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.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Adioso, Flight Search For People Keeping Their Options Open

“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.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Mark Cuban Dreams Of Minority Report. So Do I. But We’re Not There…

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.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Boom! Foursquare Crosses 2 Million Users

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.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Jibblar: Part Chatroulette, Minus Nudity

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.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Loopt Updates Mobile Apps, Brings LooptPulse To BlackBerry

This May, Google is holding its annual I/O conference, where it invites thousands of developers to learn about the latest Google and web technologies. Last year, Google had its first (of many) “Oprah Moments” when it made the surprise announcement that everyone in attendance would be receiving a free Android phone. This year, it’s taking a slightly different approach: it’s shipping all paid attendees either a Verizon Droid or Nexus One before the conference.

The logic behind the move? I/O is going to be heavy on Android content, so Google wants to make sure everyone in attendance is set up with a working phone, without having to deal with the logistics of handing them out at the conference. Getting them shipped ahead of time will also give developers a chance to familiarize themselves with Android, if they haven’t used it already.

Google is sending out Verizon Droids and Nexus Ones to developers based on the location they entered when they first signed up for the conference (and no, according to the FAQ, you can’t request to get a different model).

Here’s the Email Google is sending out:

This year’s Google I/O is less than 2 months away, and we’re very excited that you and over 4,000 other developers will be joining us in San Francisco. During the 2-day conference, you’ll have over 90 sessions to choose from and the opportunity to meet with developers from over 170 companies that will be demoing their apps and talking in-depth about their use of Google technologies in the Developer Sandbox.

As you might have guessed, Android will have a big presence at this year’s event. To make sure you’re equipped to make the most of your Android experience during Google I/O, we’d like to mail you a Verizon Droid by Motorola before the event.

Bring your Android device to Google I/O
Instead of having you spend time picking up and registering the device during the conference, we want you to be able to get started ASAP. Here are the different ways in which we’re hoping you’ll use the device you receive:

Get to know the Android SDK
Use the device to get started on your first (or next!) Android app using the latest SDK. You’ll find a ton of helpful info atdeveloper.android.com, including the Developer’s Guide. We hope you have new apps or working prototypes by the time of I/O. That way, you’ll be able to get feedback on your app from other developers, including members of the Android team who’ll be leading in-depth sessions and answering attendees’ technical questions during Office Hours (the schedule will be published oncode.google.com/io in April).

Put your device to work at I/O
To encourage active use of your device, we’re amplifying cellular and wireless coverage inside Moscone West, and charging stations will be available for anyone to use. We hope you’ll:
Get I/O info on your device: Before May 19th, we’ll send out details on how to download a conference app that we’re building now. During I/O, you can use the app to instantly access I/O session details and more.
Download apps: Over 40 companies will be demoing the latest and greatest apps available in the Android Market. Check out their demos in the Developer Sandbox, download new apps, and take them for a test drive.
Participate in SCVNGR: We’re collaborating with SCVNGR to produce a location-based mobile game for Google I/O that’ll have you hunting for QR codes hidden throughout the events.

To receive your Android device:
Click the form link below, read the terms and conditions of the offer and fill out the form with your preferred shipping address so we know where you’d like to receive your device. All preferred shipping addresses must be submitted no later than April 18th.
You’ll receive your device 2 to 4 weeks from the day you provide your shipping address.

To learn more about this giveaway for Google I/O, visit our FAQ page. If you have questions that aren’t answered on the website, please send an email to googleio2010-gift@google.com.

Thanks for your support of Google’s developer initiatives and for registering for Google I/O. We look forward to seeing you in May!

Sincerely,
The Google I/O Team

Thanks to Carlos Cardona for the tip.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Google Shipping All I/O Attendees A Free Droid Or Nexus One Before The…

Back in November, the location-based social event service Hot Potato launched at our Realtime CrunchUp. Today, they’ve taken what was a solid service, and made it a lot better with a number of upgrades.

