Archive for the ‘Localization technology’ Category

The city portal Meinestadt.de has revealed a more user friendly self after a revamp. Through the 1024-Pixel screen resolution, the pages are much clearer and more modern and offer much more local and regional content. Read the rest of this entry »

Check-ins have actually always been social: whether through Foursquare, Gowalla, and whatever other programs that are out there, checking-in and letting your friends know where you are and what you’re up to is just about the most “social” feature available by location-based sevices. So what does it mean when competitor SCVNGR is talking about “social check-ins?” Read the rest of this entry »

Foursquare was given an estimated net worth of 100 million US Dollars by investors, who decided to pump in an additional 20 million into the American company. With such a strong support system, the company can surely rest a bit more soundly, but the location-based check-in service will need to use their new capital wisely if they want to keep up with their competitors. Foursquare apparently is one step ahead of us and already has an idea of how to make itself stand out in the crowd: the gaming element of the service should be getting a major facelift to become more entertaining for the user. This information was confirmed by Foursquare engineer Anoop Ranganath in “The Big Money’s Disrupters” podcast. Read the rest of this entry »

First of all, what is geofencing? Basically, it’s a series of virtual perimeters for real-world geographic areas. In other words, geofencing is the process of creating virtual borders for the purpose, of say, being alerted of events in your current area, or perhaps of friends who are around the corner. So what does this mean for location-based technologies? Read the rest of this entry »

Twitter posted recently about the new feature in their blog “Twitter Places”: with the new feature, users can post their mini-messages with their current location. So users no longer have to post their coordinates, as previously required, but can now pick out places such as cafés, or even directly from World Cup stadiums. Read the rest of this entry »

Using social media outlets as a way to draw in customers has pretty much become mandatory for even directories worldwide. Directories, local search engines, rating portals – they’ve all got the social media fever. An interesting example is the Herold in Austria, who introduced the Facebook application “Locations ilike”. Users don’t only have the capability to search, find, and save favorite locations, but can also rate them and share them with friends. Read the rest of this entry »

For a long time, users could only perform location-dependant search in the individual theme channels – which can be considered idle. This should now change: the city-based portal has edited its local internet search and would like to make the entire deal more user friendly with the new “Universal Search” function. Read the rest of this entry »

The new real time search engine Sency doesn’t only deliver results according to key words, but also location specific results. So searching won’t only provide information about people, daily news or other things, but also about cities and places.
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Hopefully not too late: Google opened its new localization service Latitude using the API of other developers. Mountain View has (finally) opened itself up to check-in features modeled after the main competitor Foursquare. Read the rest of this entry »

The American newbie Placecast can start loading up its cash-boxes. Multiple investors are so impressed with the fairly new service ShopAlert that they’ve increased their initial investment from 3 to 8 million dollars. Read the rest of this entry »