for the social network, Foursquare says its data is now so robust that it doesn’t need users to check in before it’s able to recommend new places.

The webpage redesign also brings with it some of the tweaks Foursquare made to its apps in June. Now, users can search for things like “free Wi-Fi” or “late night” to get results that are more flexible and not tied solely to what a venue sells.

Google and Yelp had better watch out.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Imagine walking down the street and getting a ping from your friend about the restaurant you’re standing next to. Your iPhone sends you a notification that this place is one you must check out. Meet Blipboard.

Blipboard’s just-launched mobile app for iOS lets you know about all the cool things happening around you and lets you “tune” into location-based updates from friends and professionals.

The product had its first public showing at DEMO, the conference in Santa Clara, Calif. “Tune in to people and places, walk around your city, get alerts about awesome things nearby,” cofounder, Aneil Mallavarapu told the audience. Users can follow people and places as they move around their city. “You can tune into businesses you like, and tune out of those you don’t,” he explained. According to Mallavarapu, the product can best be described as “Twitter for nearby.”

The panel of sages on stage at DEMO were impressed by Blipboard’s presentation with a few reservations. “I am worried it would buzz me a lot once you turn it on,” said Josh Elman of Greylock Partners. “On other hand, I am always curious about what’s around me and if they have the best data-set, I would use it over Yelp.”

“If they have the ability to bring legacy Twitter data into the present, that would be a winner,” said Jason Mendelson of Foundry Group. “I’m excited about this one.”

The company admits to mining inspiration from Twitter and greatly appreciating its simplicity. But the app’s inception has an interesting story behind it:

“I was trained as a cell biologist and biochemist,” Blipboard co-founder Mallavarapu told us via email. “A few years back, I wrote a computer language when I was a systems biologist at Harvard. It simulated the biochemistry of cell-cell communication. Now, I didn’t start Blipboard because of these ideas. Blipboard came out of thinking deeply about how social networks like Twitter are used and why they become popular. But there are some shared themes. Cells signal each other with molecules. Blipboard is about people signaling each other using pins on a map.”

The company’s app is only available natively for iOS now, but it plans to expand to Android, Windows Phone, and the web. The app is totally free, so to make money it will explore “opportunities to build a business around connecting retailers with their best customers.”

San Francisco-based Blipboard was founded in January 2012 and has five full-time employees and five part-time contractors. The bootstrapped startup hopes to use this week’s DEMO conference as a launch pad for awareness that could help it attract funding.

Blipboard is one of 75 companies and 6 student “alpha” startups chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Photo credit: Blipboard

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

So you’re visiting a new mall — what if you could just glance at one app to see if your favorite stores, or those jeans you’ve been dying to buy, are nearby? MyPref, an iPhone app that remembers products and brands that you like, aims to do just that.

While it’s not too tough to locate nearby stores on your smartphone already, MyPref has the potential to be useful once it learns enough about you. At that point, the app could function like a database of things that you like, which you can also easily share with your friends. The app can also tell you which of your friends’ tastes are most compatible with you.

“Most location-based retail-consumer apps inundate the user with information that is largely irrelevant and less than useful,” said MyPref cofounder Abhishek Chhajlani in an e-mail to VentureBeat. “Although consumers provide merchant reviews and recommendations and share them with their social networks, the business model behind these apps is merchant-driven marketing.”

MyPref is Chhajlani’s attempt to reduce the clutter consumers face in retail apps — though it certainly has a long road ahead. The company is clearly competing with Facebook, which since its founding has been desperate to learn what users like and how to make money off it. Eventually, Facebook could pursue MyPref’s mobile location-based approach, which would spell trouble for the fledgling startup.

But Chhajlani believes MyPref’s friend compatibility metric could help it compete against Facebook. “Unlike other networks that deal with the number of likes and preferences, we deal with quantifying each individual number as well, and not in a generic way, but based on your own preferences and of those within your network,” he said.

Chhajlani and his friend Manan Bhandari found MyPref in India in January. The idea for the company came when the cofounders were struggling to remember a specific dish their friends recommended in a restaurant. That led them to believe there was a need for an app that tied our preferences together with location.