First and foremost, there is a new iPhone application that just went live in the App Store. With a completely revamped user interface, the app makes it easier than ever to find and participate in events. Perhaps more importantly, it makes it really easy to create new events — and notably, the service has the nicest third-party Foursquare integration I’ve ever seen. When you click on the button to create an event, you can still manually enter a location, but if you happen to be around the venue, you can simply pick it from Foursquare’s list of venues with the click of a button. This drastically simplifies the event creation process since the venue metadata is already there.

This new app will be crucial for the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, which starts tomorrow. If you’ve been reading TechCrunch over the past week, you’ve undoubtedly seen that just about every location-based service has an app they’re unveiling. And another service based around planning events, Plancast, just launched their app this evening. But Hot Potato offers the best of both worlds as it allows you to both plan future events, and interact with ones currently taking place. The new app makes it very easy to chat about the event, and upload photos and videos.

Also new for SXSW is Twitter integration. On a case-by-case basis, Hot Potato will be pulling in tweets about certain events at SXSW, using a filter to make sure only relevant ones show up. You’ll be able to do things such as filter those tweets to show only those by people you actually follow, which will make them potentially much more meaningful to you. You can also reply to tweets thanks to integration of Twitter’s API. And you can share tweets from within the app that will show up as retweets on Twitter.

Another new features is Calendars — something which each Hot Potato user now has. Obviously, you can add the events you wish to be a part of to your calendar, but people you are friends with on the service can also add you to other events as well. The app also now features Push Notifications now (on top of revamped email notifications).

On top of the new app, Hot Potato has rolled out a completely revamped website with just about all of the same functionality of the new app (as well as the new look and feel). And at the highest level, Hot Potato finally has its own social graph, which can pull in friends from the usual suspects: Facebook, Twitter, your address book, etc.

And here’s something that should really help Hot Potato this week: each time someone checks-in to a SXSW event, Foursquare will recommend they also join the event on Hot Potato. Clicking on the accompanying link with open the Hot Potato app and let them join with a click (if they have an account). As you might expect, you can also check-in to a venue on Foursquare within Hot Potato. With Foursquare likely to be one of the key apps used by conference goers, this cross promotion is simply huge.

On top of all of this, the service now has its own full API, so others can use and interact with their data.

Simply put, all these updates are full of win, and make a good app even better. And remarkably, they’ve managed to cram in all these new features, while at the same time simplifying the overall experience.

Fine the new iPhone app here in the App Store. It’s a free download.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Hot Potato Tosses A New Site, API, And iPhone App With Foursquare…

Could IBM be prepping more of its own location-aware technology and devices? According to a recent patent filing, it looks like it. On Thursday, Big Blue filed for a patent for a “method and system for location-aware authorization.” The inventors appear to be IBM engineers based in Rome, Italy.

According to the filing, the technology would provide a method and technology to control access to a device based on the location of that device. IBM gave the example of a company that only wanted employees to use a particular device in the office or their home and believe that their technology would allow the employer to control where the particular device can be accessed.

Here’s an excerpt from the filing:

The invention provides a method and system for location-aware authorization such as for electronic devices (e.g., mobile electronic devices). One embodiment involves authorizing access to a standalone system such as a mobile device, by collecting user credentials on the device for authentication, obtaining location information (e.g., geographical position) for the device from a locating module such as a satellite navigation module attached to the device, accessing profile authorization information for authenticating the user based on the user credentials and device location information (localization), authorizing access to the device by the user if the profiled authorization settings match the credentials and the position of the device.

Talk about GPS-lockdown.  In an age of mobile workers and telecommuters, such a product might be more of a hindrance than a help for most organizations.  But I could see putting something like that on servers or machines with super-sensitive data that are not supposed to leave the premises.  The big question looms: what will Big Blue, which reported strong earnings for 2009 this past week, do with this technology?

