YCombinator -funded Adioso today launches its third iteration as an online destination for adventurous travelers who want to take vacations but are not constrained by specific days or even places. Yes, the online travel space is saturated, but the more mainstay search services like Kayak and Sky Scanner only let you find specific dates and destinations, failing if your desire is more vague. In contrast, Adioso allows you to search flights with complete flexibility, like if you want to go somewhere in Europe in November but are not committed to specific area or time. Examples of the natural language-enabled broad or open-ended searches specific to Adioso: Chicago to Boston next week San Francisco to Europe late September under $800 San Francisco to anywhere Says founder Tom Howard: “There are really no other services that let you know where you should go, and what days are the cheap days. You go to a website and you’d spend two hours trying to find the cheap deals, there was nothing that said these are the good days at this location.” Before Adioso, the only solution to the “What are the good days at this location?” kind of query was to manually do separate searches on different sites until you stumbled across what you were looking for (aka “The Traveling Salesman” problem). Adioso’s model necessitates some programming chops however, as open-ended search is harder to enable than constrained. Future plans include expanding the service’s airline and destination inventory as soon as the Adioso platform has stabilized, currently Adioso only covers a selection of airlines in Australia (the home country of founders Howard and Fenn Bailey), Asia, Europe and the USA. Howard and Baily hope that service will create an opportunities both for casual travelers (the most rapidly growing segment of the travel industry) as well for airlines who are looking for ways to best monetize left over seats on undersold flights. CrunchBase Information Adioso Tom Howard Information provided by CrunchBase

“ Location Check in is so 2010 ,”  Mark Cuban writes today on his blog. His thought is that facial recognition hardware/software installed in public venues is going to replace the need for users to actually check-in to a place. I absolutely agree. But I think we’re ten years away from that happening. And maybe more. If you’ve seen the Steven Spielberg movie Minority Report , it has a similar technology to what Cuban envisions. At a few points, main character John Anderton (Tom Cruise) is walking through a public place and a retina scanner picks up his unique eye signature and offers up customized advertisements and specials for him. “ John Anderton, you could use a Guinness right about now! ” American Express recognizes that Anderton has been a card member since 2037. Even more in line with Cuban’s vision is when Anderton (now with another person’s set of eyes — long story) walks into the Gap and the eye scan allows the virtual greeter to ask how the last purchase he made has been treating him. To most people, this will sound extremely creepy and invasive. To me (and I suspect Cuban), this sounds fantastic. It sounds like the future we’re inevitably headed toward. But it is still the future. Minority Report takes place in 2054. Sure, that’s just a random date picked out by the filmmakers, but Spielberg actually hired a team of consultants — so-called futurists — to come up with technology that is likely to be in place all those years from now. They’re trying to be as realistic as possible. Yes, the retina scanning in the movie is more advanced than the facial recognition stuff Cuban is talking about. But I’d argue that it’s not really a matter of technology advancement that will hinder such things. Instead, it’s society being ready for these new forms of technology. Think about the location space right now. Foursquare , the current company getting most of the buzz, is hardly the first player in the space. Not even close. But they came along at the right time with the right method. When Foursquare launched in 2009, it was actually co-founder Dennis Crowley’s second location-based service. The first was the similar Dodgeball, which was purchased by Google in 2005, but never really took off. Part of the reason is that application development on smartphones was basically non-existent before 2008 when Apple’s App Store came along. So Dodgeball was done through SMS. It was clunky. Mainstream adoption would have been very difficult to achieve. The new wave of smartphones brought with them GPS and Wi-Fi triangulation. Location was now easily accessible — it no longer had to be manually input. And this is part of what Cuban is talking about when he takes the idea a step further by saying his facial recognition tech will replace the check-in because it will make it so “Individuals never do any of the work.” I agree that next step is coming. But before we get to facial recognition, things such as background location with geofencing will come into play first. And those are still a little bit away from happening. The fact of the matter is that one of the key reasons Foursquare took off and quickly stole the buzz from services that were earlier in the space like Loopt and Whrrl is because of the check-in. It helped ease users into location because they were in control of it (and the game elements certainly helped as well). Next, users will need an app to ease them into using background location and geofencing (which allows you to be checked-in to places automatically). It could be one of the current players, or it could be someone new. But that concept, which will have to be opt-in by virtue of installing an application, will be needed to pave the way for what Cuban is taking about farther down the line. Cuban sees the future where this facial recognition accesses Facebook’s name/profile picture database to pull information. If you thought Facebook’s current privacy issues are a nightmare, this would be Armageddon. But again, that’s just looking at it right now. Down the line, people will grow more and more accustomed to this type of stuff. And perhaps the scenario Cuban lays out will be the norm. But to say that the check-in is 2010 implies that 2011 is going to be the year this stuff starts coming into play. I say no way. We’ll be lucky if we see that kind of stuff in play in 2020. Not because the technology isn’t there — it definitely will be, and probably already is — it’s because we’re just not there yet as a society. But hopefully posts like Cuban’s which bring up the topic and dream of the future will help get us there quicker. CrunchBase Information Foursquare Mark Cuban Information provided by CrunchBase