The app is functional for two sectors at the moment-food and fashion, which on the one hand allows the company to focus on execution, but is potentially limiting in terms of user interest.

“Finding things around you is a hard problem,” said Sage Panelist Josh Elman of Greylock Partners. “I think it is good they are picking one or two specific verticals to start with. It is a better start than trying to be broad, but I got stuck figuring out how food and fashion fit together.”

The company received seed funding from friends and family earlier this year, and it’s looking to raise additional capital.

MyPref is one of 75 companies and 6 student “alpha” startups chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMOFall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

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

We tend to have short memories about these things. In the long run, we will be better off for having two companies with very deep pockets investing in mapping our world.

Mapping is one of the most challenging problems out there. The underlying data are constantly changing. Businesses open and close, new buildings are added to our skylines, new roads are built, subdivisions gets added, and (sadly) in some places cities become virtual ghost towns.

The new wave of mapping will be driven by the use of smartphones as data collectors and real-time data that is published on the Internet.

The competitors in the maps and local landscape have changed a lot since the beginning of the Internet. We’ve gone through several waves:

• In the first wave, it looked like local newspapers, CitySearch and Sidewalk were going to run away with local. In the mid-’90s, I launched one of the first online city guides and Yellow Pages at startribune.com in Minneapolis. Sidewalk, Microsoft’s ill-fated attempt at local, didn’t last long at all.
• The second wave featured Aol and Yahoo in the mapping and directory wars, along with feeble attempts by print Yellow Pages providers. Aol, by virtue of the Mapquest domain, was in a great position to win local. Both companies essentially gave up on local.
• The third wave, starting in 2005, featured Google and Yelp. Google quickly came to own maps and Yelp (helped by strong SEO) became a key source for local reviews.
• The fourth wave, which is beginning, pits Google against Apple. I also expect that companies with massive and engaged audiences like Facebook and Twitter will become players in this wave of local. I would also love to see American Express apply its enormous local transactional data set to the local problem, but so far I’ve seen scant indication that it will.

The map data available to us has become much richer than the road maps people once got from AAA or the initial online maps offered by Mapquest and Vicinity in the mid-’90s. Now we can see parking garages, photos, building outlines, subway stations, elevation profiles, bike routes, neighborhoods, user-generated content and real-time traffic. With one click, we can see aerial imagery or ground-level views. Google has now gotten into mapping the insides of buildings. Pull up Macy’s Union Square in San Francisco on an Android phone and you can see floor-by-floor layouts. Headed to the airport? Zoom in and you can see every store, restaurant, gate and bathroom at SFO.

The way we search has also changed. Instead of being restricted to ZIP Codes (which few know, aside from home and work), we can search by neighborhood or landmark.

Much of the credit for all of this innovation goes to Google.

Back in 2007,  Tele Atlas and Navteq, the two big map data sources, were being acquired by Google’s competitors. I met John Hanke, head of Google Maps at the time, in late 2007. I asked him what Google was going to do about the fact that two key data providers were going to belong to TomTom and Nokia. He said they had a plan but didn’t offer any details. Apparently that plan was for Google to go head-to-head with the data providers and collect its own maps and navigation data set. In October 2009, Google announced free turn-by-turn navigation for Android. (VC Bill Gurley has a great post on why the transition was necessary and how disruptive the model is.)

“I think Google, you would give them all kind of credit because they invested (no one knows the exact number) somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion to build their own maps product, intentionally getting out of the situation where they were licensing,” Gurley told me in an interview in May. “It is a competitive weapon they have that Apple doesn’t have and that Microsoft doesn’t have. … I look at Google and think, ‘My God, this is the one that has the cards in the right place.’”

In the United States, mapping providers typically started with government mapping data and then built on top of it, often by driving vans around the world equipped with sensors and cameras. Traffic data were collected by using road sensors or fleet vehicles with GPS gear installed.