Thanks for the tip Anand S.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Patent Watch: IBM Figures Out How To Limit Device Access By…

This morning, after many months of rampant speculation over the enigmatic Tablet, Apple officially invited scores of press to a special media event to be held January 27. The debut of the Tablet seems all but a given according to most reports, but there are some secondary announcements that also stand to be huge — especially the rumors that we may also see the launch of iPhone 4.0. This afternoon, Fox News “confirmed” that we’d being seeing the latest iteration of Apple’s hugely popular mobile OS for the first time. Should that be the case, there’s also a good chance we’ll see launch of a very important new feature: background applications.

First things first. While the title of the Fox News article is “Apple Tablet, iPhone 4 Launch Confirmed for January 27″, the body of the article later says that it’s “likely” that Apple will unveil those two products (along with an updated iLife suite), and also notes that Apple is known for suddenly removing features or products from their announcements at the last second — none of which makes the news sound totally concrete. That said, there are plenty of reasons why iPhone 4.0 could be making an appearance alongside the Tablet, and why it will bring background apps with it.

We’ve discussed the probable connection between the Tablet and the iPhone OS since as early as last May. With iPhone OS, Apple took Mac OS X and stripped it down to the basics to turn it into a compact and powerful mobile operating system. The tablet will almost certainly have more horsepower than the iPhone, but it would still stand to gain from the power and space saving attributes of the mobile OS (albeit a modified version). Our suspicions got further support less than a week ago, when we saw reports that the newest releases of the iPhone OS was actually being held back because some of its code alluded to the unannounced tablet device. Given these ties, it would be logical for the iPhone 4.0 OS to make its debut alongside the tablet.

But the Tablet OS will need to bring some new features will it. For one, it will probably need to allow users to run multiple apps at the same time. Most people don’t particularly care (yet) that they can’t do this with their iPhones, because the screen real estate is so limited and they don’t view the device as a handheld computer (even though it is one). But that won’t be true with the tablet — in light of its larger screen, users will expect more functionality, and the inability to run multiple apps would grow frustrating quickly. With that in mind, if Apple has already established a paradigm for running background apps on the tablet, it would make sense to finally bring it over to the iPhone too.

The iPhone’s current lack of background applications is one of its most glaring weaknesses compared to other mobile operating systems, most notably Android and Palm’s WebOS. Apple’s reasons for withholding the functionality before now were obvious: running multiple applications can drain the device’s already-strained battery more quickly, and forcing users to manage which apps are open adds an extra layer of complexity. It was the right choice then, but it’s time for things to change.

Plenty of developers have already had their applications hampered by their inability to run in the background. Messaging clients have to rely on the iPhone’s Push notifications, which can only display a single alert at a time. Music players (other than the built-in iPod app) close down as soon as you try to do anything else on the phone. And location based apps have to rely almost exclusively on the “check-in” model popularized by Foursquare, because they have no way to passively monitor your location. Consumers may not be frustrated by these restrictions yet, but it’s only a matter of time before they look enviously at their Android-toting friends streaming Pandora and running Skype or Meebo in the background.

And Apple knows it. As far back as last May we were hearing that Apple was having serious discussions about how to implement background applications.  As it did with copy and paste (which iPhone users had to wait years for), Apple is clearly taking its time to get it right the first time.  Now, with the imminent release of the tablet, Apple may have finally settled on a solution.  If the Fox News report is correct, that could be revealed as soon as next week. But even if iPhone 4.0 isn’t announced for a few more months, it seems highly likely that background apps will come with it.

Image via Gizmodo. And no, it isn’t real.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Will Next Week’s Apple Event Finally Bring Background Apps To The…

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. But Foursquare doesn’t seem too tickled by Yelp’s newest feature.

On Friday, Yelp fired a major shot across the bow of the location-based services with the launch of the latest version of its iPhone app. The app’s big new feature is the ability to check-in at venues in cities, which is of course exactly what Foursquare is built around. But plenty of other services also have that feature such as Gowalla and now Loopt. What Foursquare doesn’t seem too happy about is Yelp’s check-in leader board, specifically.