It appears that Foursquare has just crossed the 2 million users mark this morning. The location based social network has been growing fast, adding 100,000 users per week. Only three months ago, Foursquare passed one million users after taking a year to accumulate one million members. Over the past several months, Foursquare has had a number of impressive stats for a startup. Some of them involved SXSW , some involved overall check-ins numbers. And it seems to be growing faster than its main competitor, Gowalla. Of course, to expand upon this growth Foursquare has just raised $20 million in funding at a $95 million pre-money valuation, led Andreessen Horowitz with existing investors Union Square Ventures and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures participating. The new funding is going to be used to hire additional staff, for product development and a new office space. And we know that Foursquare has some interesting ideas to incorporate gaming with check-ins. It’s important to note that other competitors have already crossed this mark. MyTown, another location-based network hit that number in May, Brightkite hit 2 million users in February. And, Loopt just passed 4 million users. Congrats to Travis E for being Foursquare’s 2 millionth member. Hat Tip to Finbarr. CrunchBase Information Foursquare Information provided by CrunchBase

Riding the wave of anonymous randomized chats, Jibblar is a text-only, communal version of Chatroulette . Taking a cue from the Russian phenom, Jibblar (authored by Peter Nicholls, an Australia-based developer) is a bare-bones site that does one thing well: it allows people in close proximity to anonymously contribute to a chat room. Jibblar grabs your location from the Firefox or iPhone browser and will only facilitate conversation with people in your immediate vicinity (according to Nicholls the range is 0.5 kilometers). The only identifier is your location tag (which you can either pick from the list of options or create a new one if it doesn’t exist) and a randomly assigned number that appears next to your chat. The site is thin on details (it’s literally one page with a title, chat stream and a sprinkling of text on the right hand side) but it does clarify that a “jib” is their term for chat room and it is most common in schools, universities and pubs. Don’t get me wrong, I love simplicity, but this brand of simplicity breeds confusion by dropping you into several streams of conversation. To quote their site, “WTF?” When I first tried to use it in downtown Palo Alto, there was one location tag in the chat stream: “LJ Hooker.” The chat itself was just jibberish, with random f-bombs and strange declaratives (“I’m retiring,” “need to get myself a new job,”). Theoretically, this could work well in a pub or at a university—- if you got a critical mass— but I imagine many chats will look like a car crash of phrases, expletives and general confusion. Then again, maybe that’s the point. For example this: And this: Nicholls was inspired by Chatroulette. After designing Jibblar, he went to a local pub and handed out pieces of paper with the link “Jibblar.com.” He says within an hour, 20 or 30 people in various states of intoxication were using the service, yielding amusing results. Nicholls admits the service is far from perfect. The iPhone version seems to work fine but there are several, major bugs on the Firefox version at the time of this post (namely, you can’t input text (!) and there are no randomly assigned numbers identifying the users, raising the degree of confusion). As for a grand plan, Nicholls doesn’t have one. He could see it catching on at schools or in the workplace, any place where gossip thrives, but he’s willing to let the users decide. “I just want to put it out there, give it to as many people as possible,” he says. There’s only one thing that he’s adamant about: its simplicity. “You’re never going to see a sign-up, you’ll always be able to just open it up and chat.” While I could be wrong, I don’t think Jibblar is going to reach Twitter or even Chatroulette proportions, but I have to give Nicholls credit for highlighting the importance of geo-based chat and trying (B+ for effort) to create something dead simple to use. Update: After our chat, Nicholls took down the Firefox function. He just won bonus points for being a fast adapter.

Location-based social network Loopt has just updated its iPhone and BlackBerry applications, adding a hybrid map feature that allows you to view a single map (seen at right) that plots nearby points of interest, friends, and events all at once. The new update also brings LooptPulse, which the company has already launched for the iPhone and iPad , to the BlackBerry. LooptPulse, which was first announced last fall, is Loopt’s discovery feature. If there are a lot of Loopt users checking in at a nearby event or restaurant, the service will recommend it to you, even if your friends aren’t necessarily there. Loopt generates some of these recommendations using data from its partners like Zagat, CitySearch, Bing, and Tastingtable (recently added partners include SonicLiving, Zvents, and Metromix). Loopt has been around for much longer than hot location startups like Foursquare and Gowalla, and has more registered users than either of them. But in some senses it’s playing catchup — for years Loopt was a passive service that constantly tracked your location as opposed to the check-in services that have recently caught on. Loopt has now shifted its model to compete more directly with these services, and its Pulse discovery features go beyond what Foursquare currently offers. Disclosure : Loopt offers a branded TC version of the service here</a. CrunchBase Information Loopt Information provided by CrunchBase