With the rise of smartphones, companies with large installed bases like Google and Apple can use data collected by phones to enhance their data set. When you drive down the road with Google’s navigation app open, you are feeding data back into the system about traffic on those roads. Although Google hasn’t confirmed that it does this, it could also find out about errors in routing or new roads by using GPS trace data. If the app gives an instruction and most users ignore it, it’s a sign that something has changed. Maybe it’s a new intersection or a road being blocked off for construction. Crowdsourcing would allow Google to find out about this much faster than simply driving trucks around. (See my blog post My commute as a metaphor for user-generated content.)

Google has also created a rich set of tools for small businesses to provide up-to-date data on their businesses. (For more than you ever care to know about these tools, see my friend Mike Blumenthal’s blog, Understanding Google Places & Local Search.)

For parts of the world that haven’t been commercially viable for data providers due to small population or lack of disposable income, Google has created Map Maker, allowing users to create their own maps from scratch.

As Apple builds up its own capabilities in mapping, it will have to replicate many of these tools and processes. If Apple makes similar investments — it certainly has the cash to do so — we can expect its maps to improve. Mapping, like speech recognition, can dramatically improve as you throw more data at the problem.

The road ahead

One of the things I love about Google is that it thinks big, sometimes audaciously big. Google has moved beyond mapping the roads to modifying vehicles to be able to drive themselves on those roads.

Just imagine the data that you can collect if you control the vehicle: highly localized weather with rain sensors and thermostats, road conditions based on anti-lock brake activation, pothole locations. There are the safety benefits of not having to deal with distracted, drunk, or inept drivers. Self driving cars will also give us plenty more time to watch YouTube videos, listen to Google Music, or surf the Web.

I look forward to the day when I can purchase a self-driving vehicle. Or, better yet, the day when Google or a partner uses that technology to create a fleet of vehicles that users can call up on demand and not have to own, similar to car2go.

Closer in, I’d love to see Apple and Google add more real-time information to maps. Want to know where the hotspots in the city are now? Google and Apple can show you (in aggregate) where people are. Zoom in on a movie theater and see what’s playing. Looking for a restaurant? The map view will show you which restaurants have open tables and which are running specials. Waiting for the bus? Oh, look, there it is. Need a parking spot? There are 25 spaces in that garage.

Personalization should also be a part of the next generation of maps. The maps that you see shouldn’t be the same maps that I see. Our maps should reflect our interests and experiences.

I would love it Google or Apple solved the Applebee’s problem in local search.

(Disclosures: I’m long on Apple, American Express, and Microsoft from my time there. I’m short Aol, Facebook, and Yelp)

[Top image source: Google Maps with Street View campaign]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Popular photo sharing and editing app EyeEm has today relaunched into version 3.0 on iOS and Android with a live discovery tool in what is arguably, the first of its kind.

The new, keystone feature is a personalised feed of other users’ photos based on location and trending topics worldwide. It also presents content you might like, by remembering what types of photos are personally viewed most.

“Anytime you contribute a pic or navigate through – the app learns a bit more about you. The more you use it, the better it gets in recommending content and engaging users. That’s when it gets more fun and interesting,” co-founder and CEO Florian Meissner explains – when you travel, whether it’s in your city or in another country, the app changes with you.

“If there’s an amazing ice creamery where people take lots of pictures on EyeEm, then we’d recommend it to you if you’re in that location,” Meissner says.

“There’s this contextual layer which are your interests, so what sports you’re into, what conferences you’re attending. If you’re a foodie you could discover the cool, new restaurant around the corner if people have taken pictures there.”

The new EyeEm comes on the back of the company’s one-year anniversary celebration. “The discovery tool was our vision from the get go. Many photo apps have rushed into creating crazy, new filters since the rise of Instagram, but the photo editing space was never our goal,” Meissner says.

“We’re realising our vision of what is possible through smartphone photography, to offer people alternative, relevant images of the world around them, sorted and tailored to their interests and lifestyle,” he adds. “It’s something genuinely unique in this space, and we’re now looking forward to more content from our global community.”

EyeEm, which has gradually expanded to a team of 15, has attracted a big following throughout Asia, Russia, Turkey, Germany, and the UK. “Our biggest users are, surprisingly, in Mexico City and Bangkok. Jakarta is also picking up a lot,” Meissner says.

