{"id":45375,"date":"2009-11-19T20:30:59","date_gmt":"2009-11-20T01:30:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=81393"},"modified":"2009-11-19T20:30:59","modified_gmt":"2009-11-20T01:30:59","slug":"location-location-location-simplegeo-twitter-flook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/45375","title":{"rendered":"Location, Location, Location: SimpleGeo, Twitter, Flook"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"In my first week back on the web beat at GigaOM, one of the topics I wanted to focus on was location. Let’s just say that hasn’t <\/a> exactly been <\/a> a difficult task<\/a>. Coming at us from Boulder, San Francisco and London, here are today’s top three geo-tagging developments:<\/p>\n

SimpleGeo<\/strong><\/a> launched today, promising to build a contextual infrastructure of points and eventually polygons for the world so that people can build apps that incorporate where users are located. The company says it’s already received 600 beta inquiries in its first day out, and it also received both audience and judges’ choice accolades at the Under the Radar event where it debuted. <\/p>\n

“We’re selling shovels at the beginning of a gold rush,” is how co-founder Matt Galligan put it on a call today. “You want to add location, just come to us — it’s done.” Though four-person SimpleGeo still measures its age in months, it already has a price sheet: free, $399\/month for small businesses and $2,499\/month for custom implementations. Galligan said he expects to announce a funding round soon. (BTW, this follows the launch of competitor PublicEarth<\/a>, which calls itself “the wiki for places,” yesterday.)<\/p>\n

While Boulder, Colo.-based SimpleGeo may have moved quickly in its short life, big social sites aren’t necessarily waiting for little startups to come fill their location-based needs. Today Twitter<\/a><\/strong> launched<\/a> a geotagging API, at first only available as an opt-in feature for outside apps like Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid and Twittelator Pro. When used, this feature associates a tweeter’s exact location (as best as it can be determined) at the time of tweeting with the tweet itslf. <\/p>\n

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And lastly, Ambient Industries<\/a> debuted a social location app for the iPhone today called Flook<\/strong><\/a>. While there’s no lack of competition for fun iPhone apps that enable users to mark up the world, Flook is built to be quirky, easy to browse and contextual-ad ready. The basic interface consists of virtual geo-tagged “cards” with facts, photos and recommendations left at particular locations by Flook users. Users can swipe through cards and turn them over to leave comments in a jaunty orange and purple interface manned by cute little robots (see video demo above). <\/p>\n

What’s interesting is that Flook comes from two Symbian founders, Roger Nolan and Jane Sales. Said Nolan on a call from London today, “Apple seemed to just do all the things that Symbian and Nokia should have done for a long time.” So he and Sales (they’re married) along with two other co-founders raised $1 million from Eden Ventures and Amadeus Capital and founded Ambient a year ago. Flook is the company’s first project. <\/p>\n

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