A couple days ago, Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley took a screen capture of Yelp’s leaderboard and posted some commentary about it to his Tumblr blog. He quickly removed the post and made the picture private, but at least one other Tumblr blog used the service’s quick re-blog feature to capture Crowley’s post:

Shameless. At least innovate on top of it!:

Most any foursquare user will tell you our leaderboard is flawed. It tracks the wrong metrics; it encourages fake checks & cheating; etc. We’ve been hustling these past few months to build the infrastruture that allow us to tweak the game mechanics on our end (think: Leaderboard 2.0)

Poor guys, you copied the wrong stuff!

Them’s fightin words. Crowley also included a picture of Yelp’s check-in screen, which does look a lot like Foursquare’s (see picture at the top).

Also worth noting is that a new version of Foursquare’s leader board is apparently coming shortly. We noted they were tweaking the point system that underlies part of the gaming aspect of the service a couple weeks ago.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Foursquare Not Flattered By Yelp Check-Ins

In 2006 I was horrified by Jigsaw, a website that encouraged users to upload people’s contact information (often from business cards) for money – $1 per contact. Other people then bought that contact information.

Even if you found out about Jigsaw there was no way to get the information removed. Hand out your business card to the wrong person and you could suddenly find yourself in vendor cold call hell.

From my original post: “Jigsaw makes money while pushing costs to other people…[by] making private contact information public. The problem here is that Jigsaw’s actions aren’t easily found out by people getting constant cold calls and emails – it’s very unlikely they’ll know that these people got this contact information at Jigsaw in the first place.”

Jigsaw has changed its model since 2006. People can now see if their personal information has been uploaded, and there is a process to have it removed, at least temporarily. And users are no longer paid cash to upload contacts. Instead they receive points that can be used to download contact other people’s contact information.

Fast forward to today. Jigsaw continues to thrive, because there are lots of people out there who desperately want contact information for sales and business development purposes. Revenue is rumored to be around $30 million/ year.

Is Jigsaw still evil?

The company softened it’s approach to data by removing the cash incentive and giving people a way to remove data. But more importantly, the world has changed a lot since 2006. Facebook has been the catalyst for much of the change.

Back in 2006 people still had a notion of privacy online, particularly around contact information. Today those walls are crumbling. People share information today without blinking that they never would have considered sharing in the past. Things that bother us today probably won’t matter much this time next year.

But while sites like Facebook encourage us to share personal information with the whole world, and services like Loopt, Gowalla and Foursquare get us to voluntarily share even our location publicly, at least users still have a choice; it’s their decision. And most people still don’t want to give up their privacy.

Jigsaw doesn’t give people that choice. And they’re sharing contact information, giving people direct access to your email and phone number. As I said nearly four years ago, that pushes the costs of their business, which is people having to deal with unwanted contact from vendors, to third parties.

We have to have control over the distribution of this information. As long as it’s legal (in the U.S. at least) there will be companies that disregard morality and pursue profits.

So for now, Jigsaw isn’t really evil. They’re just amoral. The first purpose of our government is to protect the rights of its people. Data privacy rights should really be no different than property rights.

Jigsaw can’t come and put up posters on my house advertising their service. The same logic suggests they shouldn’t be in the business of selling my contact information, either.

Since Jigsaw won’t get off my lawn, it’s time for the government to make them.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

The World Has Changed. Is Jigsaw Still Evil?

Startup RepairPal, an auto repair and maintenance information site, has raised $4 million in Series A funding led by Tugboat Ventures, with Rick Keister, David Strohm, Mark Goines, and Michael Torres participating. The startup previously raised $3 million in seed and angel funding.