With a strong, conservative grassroots campaign, Berlin-based EyeEm is expected to hit the one million user milestone within the next few months. And it’s all thanks to good old organic growth with no major funds injected into marketing and advertising campaigns. “We’ve invested heavily in our community and building relationships. So we’re seeing a very highly engaged community with these strong social connections,” Meissner says.

This story originally appeared on VentureVillage, VentureBeat’s Berlin-based syndication partner.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Location analytics company Placed is bringing its technology to mobile websites, allowing you to see where your mobile web visitors are physically located when accessing your site. The company also just clocked in 1 billion location data marks in less than 60 days since its launch.

Placed’s tech was previously only available for iOS and Android apps, but the move to mobile web will open it up an even wider audience of publishers. Placed not only collects valuable location data, it also cleans up the noise to figure the data that actually matters to you. So if a news site learned that their readers often read from coffee houses, they could use that data when determining advertisers and content.

Placed wowed the judges at our MobileBeat Innovation Competition in San Francisco last month and ended up beating out four other mobile infrastructure companies to win the coveted Tesla prize. The company also announced today that it has added Jeff Lanctot, the chief marketing officer of the ad agency Razorfish, to its advisory board.

“We chose mobile web as our next platform because mobile site owners have been requesting the same level of insights as app developers,” said Placed founder and CEO David Shim in a statement today. “Additionally, the early adopters of Placed Analytics are also the same developers embracing HTML5 as an alternative to native app development.”

Map pins photo via Shutterstock

Skout chief executive Christian Wiklund (right)

On June 12, multiple allegations of rape and sexual assault of minors caused Skout to shut down its teen forum. Now the community is back online, with new controls that the founders say will help protect the children using the service.

Skout is a service that lets its users find and chat with other people nearby. It’s got a playful brand, with a home page that invites people to “find your party, anytime, anywhere.” It’s been successful, attracting one million new members every month and securing $22 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz in April.

Until June, the company had two separate communities, one for 13 to 17-year-olds and another for adults. But after allegations of sexual assault surfaced, Skout shut down its teen community.

According to the New York Times, a 13-year-old-boy sent nude photos using Skout to a 21-year-old man posing as a minor. The two met in a park and were found performing sexual acts, police told the Times. In another case, a 37-year-old man chatted with a 15-year-old girl on Skout before meeting her and raping her. In the third case, a 24-year-old man is accused of raping a 12-year-old girl he met in Skout’s teen forum. Charges have been filed against all three accused, the Times reported.

After the Times report broke, chief executive Christian Wiklund published an apologetic explanation of the community suspension, a post that garnered over 3,000 heartfelt comments, many of them outraged that the service was being taken away from them.

Now those teenagers should be happier, as the community is back, with new age controls.

“We can never guarantee that our system is 100 percent bulletproof,” Christian Wiklund, Skout’s founder, said in an interview with the New York Times. “It never will be. What we can guarantee is that the service will be much, much safer than before.”

The new system relies on Facebook for age authentication. Facebook’s terms of service require users to be at least 13 years old, although it doesn’t verify the ages that people report — and teenagers are certainly capable of lying about how old they are.

Also, Skout will not allow teenagers to chat with other Skout users who are within 100 miles of them, which might limit its usefulness for hooking up with boyfriends or classmates. It will also prevent users from seeing exact location data on teenagers.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

You probably know how long consumers are using your mobile app, and what they’re doing within them — but where are they actually located? That’s the question that location analytics company Placed hopes to answer with its product, Placed for Developers.

Previously only available for Android apps, Placed announced today that its product is now available for iOS apps as well. It made the announcement at the MobileBeat 2012 conference, where it’s competing against other mobile services in our Innovation Competition. (Update: Placed won the competition.)

Placed believes there’s plenty of value in knowing exactly where consumers are using your apps, as well as tracking their paths through the world. For example, you could tell if consumers often used your app next to restaurants, which could allow you to charge for higher ad rates to large restaurants. The company stresses privacy by saying it will always ask permission for using location data, never use the data for ads, and anonymize users.

