Posts Tagged ‘Location Based Apps’

It wasn’t that long ago when the vast majority of phones were feature phones with little or no graphics capabilities. And, features phone are still a huge market and important in developing nations. Despite the lack of high resolution graphics and GPS in many of these phones, they are not being left out of the ability to make use of geo-location and local search. Nokia Beta Labs released an app for Nokia’s Series 40, S60 and Symbian phones to get such information even when GPS hardware is not available.
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It has been a while now, so you might have forgotten the kerfuffle that occurred when it was learned that the iPhone was tracking the location of cell towers, which resulted in a fairly accurate data trail of the iPhone user’s travels. At the time I suggested that I expect laws to be passed about the handling of this type of information, and today Senators Al Franken (D-Minn) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn) introduced legislation that will require platform companies and app developers to ask for explicit consent before sharing user location information with third parties.
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Glympse is a location sharing app, and it was the most important of the apps that I used on my Android smartphone during my recent trip to visit family and friends. If you have a Windows Phone, are traveling soon, or otherwise have the need for other people to see your current location, you can get a free copy of Glympse from the Windows Phone Marketplace.
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There has been much talk over the last two weeks about location tracking and location services, and lost in the debate about privacy is the value that location services provides. Local search, mapping, and navigation apps come quickly to mind, but many apps exist that use location awareness to provide value. For example, there is Remember It, which provides a location based alarm.
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Whrrl users have not need to worry because according to Pelago CEO Jeff Holden the Whrrl data will not be lost once it closes its doors. He explains in his blog, “You’ll find on the website that you now have an option to retrieve your data – pretty much everything you ever put into Whrrl. It’s explained pretty clearly on the site, so I won’t get into the details here, but I hope you do download your data and ultimately have the opportunity to use it again.”

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Your friend Joe knows the best pizza joints in New York. But can you trust his taste in taco trucks in LA? Bizzy thinks you might get better advice from strangers. What’s that all about?

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Sometimes, a lot of little things add up fast. And to big numbers. See how this happened for FourSquare.

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Jeff Holden is the founder and CEO of Pelago, the company behind the Whrrl social media network. Pelago is at the nexus of two of the hottest topics in social media – geolocation and location-based applications. Social Times asked Holden about Whrrl, how it compares with its competitors and what might be coming up next.

The list of mobile location-based social networks has grown. How does Pelago see Whrrl’s place in the location-based universe?

Whrrl has a very clear focus, which is getting people out into the world trying new things. We’re fundamentally changing the way people explore and experience their cities. And the feature set and experience of Whrrl is very different from other products in this space as a result. Read more

At the recent Social Developer Summit in San Francisco, I had the chance to sit down with Kent Lindstrom, CEO of PlacePop, a platform that allows businesses to easily create loyalty programs for people that visit their store. The platform uses location based technology and check-ins to reward frequent visitors of a store, but because the API is open, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In the video, Kent makes the example of an ice cream vendor near Dolores park can have a discount for frequent visitors of the park. See the video after the jump.

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There a some products you just can’t order online and have delivered to your door. For example, a tank of gas. Coinciding with the launch of Whrrl Society Rewards – a loyalty program designed to close the gap between a brand’s social media presence and real-world physical presence – Whrrl has teamed with Murphy USA to reward Whrrl members who fill up at one of its 1,100 shops. Customers that check in with Whrrl while at a Murphy location will be accepted into the “Murphy USA Society” and earn a chance to immediately win free gas.
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