The site, which we reviewed last year, is similar to a Google Health for cars. You get price estimates for different parts and repair jobs for your car. You enter your car year, model, and mileage, and it spits out price ranges for your zip code. There is also a directory of hundreds of thousands of local mechanics, with each shop placed onto a Google Map. Members can rate each mechanic and once a repair is completed, you can keep an online service record at RepairPal. It’s like a one-stop shop to maintain and record the health of your car.

RepairPal also launched a free, handy iPhone app which will help users find reasonable prices for car repairs and provided them with locations of reputable repair shops in their areas on the go. The app also includes Google Maps integration, user reviews for each shop and a list of towing and roadside assistance services based on your location.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

RepairPal Grabs $4 Million For Google Health For Cars

Over the last six months just about all of my tech friends have started using Foursquare, a geolocation-based game that was built by the creators of Google-acquired Dodgeball. Some of them will literally pull out their phones as soon as they enter any restaurant, event or even TechCrunch HQ and check in just so they can be named ‘mayor’ of that establishment (whoever checks into any particular location the most times becomes mayor of that location). It’s fascinating and a bit bizarre to watch, and it clearly shows that Foursquare has tapped into something powerful.

But all this time I’ve had a nagging feeling that Foursquare, at least in its current form, is not going to be the next Twitter, as some people have concluded. Because as good as Foursquare is at figuring out where and what your friends are up to, they can’t hope to compete with Facebook. That is, if Facebook does Geo right.

While the world’s largest social network has been almost totally silent with regard to its plans for geolocation, we’ve been hearing an increasing number of rumors about Facebook finally coming close to launching these features. Such rumors have come and gone for a long time, but all signs point to the most recent batch being true. For one, Facebook recently edited its Privacy Policy to explicitly allow for location-based features. And perhaps more importantly, the clock is ticking: Facebook’s rival Twitter just launched its Geolocation API, and Facebook can’t afford to be left in the dust. Facebook absolutely needs to implement location if it’s going to maintain its status as the top social network.

When it does launch, Facebook is going to have a massive impact on the current location based service environment. Much of this still-nascent space will change. And those that fail to evolve quickly will die.

Deconstructing Foursquare

I’m singling out Foursquare because it’s currently the hottest startup in location. But many of the issues affecting Foursquare apply to other promising geo-based startups like Gowalla, and the countless others that are surely in the works.

During our Realtime CrunchUp, Foursquare VP of Business Development Tristan Walker described Foursquare as a company that “makes things that make cities easier to use. We try to get folks to get out and explore the cities in which they live, or visit, and incentivize them to do so. It’s a little bit of a friend finder, a little bit of a social city guide… and we use game mechanics to tie that all together.”

First, let’s look at Foursquare the game. Whenever you check in on Foursquare, you’re rewarded with points and (sometimes) badges with clever names. These are fun initially, because you can easily compete with your friends for bragging rights. But while these game elements are a good way to entice users, they’re ultimately just a gimmick. In two year’s time, will any of these people seriously care about how many checkins they have? I doubt it. Certainly not enough to motivate them to check in every time they enter an establishment. If there’s one thing I’ve learned as a lifelong gamer, it’s that even the most engaging, addictive games out there get tired after a while. And Foursquare’s gameplay simply isn’t that engaging to begin with.

Then there’s the social city guide element of Foursquare, which could one day be a full-fledged social recommendation feature. But right now it revolves around leaving ‘tips’ about the locations you visit. This is Foursquare’s weakest point. When I look through the tips of various restaurants they’re usually filled with things like “try the chicken noodle soup”. These are occasionally helpful, but they lack context. Most of the tips I’m seeing were left by people who I don’t know at all, and they’re too brief to be any more useful than something I can already find on Yelp. I certainly haven’t reached the point where I want to see the available Foursquare tips every time I check into a restaurant.