“Our aim is to make Placed Analytics a standard tool for any mobile app that uses location,” wrote Placed founder and CEO David Shim in an e-mail conversation with VentureBeat. “Location is what makes mobile unique, and Placed Analytics is the way to quantify it.”

When it comes to design, Placed says it had a unique challenge in presenting location data to its customers. There’s a lot of noise once you start collecting massive amounts of location data, and the company has developed ways to turn most of that noise into useful information. It focused heavily on the design of its reports, which aim to be simple and intuitive, offer new insights for users, and give power users the ability to easily dig deeper.

Placed is based in Seattle, Washington and has raised $3.4 million so far from Madrona Venture Group and others.

Bloomberg said this morning that documentation recently provided to Apple developers includes screenshots of Yelp check-ins within the new Apple Maps application, which will replace Google Maps as the default mapping solution within iOS sometime this fall.

Yelp has been a content partner for Apple’s Siri personal assistant since Siri’s launch, and Yelp’s positioning within the Siri service was solidified at the recent World Wide Developer’s Conference, where Apple revealed that Yelp star ratings and would appear within Siri results and that users could tap to go directly to a local business landing page on Yelp.

But this is a new level of integration.

Facebook’s new “Find Friends Nearby” feature uses your phone’s location-awareness functionality to broadcast your location to anyone nearby. Yelp checkins help users find friends as well but also enable discounts and preferential treatment at participating businesses. It’s not yet clear, however, if the new Apple Maps feature will allow iPhone owners to participate in those or if users will need a separate Yelp account in order to check in.

Checkins are also a major feature of Foursquare, although that location-based social network has recently been redesigned to simplify and de-emphasize the actual act of checking in.

Apple has not yet confirmed the news. VentureBeat has asked Apple PR to comment, and when we hear more, we’ll update this story.

Image credit: ShutterStock

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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While the usefulness of the location sharing app Foursquare may be dubious, one thing is certain: the company has so far lacked a real revenue source.

So it’s not at all surprising (and in fact a bit heartening) to learn that Foursquare is checking in to a new venture: coupons. Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley made the announcement in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.

Appearing in a July update of the Foursquare app, the coupons will take the form of personalized offers from local vendors, who will pay Foursquare for their placement.

The move, on the whole, makes sense. Foursquare, on the retailer end, has always been all about encouraging consumers to make repeat visits, a highly-desired thing for pretty much any business.

The plan, however, isn’t the first of its kind. Last year Foursquare announced that it was working with American Express  to offer discounts to cardholders when they checked into the locations of participating merchants.

But the company’s new plans are a bit more ambitious. With personalized coupons, it appears that Foursquare is finally nearing the point where it can monetize all the data its been collecting over the past three years. Foursquare’s 20 million users have checked in two billion times, so the company is clearly in possession of a lot of information.

But Foursquare faces some real hurdles, not the least of which is that most people are still not crazy about the idea of location sharing as a whole. That, Crowley hopes, may get better with time.

“People are still warming to the idea of location sharing. We are inventing this category, or really pushing it forward,” he told WSJ.

Crowley himself  ”lost his mobile couponing virginity” way back in 2008, before Foursquare was even launched. At the time the Crowely noted one of the biggest problems with the concept. “Mobile couponing isn’t a bad idea (I’m actually seeing it in a lot of mobile biz plans these days), its just so hard to execute because of a venue’s employees (the people behind the bar, cash register or counter),” he wrote on Flickr.

With Foursquare’s latest efforts, Crowley may have just found a way around that.

Photo via Flickr: MissMessie, Dennis Crowley

Checking in to the power of nostalgia, Foursquare is bringing members’ past location moments back to life with a reworked history page that doubles as a check-in time machine.

Friday, Foursquare has remodeled the web-based version of the history page to let members take a journey down memory lane. The improved page now includes search, and time, place, and people filters for letting people rediscover their favorite venues or the places they visited while on vacation.

“You can easily jump to all your past check-ins from any month or year, and even filter them by who you were with, what type of place you were at, or which neighborhood, city, or country you were in. We’ll show you your check-in photos, comments, and friends who were there,” Foursquare explained in a blog post.

click to enlarge

The history page incorporates some of the same of elements of Facebook Timeline, the social network’s storybook-take on the personal profile. The page includes a map of all check-ins, weaves photos, friends, and comments prominently into the experience, and will eventually allow people to enhance their past by adding tips or creating lists.

