Urban Airship To Shutte...

Yesterday, we wrote about Urban Airship , the startup that gives developers a simple way to build in-app purchases and push notifications into their mobile apps, and how the company has been on a tear of late. They recently hired Skype’s former strategy czar and yesterday hit 10 billion notifications pushed. Not bad for a two-year-old. On top of that, Urban Airship acquired SimpleGeo at the end of October for approximately $3.5 million. Considering that the two startups had some months before struck a strategic partnership, and both provide location-based services for mobile developers, the acquisition made sense, even if the price was lower than many had hoped. (And SimpleGeo Co-founder Joe Stump left the company post-acquisition, following Co-founder Matt Galligan.) At the time, it was unclear what Urban Airship would be doing with the terabyte-plus of SimpleGeo location data. Today, that became clear. Simply put, it looks like it’s curtains for SimpleGeo’s services. Urban Airship said this afternoon , after the requisite internal discussions, talks with customers, and hand-wringing, that it will “wind down the availability of the current versions of [SimpleGeo's] Places, Context, and Storage over the next few months”. The target date for pulling the plug officially will be March 31st. Obviously, this is not good news for SimpleGeo’s customers, so in order to make sure its customers aren’t left out in the cold, the company said that Factual will be picking up the slack. The LA-based startup will be migrating developers over to its service, as the company offers its own API with location information, similar to that which was provided by SimpleGeo. A loss for SimpleGeo means a win for Factual. Factual has been providing SimpleGeo with their Places data since June 2011, so Urban Airship hopes that it will be able to facilitate a smooth transition to Factual’s API to continue with access to that data. Urban Airship is also offering customers an additional list of replacement services here . Furthermore, the startup will not be charging for use of Places, Context, or Storage services through March 31st, and will be offering existing SimpleGeo customers up to six months of its Pro Plan for no monthly charge. ( More here. ) Smacks of a bit of guilt, doesn’t it? Urban Airship said that it is basically determined to focus on its product development efforts, which means that it will be taking the best parts of SimpleGeo to beef up the location and context capabilities of its push notifications, while the rest is for all intents and purposes kaput. This wasn’t unforeseen considering the departures from the company post-acquisition, but it’s probably not what the SimpleGeo founders had in mind a year ago. For more, here’s Urban Airship’s blog post .

Social Travel In Realti...

As Semil showed back in November , social travel sites are all the rage these days among the entrepreneurs, offering plenty of interesting approaches to offering recommendations on where and how to travel. You may not have heard of HipGeo , but if you’re a traveler, this is something that will likely pique your curiosity. HipGeo has developed a location-aware platform that records and displays the places users go and how they get there, and today they’ve released a new app that is essentially a travel diary for the modern Web. The app offers a unique and snazzy interface that is designed to let mobile users post text, places, and photos that are recorded, organized, and displayed around a user’s travels — the places they’ve visited, all in pursuit of the “places graph”. To get a better, more granular picture of HipGeo, you might see it as a product of some of the best features of services with which we’re already familiar. HipGeo is trying to do with GPS and location what Facebook is doing with time on the much-talked about Timeline , more specifically with the new “map” feature Facebook has incorporated into Timeline based on the aggregation of “Places” check-in data. HipGeo is, in a sense, the smaller, third-party app version of that, which is now usable by other developers thanks to the launch of its API in November. Or you might see HipGeo as Banjo that goes beyond the Foursquare API, or doing for location what Path does for time (and location), but only for the people you really want to connect with. Imagine seeing all the photos and comments at an arena or stadium, as well as the users who uploaded them from last night’s concert or game — that’s what they want to make possible. And do so by using place history and tracking to do a lot of the content discovery heavy lifting, or really fellow traveler discovery, in an attempt to create the kind of “serendipity” Catherine Cook talks about in this recent TC post . HipGeo initially launched as a way for users to create animated slide shows of their activities, but HipGeo Chief Product Guy Rich Rygg says that users requested more of a blog-like display to share their travels and trip journals, so the team responded with this new app in an attempt to create a lovechild between Tumblr and Foursquare. HipGeo was founded by GeoCities alumni, who are well-familiar with location and content sharing, and they’ve built a platform that is centered around delivering location and travel information. With this tech at its core, HipGeo can make easy modifications in terms of features and the “top layer”, responding quickly to user and developer requests, just as they did in adding the app’s new blog features. But for the user, all he or she has to do is travel and record those experiences on their phones. HipGeo then builds a timeline around photos and location, dropping them as points on a map. From there, you can decide who to share your travel information with, if anyone, or just flip on passive tracking to let the app record the goings-on (photos, comments, and locations) of your day in a realtime diary. It’s a way to solve check-in fatigue, as the startup offers a crowdsourced blog for location, allowing you to see what route others are taking to get to their destinations, where they’re going, and what they’re saying about it when they get there. This becomes a source of realtime recommendations and you don’t have to check in one million times from every location, because geotagging is inherent to all of the content you’re producing. You just have to make sure you’re keeping your phone active as you travel, which shouldn’t be a problem for most smartphone users out there, judging by the level of activity in our Foursquare and Instagram feeds. For more, check out HipGeo at home here , or on the App Store here . (Android is on the way.) Let us know what you think.

Quickly Tag Photos With...