Finally, there’s Foursquare the friend finder. The first thing you see when you boot the app is a list of where your friends have checked in recently. This is the driving force behind Foursquare’s growing popularity. There have been other services, like Loopt and Brightkite, that have let you keep tabs on your friends for quite a while. But Foursquare’s check-in model has struck a chord because it provides more context (you know what people are up to as opposed to just where they are) and a greater amount of privacy, because you have to explicitly choose to check in. The appeal of the friend finder is obvious — if you see your buddy is at a nearby bar, maybe you’ll walk over to meet him. This isn’t just a gimmick. It appeals to some fundamental human desire to hang out with people you enjoy spending time with. This will never grow old. And it’s where Facebook is poised to dominate.

Why Facebook Already Won

The most compelling part of Foursquare is the ability to see at a glance what your friends are up to. Unfortunately, most people don’t know all that many people on Foursquare yet — my current Friends List on Foursquare is dominated by folks who live and breathe tech, without a single person from my ‘regular’ social circle on the service. Twitter has always suffered from the same problem, and even a year of stellar growth and constant press attention hasn’t yet given Twitter an on ramp into mainstream use.

Facebook doesn’t have that problem. At most, there are probably a few dozen people who you’d like to share your location with. And you’re already friends with all of them on Facebook. You may even have separated them into a Friends List of “real” friends — the people you hang out with on a regular basis. And that’s why Facebook has already won the battle. Unlike Twitter, where you may be interested in following people you don’t know well, your circle of close friends on Facebook and the people with whom you’d probably like to share your location are one and the same. If Facebook really wanted to, it could probably even look at people you’re commonly tagged alongside in photos to help suggest who to include on your list of ‘location’ friends.

There are plenty of other things Facebook has going for it. Facebook already has a robust system for managing privacy settings. Granted, they’re confusing as all hell, but Facebook has made it clear that it’s working on making them easier to use. And over the years millions of people have come to trust Facebook as a relatively safe service — something that is key given the sensitive nature of location. Foursquare is a looming privacy disaster.

The other key component is Facebook’s ubiquity on GPS-enabled smartphones. These are essential for updating your location on the go (which is where most of geo’s utility comes from). And Facebook is already dominating here. Facebook is the most popular iPhone/iPod Touch app of all time, and it has a strong presence on other platforms as well (it comes preinstalled on Android and Palm’s WebOS).

It is hard to overstate how important these advantages are for Facebook. It may not be particularly difficult for other services to implement privacy features and friends lists, or even to build nice iPhone apps. But getting people to start using them will be incredibly difficult.

The Big Question Mark

Facebook has made it quite clear that location based something is coming. We’ve heard rumors about it for months, and in their most recent Privacy Policy change they actually included language directly pertaining to location based services. Here’s how it reads:

“Location Information. When you share your location with others or add a location to something you post, we treat that like any other content you post (for example, it is subject to your privacy settings). If we offer a service that supports this type of location sharing we will present you with an opt-in choice of whether you want to participate.”

So it looks like it’s coming soon, but we still don’t know the direction Facebook is going to take.

There are two obvious ways Facebook could treat location. It can act as a direct competitor to services like Loopt, Foursquare, and the rest by allowing you to directly check into locations from your phone or via the web. Or, it could serve as something of a central hub for location that third parties could update via an API. In other words, updating a service like Foursquare could then update your Facebook location.

It seems likely that Facebook will wind up doing both. Twitter is already trying to become the central hub for geo-positioned status updates through its own API, and Facebook isn’t going to give that up without a fight. Given Facebook’s moves to bolster its other API functions, I think it’s safe to say they’ll be allowing developers to push a user’s geolocation from their service or app into Facebook.

Facebook would be foolish to rely exclusively on third parties as a source of location data. Many people update their status messages and photos exclusively through Facebook.com and their official mobile applications, probably without realizing they have other options. The big question is what form this native location functionality that appears within Facebook will take. Facebook could simply allow people to geotag their status updates in the same way that Twitter does. Or it could adopt a robust location feature that more closely resembles Foursquare and Loopt. The change in the Terms of Service leaves room for both of these. Again, I think Facebook will do both. Third parties may be able to tap into this data via Facebook Connect, but they won’t own it.