I’ve written before about the power in remembering the past and the role of location in memories, specifically as it pertains to Foursquare and its battle to prove to the public that there’s more to check-ins than points and badges.

“To moms, dads, uncles, aunts, kids, sisters, brothers, and you and me, location has meaning, but only in its ability to enhance a story, not to win some virtual badge,” I wrote. “It’s this approach to location, as a behind-the-scenes memory assistant, that will resonate with mainstream social media audiences,” I said, giving a nod to Facebook and Timeline.

With the new history page, Foursquare is wisely following in Facebook’s footsteps and helping its users better understand the why behind each check-in, photo, tip, or comment.

A Foursquare spokesperson said the company does not have immediate plans to carry the features over to mobile.

Photo credit: Bashed/Flickr

Today, the third annual 4sqDay (April 16, four-squared, get it?), check-in king Foursquare confirmed that it has reached new milestones of 20 million users and a whopping 2 billion check-ins.

Anyone who makes a check-in on the service today will receive the 2012 4sqDay badge, as well as the following message:

In 2010, foursquare fans declared April 16 4sqDay (4/4^2 – nerds after our own heart!). Two years and two billion check-ins later, you’re still why we get out of bed each day. Thanks to all 20 million of you for making us part of your lives. Happy 4sqDay!

Foursquare surpassed 15 million users back in December, and in March founder Dennis Crowley said it was close to 20 million users. We’ve asked the company for further comment on the milestones and will report when we hear back.

While it’s not growing as fast as uber-popular Instagram, Foursquare’s steady growth shows that there’s still plenty of value left in its check-in model, even if its revenue prospects are cloudy. The company stands strong while its biggest competitors, Gowalla and Facebook’s Places, are now out of the game.

The New York City-based company has raised over $71 million in funding so far. Last June, Foursquare landed a massive $50 million round with a valuation of $600 million.

Illustration: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

The next evolution of the Internet or so-called “3.0” is supposed to be semantic, smart if you will. Smart, automated social tools were all hyped to go viral at this year’s SXSW conference several days ago. These tools promise to turn us, via our smartphones, into all knowing masters of our environment, prompting us to meet new friends at IRL serendipitous moments. But, instead, the big story turned out to be the short lifespan of these apps. All of these Location Based Services (LBS) apps focus on hooking into your friends on Facebook, Linked-In, and Twitter and alerting you when “real” friends entered your “geo bubble” of life. They also suggest new friends or friends of friends that you should meet.

The technology worked – I was alerted to many people that I should meet who “liked” the same stuff on Facebook; but that turned out to be boring, as our common interests turned out to be only fan pages for TV shows or bands. I was also alerted that friends were nearby. Alas, friends that I wanted to see I had already texted or rendezvoused with.

In fact, these apps didn’t fly with the social early adopters at the show for an important reason: They caused smartphone batteries to die, leaving attendees at a social conference without the ability to be digitally social. No tweets, texts, photos, or profile updates get pushed when your iPhone goes dark. The problem at hand with LBS apps is that they require the GPS radio to run nearly full-time, have a clear view of the sky to get a signal, and report back to a server their location.

When you’re using your smartphone for navigation, your windshield and roof barely block the signal, and typically your cigarette lighter adapter keeps the juices flowing during this peak power usage. When your phone is in your pocket or purse, your body acts as a Faraday cage, blocking GPS signals from reaching it as it struggles to get a position.

I like to say that GPS stops at the door. (Full disclosure: I run a company that’s betting WiFi and Bluetooth will steal the market from GPS for location-based apps.) Companies like Google are taking rolling carts with sophisticated WiFi measuring gear through airports and malls, using the retailers’ access points to physically map them into a virtualized GPS. This enables the Android Maps application to move the blue dot to about the same spot in which you stand. This results with WiFi working much like the GPS satellite system does to the Maps application on your smartphone when you’re outside.