There’s one big new feature in today’s global rollout of Facebook Timeline . Facebook has enhanced the Timeline Map with a wizard that lets you rapidly tag your existing photos with locations. You can also now type in a location and share rich stories about whether you’ve been, took a trip, or lived there. The Map feature could seriously advance Facebook’s “location as a layer” plan. By convincing users to append valuable geographic data to its massive collection of photos with this easy flow, Facebook could improve local ad targeting. To access Map, visit your Timeline, which you can  enable here . Below the Update Info and Activity Log buttons and next to to your Friends, Photos, and other Timeline View tiles is a drop-down arrow with a number. Expand this menu and click “Map”. To navigate to Map directly, you can add ” /map ” to the end of your profile’s URL in this format “http://www.facebook.com/[Your User Name or Profile ID]/map”. To alert people to the feature, Facebook is currently showing news feed stories about friends who’ve updated their maps, and Map can be viewed from mobile thanks to Bing . When Timeline became available for developers, Map only showed the Places you’d been tagged at, and didn’t let you directly add new data. Now, you can click “Where have you been?” to share travel memories, or “Add Photos” to bring up a ”Where was this?” entry field over a thumbnail strip of photos you’re tagged in. The wizard slides you forward and asks you tag the next photo once you’d added location to the last one. You could probably add location to all your tagged photos quickly as each only takes a few seconds. The feature focuses on getting you to add location to photos you’re tagged in because Facebook wants a better idea of where you and your friends spend your time. If you list San Francisco as your current city, but say many of the your photos in are from Mountain View, Facebook could know to show you ads for Mountain View restaurants. As multiple people are often tagged in each photo, Facebook gains that same data about your friends. For the same reason, the “Where have you been?” feature asks who you were with. Many third-party apps such as TripAdvisor and Where Have I Been? have had success helping people share their past locations and generate maps to show off to friends. Those could become less necessary now. Timeline Map could even challenge Foursquare ‘s single player function of letting users keep track of their travels. Facebook’s most ingenious designs create something easy to use, fun to browse, and coax valuable data from its users. Timeline Map does all three, and honestly, it’s kinda fun to use. Now you have to decide whether to keep your location to yourself, or aid Facebook in serving you more relevant ads while filling out your map with memories.

Google+ To Take On Four...

It looks like Google+ is adding a feature that will allow users to “check-in” via the Google+ mobile application in order to receive a time-sensitive deal or discount. This feature is mentioned in Google Places’s help documentation , but has not yet been made available to business owners using the Google Places service . Google check-ins have a confusing history, it has to be said. To be clear, the ability to check in via Google+ is not new. Google’s location-based social service  Google Latitude launched checkins in February, prior to the launch of Google+. And when Google+ arrived on mobile , it offered a check-in feature of its own, seemingly based on Latitude, which pulls up a list of nearby Google Places. Google Latitude also allows you to sync your Latitude check-ins with Google+, as Google explains here . Other documentation refers to check-in offers for Latitude users ( link ), but again, nothing that specifically says these offers will show up for users checking in on Google+. Whew! Yeah, it’s kind of a big ol’ mess right now. Google probably should have killed off Latitude when Google+ launched to avoid this kind of confusion. Maybe it still will. After all, now you can checkin on Google+ and there are so many other places to find Google’s Offers, including the  Google Shopper application  (iOS/Android), the Google Offers application for Android , and the Google Offers website . And soon, apparently, Google+. The new help documentation was spotted by Mike Blumental , who also notes that Google has recently started cracking down on businesses whose offers don’t include a real discount of some sort. Business owners are receiving emails explaining that offers should provide “a monetary discount or an additional good or service that is not normally included.”  (That’s per the Offers Guidelines here .) As for the forthcoming Google+ check-in offers, here’s the Help Documentation that explains how Google+ users can receive the deal or discount. It reads (emphasis mine): If your customers have to visit your locations in order to do business with you, you can request that they check-in on Google+ in order to redeem your offers . They can choose to share the check-in publicly or with some of their circles, which helps spread the word about your business on Google+. They can also choose to keep their check-in private and still redeem an offer. Again, this is not a “Google Places” check-in offer or a “Google Latitude” check-in offer being discussed here, it’s a “Google+” check-in offer. So is this new? It appears so, because the option for a business owner to actually include the Google+ check-in offer hasn’t yet gone live within the Offers tab of Google Places, which is here such things are maintained. This is what it looks like now (see below): This all seems to imply that Google+ is going to soon encourage more check-ins through the integration of check-in deals and discounts, similar to Foursquare. It’s an obvious next move, of course, but it’s good to see it all confirmed in black & white…help documentation.

Google Further Personal...

It’s a full time job just keeping up with and understanding the reason behind all the changes that Google makes regularly. The latest is and addition to maps that allows you to see the places you have reviewed on a map along with some Google suggestions. The more I read about these changes the more I realize just how little I go out (don’t feel sorry for me because I actually like it that way). But as with any marketing update in the online space, how I use it doesn’t matter a bit. In a post from the Google Lat Long blog comes an explanation of this newest maps feature. Since the My Places tab was released earlier this summer, you’ve been able to view all the places you’ve rated in one manageable list. This list is now being used to personalize your view of Google Maps, enabling you to visualize all the various places you’ve visited, loved, loathed, and might want to check out right on the map. Starting today, business labels for locations you’ve rated with Google Places will be highlighted on the map with your corresponding rating beneath it. Additional places that our system thinks you might enjoy visiting — either to eat, shop, or more — will be highlighted as well. These personalized recommendations are based on the places and ratings you’ve already shared. his could be good for the “out and about” set. My question is, how many places does the average person go out to eat at and do they actually forget whether they rated it as being good bad or indifferent? And do they just wander about and look for recommendations to something else in the vicinity? Anyway, it doesn’t matter how I see this. It’s how the target market does that counts. Are you one of the targets for this kind of map functionality?