I don’t think Facebook is going to set out to beat Foursquare. Far from it, in fact — I think Facebook is going to readily accept geo data through its API, which makes Foursquare a great potential contributor. But if Facebook chooses to own your location and that of your friends, it will severely undermine Foursquare’s primary feature.

Nothing Is In the Bag

All of that said, Facebook could still mess this up. The company has been thinking of location for a very long time now, and has held off largely because of the concerns over privacy. These concerns are certainly valid. Attorneys general from multiple countries are clearly keeping their eyes on the site’s potential safety risks. In light of this scrutiny, there’s a chance that Facebook will roll out location too slowly. Or that what they do roll out will be handicapped. Given how much is at stake I don’t think they’ll let that happen, but it’s possible.

How Foursquare And The Rest Can Still Thrive

If Facebook does nail geo, that doesn’t necessarily mean Foursquare is doomed. It just means that Foursquare needs to build a product whose core value extends beyond showing where your friends are. That’s why I think its social city guide is probably the best thing it has going for it. It may be lacking now, but if Foursquare can build out a compelling recommendation engine that introduces you to new people to meet and places to see based on your past checkin history, it could be very cool. It could also continue building out its gaming elements to keep them fresh.

Looking forward, services like SimpleGeo and GeoAPI will be able to help apps integrate location very quickly. Facebook is going to own the social graph, but there’s plenty that can still be done beyond that. Games. Dating apps. Hyper-local advertising. These all have very bright futures. They’ll just need to figure out how to use location as a starting point, rather than a core feature.

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Watch Out Foursquare, Facebook is Poised To Dominate Geo

As one of the hot social-location properties, Foursquare has a wealth of information about where you go. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really offer many good ways to visualize it. In fact, Foursquare only focuses on providing a text stream of your check-ins. A new app takes that data and puts it on a map.

4mapper, built by John Wiseman, is a very simple application. Once you authorize it to use your Foursquare data (via Foursquare’s new API), it will pull your location information and place it on top of a Google Map. Your check-ins are displayed as white dots on the map. The more times you have check-in to a certain place, the larger the dot will be. Clicking on these dots will give you more information about where you checked-in. And you can zoom in on the map for better detail about your check-ins.

As I said, this is a very simple app, built on Google App Engine, but it’s interesting. It’s sort of like a heat map to show where you frequent in any given city. It’s similar to what Social Great has been doing with Foursquare data, only this is personalized, whereas that is an aggregator of data in various cities.

While Foursquare, the service, is interesting for a number of reasons, namely its gaming element and the potential business component, the geolocation data served up via the API may also prove to be a great source of some new apps. After coding this using Foursquare’s API, Wiseman also came up with a Python module for accessing the API. You can find that here.

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4mapper Puts Foursquare On The Map

When Loopt launched in 2006 it was ahead of a curve that is just starting to be recognized: Location. Now, with services like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite, and even Twitter fueling the location-based services frenzy, Loopt realized that it needed to shift its strategy a bit. Enter Pulse, a new feature launching today.

Previously, Loopt was more of a passive service — you started it up on some device and it kept track of where you were. Other users could see where you were if they opened the app too, but generally it wasn’t about pinging your friends to let them know where you are and what you were doing. But Pulse makes Loopt much more of an active service. It recommends hot places, hot events, and lets you know what your friends are up to.

This new feature is already live on Loopt’s website, but as we alluded to back in May, this will also be a part of the Loopt 2.0 iPhone app, which should be released shortly. But things have even changed since then. As you can see in the screenshots, a key feature of this new Loopt is the idea of the “Check In.” Obviously, this is a direct reaction to competitors like Foursquare and Gowalla which are built around that very idea. This is a key part of the new Loopt as checking in helps it recommend things for your friends to do.

But Loopt is also using other data to recommend places. It has a partnership with Zagat to get restaurant information and pulls data from sources like Citysearch to further its recommendations. All of this data has allowed Loopt to create what founder Sam Altman refers to as a “local search engine.”