But life is more than your virtual representation as a blue dot. Inside, maps are boring. I can find the bathroom with signs, and the registration desk via arrows. Instead, think of the potential for radio waves as triggers for actions to occur in your phone, or in the cloud – making intelligent decisions automatically while your phone sits in your pocket.  And unlike GPS, which requires a clear view of the sky, Bluetooth and WiFi radios inside your phone work inside the confines of your walls and halls.

Your smartphone has WiFi, which normally requires you to connect to an access point, and Bluetooth which requires pairing to another device to communicate. Using these same radios without the need for connecting, when you walk into a specific space, your dating app could alert you to a suitable match (after you enable ice-breaking in-room digital serendipity), or your social networking or business app could let you know when a friend or to-be customer is within eyesight. Maybe your mobile phone calls could get routed to a landline for drop-free calling. All without compromising your smartphone battery. Now that is true social and smart innovation.

Dave Mathews is a inventor and founder of NeuAer, an open proximity platform that enable apps to become smart via low-power radio waves already found on devices in your environment.

[SXSW image credit:  Kevin Krejci/Flickr]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Grindr is a huge success, as apps go. The location-based dating app for men-loving men has won several awards and counts millons of gay, bisexual, and bi-curious men among its users.

Grindr creator Joel Simkhai, who spoke with VentureBeat at South By Southwest Interactive in Austin this week, also recently launched a new, similarly location-based app called Blendr. The app is intended to allow like-minded folks to find new friends in proximity, and Simkhai says it’s been tweaked with straight people and lesbians in mind, as well.

Stay tuned for more video interviews coming from SXSW.

Caterina Fake (pictured), who previously co-founded photo-sharing megalith Flickr, has just taken the wraps off Pinwheel, her brand-new app.

Pinwheel is currently in private beta; Fake says it’s a way to “find and leave notes all over the world… A note, like a photo, can be a container for all kinds of things. It is the perfect social object.”

The notes users create are pinned to locations. They can be public, private, or shared, either with one person or with an entire group. You can organize your notes into sets, making for great social travelogues or linked-data memoirs.

Also, users will be able to follow activity from specific people and in specific places; they can also follow sets. Following breeds mobile notifications, of course, which Fake says are coming soon.

“Stories, advice, jokes, diatribes, information, memories, facts, advertisements, love letters, grocery lists, and manifestoes can all be put into a note,” Fake concluded. “It is the perfectly constrained, perfectly open thing that you can make into what you want.”

Fake also said she’s got her monetization strategy on lock in the form of sponsored notes. As several location-based apps have already proved, venue-tagged data makes for some mighty attractive local advertising for brands large and small.

We’re including a screenshot or two of the app below.

The startup just closed a round of funding led by Redpoint Ventures with participation from True Ventures, Betaworks, Founder Collective, SV Angel, Obvious Corp, and a few angel investors, as well. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The startup is headquartered in the lovely Hayes Valley neighborhood of San Francisco and is currently hiring iOS developers and content interns.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google Maps for Android has just launched a new update  that tackles some of the toughest navigation challenges around: the interior world.

With Maps version 6.0, which arrived on Android devices today, users can now find the nearest bathrooms, ATMs and the locations of individual departments inside some of the largest retail stores, such as Ikea, Home Depot, and Macy’s locations nationwide.

The maps update will also provide detailed location information for 18 major airports in the U.S. and mass transit stations in the U.S. and in Japan.

“Today when most people go to an airport, or a shopping mall, or a large retail store, they try to hunt  down an information kiosk to figure out where they are, and find where they need to go,” Google Maps product manager Steve Lee told VentureBeat. “What we’re trying to do with Google Maps 6.0 is bring that information kiosk with you on your phone.” The new update gives accurate interior information within 5 or 10 meters (15 to 30 feet).

Getting the familiar blue dot to work properly indoors was one of the biggest hurdles, and the 3D environment of a store or transit station, with multiple floors,  added to the difficulty. ”One of the big challenges indoors is that GPS is not always available, or is not as strong.” said Lee. This was overcome by getting detailed floor plans from Google’s partners, so that even on the fourth floor of a building the app still knows right where the user is. “Instead of a static ‘you are here,’  symbol on that information kiosk, the Google Maps blue dot will show you where you’re at inside any of these venues.”

Google has been making a very aggressive push lately to chart alternative spaces. In October Google Streetview added business interiors to its Maps product, and the in early November parks across the world  were also included.

iOS users will certainly be interested to see Maps 6.0 come to the iPhone and iPad, but Lee said there is no announcement for any other platforms at the moment. Since the iOS Maps application is made by Apple and still lacks plenty of features that Google has brought to Maps on Android, I wouldn’t hold my breath for these newer features.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

CSR is adding the new feature of indoor tracking to its line of SiRFusion location technology, the company announced today.

The chip-making company is demonstrating the technology today at the Locations & Beyond Summit in San Francisco. CSR has pulled together several different technologies to create reliable and accurate indoor navigation possible, according to chief marketing officer, Kanwar Chadha.

The company’s SiRFusion platform and its SiRFstarV mobile chip architecture amount to the latest navigation technology that customers could use in smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices to track a person’s location as they’re walking through a big building like Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, Chadha said in an interview.

“Indoor has been a much tougher problem to solve,” Chadha said.

CSR — a big chip maker that was gained heft with the mergers of CSR, Sirf, and Zoran — hopes that puts it at the center of a hot market.

“Our research clearly indicates that location has quickly gained traction with consumers as an essential contextual component for many of the applications they use and depend upon with their mobile devices,” said Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies, a market analyst firm. “The SiRFusion platform will shine a bright light into what until now has been a location dead zone.”

The motion-tracking system for indoors isn’t perfect, but it puts together as good a fix on a person’s location as it can with three technologies: navigation data from the Global Positioning System (GPS) and other satellite info services; WiFi radio network triangulation; and motion-sensing devices in the smartphone itself, such as gyroscopes and compasses. Separately, each one of these systems has its own limitations. But together, they can do a decent job.

Chadha’s demo features a smartphone containing the first chip using the SiRFstarV design created by CSR. That chip uses the  wireless network to tap the brains of the servers of the SiRFusion platform, which gathers information from multiple sources to make its best guess about where a given person is located.

GPS can track your location outside by determining your position relative to a satellite network. But once you go inside, the network can no longer locate you, and it doesn’t work as well in urban canyons, or streets in between skyscrapers. The system also uses cellphone network and WiFi network location systems, such as those used in the Apple iPhone, to determine your location. But those don’t work in areas beyond the range of WiFi or in a cell phone reception dead spot.

Lastly, the sensors inside a phone can offer clues as well. A compass can indicate what direction you’re walking. And motion sensors such as gyroscopes can tell if you are moving or not. If you add all of that up, the signals can be fairly accurate about your location, inside or outside. Once the technology figures out where you are, it can compare your location to known location information, such as a map of big casinos in Las Vegas that show the outlines of the buildings.

“The result can be very reliable,” Chadha said. “We think this takes location to the next level.”

Effectively, CSR’s platform is a cloud computing solution, mashing up a bunch of data sources and computing them together to get some really useful information. What’s useful about it? The data could be computed in real-time to show whether you’re walking in the right direction inside a giant building, from a casino to a parking lot. It isn’t fool-proof, but it works well enough, Chadha said.

Chadha said the systems will use only anonymous and voluntarily supplied location information as it is broadcast from users’ devices. It will then use that information to improve its database. The CSR SiRFstarV family of chips will debut sometime next year with the new indoor location platform.

Of course, if you turn your phone off, no one will find you. And if you lose all connections to the outside world, you won’t be able to find your indoor location at all. But overall, the SiRFusion platform is self-learning and self-sensing.

“If two of the elements are there, it can be accurate,” Chadha said.

CSR has also announced a new version of its car navigation and entertainment platform, the SiRFprimaII SoC. The platform can be used to create better and cheaper location-aware car entertainment systems. The chips support all global navigation satellite systems as well as features such as WiFi or Bluetooth. The chip has a 1-gigahertz ARM A9 application processor, or twice the speed of the previous chip and several times more graphics power. The chip will begin manufacturing in 2012, and parts that can be built into cars are targeted for 2013.