And this is altering Loopt’s business as well. As we’ve previously covered, location is a potentially powerful tool for business models involving things like coupons. Foursquare is starting to delve into this, but it isn’t yet making money from it. This new version of Loopt is taking full advantage of this. The company has already struck deals with partners such as Jack In The Box to serve up virtual coupons when users of Loopt are nearby a restaurant.

Fans of Loopt will still recognize many of the features of the service, but everything has been improved, Altman says. One thing not included however is Mix, Loopt’s service that helped users potentially find dates. That was spun off into its own app last month.

Loopt also offers some things that Foursquare doesn’t such as the ability to see where all your friends are checked in on an actual map (rather than just a list of where they are). And you can also see not only that friends are at a particular place, but how others have rated it (with a smiley face or a frowning face). This allows you to see if a restaurant is not good, for example.

The iPhone is proving to be a boon for location-based services, but it also has a very big weakness: Third-party apps cannot run in the background. This is one reason why the previous version of Loopt didn’t work well on the device; it kept track of your location, but only when you had it open. Loopt recently launched a new feature that allows you to get around this by pinging your phone to get your location with the help of the carrier. But that service costs extra money, a huge barrier. Moving to the concept of check-ins seems like a better way to keep people using your application.

So can Loopt take on the younger location-based upstarts with its new features? We’ll see, but Loopt has a couple of big advantages: 1) It works on over 100 mobile devices (Foursquare, for example, works on only a few right now — but any phone can access its mobile website). 2) Apple seems to love Loopt. They’ve included it in commercials, and routinely feature it in the App Store.

Disclosure: Loopt offers a TechCrunch branded version of the service here.

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Loopt Shifts Its Strategy To Tap The Pulse Of Location

What if the next time you went to a football game, there was an iPhone app for that stadium that listed all the bathrooms nearest you, all the food stalls (with menus and the ability to order from your seat), a button to contact medical assistance, and the ability to find car pools back home? One of today’s Demopit winners at TechCrunch50 is Chyngle, has created a branded app for the University of Michigan which does just that.

Chyngle’s branded apps use GPS to find out your location and discover services and people nearby. It shows them as red dots on a seating chart of the stadium. If you want to order a slice of pizza, you can send an SMS message to one of the pizza vendors and they will deliver it to your seat. CEO Todd Sullivan calls it “in-pocket marketing.”

If you want to find tickets for sale by other fans or a ride home, the app lets you call them anonymously (the calls are routed through Chyngle).

The company charges the venue a $2,000 a month for the app, and can create custom apps for any event location.

During the Q&A, the judges suggest changing the name. “My second company was called Plaxo,” says Sean Parker, “people thought it was a dental problem.” They also suggested making it a free app and creating different ones for every big venue like Madison Square Gardens

Todd Sullivan

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TC50: Demopit Winner Chyngle Creates In-Pocket Mobile Marketing Apps…

1. It’s the location of Google’s San Francisco office (floors 2-4)
2. It’s the location of the Secret Service’s San Francisco field office (floors 5-6)
3. And someone who works there has a license plate that says “Drunk”

Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to theorize how these three facts form the backbone of a massive worldwide conspiracy. Feel free to add additional “facts,” such as “That building was also constructed on top of an ancient Native American burial ground” or “I heard that’s where the Secret Service keeps all the counterfeit cash they confiscate, and the floors are really thin.” Just make sure to bake in the drunk license plate, too.

I took that picture of the license plate, by the way, in the parking garage of that building. And a different picture of it ended up on the FailBlog last month. So if you can work that into your conspiracy theory, you get bonus points.

Best story gets a free TechCrunch Tshirt, any size, delivered anywhere in the world. In fact, any entertaining story that has significant creative effort put into it gets a Tshirt. So go for it.

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Coincidence? Three Interesting Things About 345 Spear Street, San…