Back in November, at our Realtime CrunchUp event, I sat on the geolocation panel with members of Twitter, Foursquare, SimpleGeo, GeoAPI, Hot Potato, and Google. At one point, I raised the question if location was going to be the next battleground between startups large and small, much like social identity plays (Facebook Connect vs. Google Friend Connect) and status updates (Twitter vs. Facebook). All of the panelists indicated that it wouldn’t be, because they could all get along. How sweet. Sadly, I don’t believe them. I believe they might think that right now, because it’s still very early in the game. But it’s still a game, and people are going to play to win.
I’m sure some of them would counter that because location data is fairly standard right now, and moving easily between services, all of them will win. But that’s not true either. While location, as a whole, will win, there will be individual companies that end up ahead of others in the space. More to the point, there will be one or two services that people will go to for their social location data. That’s what we’re moving towards. And the bigger companies are starting to realize it. That’s why today we saw what may be the first maneuver in an upcoming rush to secure the location landscape, with Twitter snatching up Mixer Labs, the team behind GeoAPI.
Twitter CEO Evan Williams just announced on the company blog that they have acquired Mixer Labs, creators of GeoAPI. In a nutshell, GeoAPI provides developers with the ability to query the world through services which include a reverse geocoder; deep data about 16 million businesses and tens of thousands of points of interest; a writable layer for developers to annotate the world and do complex geo-queries; and location-enabled media layers (e.g., Twitter and Flickr). Just recently, they’ve added an iPhone SDK to speed up mobile development as well.
GeoAPI will be integrated directly into the Twitter API, speeding up Twitter’s efforts in the geo-location space. In August 2009, Twitter first announced that they’re getting into the geo-location game as well. And, in September, a lot of you started seeing the Geo API in action through apps like Tweetie, Birdfeed, etc.
Telefonica (NYSE: TEF) is buying up VOIP provider Jajah for $206 million in cash. The company—which had raised $35 million in venture capital funding—had been up for sale for more than a month now and several companies, including Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) and Cisco (NSDQ: CSCO) had also been said to be interested. In recent days, however, there were reports that Telefonica had beat out those two companies in the bidding.
In a release, Telefonica says that it will offer Jajah’s services to “customers wishing to extend their communication experience”—beginning in Europe, where it operates under the name O2. It will retain the Jajah brand.
Former PayPal SVP Jack Selby is getting into the film business: He’s funding and launching Horsethief Productions, a digital movie production, distribution and marketing firm. Selby currently serves as managing director of hedge fund Clarium Capital Management; before Clarium, he spent three years as SVP of corporate and international development at PayPal.
Horsethief plans to release two-to-three films per year on various digital platforms, including VOD, subscription services like Netflix and premium video channels like Hulu. The company will also rely on the web to promote its content. For example, its first film, The Last Rights of Ransom Pride, already boasts two microsites: lastritesfilm.com, and whokilledthedwarf.com, which introduces viewers to “The Dwarf,” one of the main characters in the film.
We’ve written about the social city and nightlife mobile app, buzzd, which pulls its data from Twitter and other buzzd users, for a bigger picture of the places that are hot in a given location. The mobile app, which has been available for iPhone and BlackBerry users, is launching an Android app as well as rolling out new versions of its existing smartphone apps.
The buzzd network compiles information from its base of over a half-million users, Twitter, and other real-time sources to provide users with activity updates for almost half a million venues across the United States and Canada. You download the app and it will bring up a list of venues close to you that are currently popular based on people talking about them on Twitter and Buzzd. Using Twitter’s new Geolocation API, the app can even pull the exact locations of your friends on Twitter.
Cc:Betty, a free service that helps organize group email threads, has rolled out an iPhone app to help declutter your email on your mobile device. Cc:Betty’s app is a group based email application that breaks email conversations into collated, threaded discussions.
An account can be created right from the app, and new group discussions can be created, using the iPhone address book to access your contacts. Photos can be easily attached as well and new contacts can be added to discussions via your address book. Any discussions, or other content such as attachments a person has in their Cc:Betty.com account are automatically synced to their iPhone. When one of your discussions is updated, you’ll get a push-notification to your iPhone so you can access important information on the go.
Cc:Betty, a free service that helps organize group email threads, has rolled out an iPhone app to help declutter your email on your mobile device. Cc:Betty’s app is a group based email application that breaks email conversations into collated, threaded discussions.
An account can be created right from the app, and new group discussions can be created, using the iPhone address book to access your contacts. Photos can be easily attached as well and new contacts can be added to discussions via your address book. Any discussions, or other content such as attachments a person has in their Cc:Betty.com account are automatically synced to their iPhone. When one of your discussions is updated, you’ll get a push-notification to your iPhone so you can access important information on the go.
Empire is a venerable British movie magazine that has amassed quite a library of film reviews since it was first published more than 20 years ago. Their reviews tend to be aimed at the enthusiastic film buff, rather than academics. I have always found the reviews entertaining and a worthwhile read.
Now, the entire Empire archive has come to the iPhone and iPod touch with the Empire Movie Guide [iTunes link]. The US$4.99, 8.9 MB app puts all of the reviews on your phone without need for a data connection. As a nice bonus, Empire grabs the most recently published reviews over the air when you are connected and launch the app.
It’s been a sad few months on FriendFeed following their acquisition by Facebook. Despite assurances that FriendFeed would not die, activity has dwindled and many users have moved on. While the service was still working, there was a fairly major glitch that made it much less compelling: Tweets, the main source of content for FriendFeed, stopped coming in at realtime speeds, and instead were delayed by up to an hour. But today, finally, realtime tweets have been restored.
If you visit FriendFeed right now, you’ll notice that many tweets are coming in with about an 8 second delay. Some are delayed a little bit longer, but it’s infinitely better than the delay we’ve all endured for months now. And many of us have been complaining for months, wondering if the Facebook deal caused Twitter to pull FriendFeed’s firehose. What actually happened is that FriendFeed was apparently transitioning over to one of the newer Twitter data streams. At our Realtime CrunchUp last month, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit indicated that they were close to implementing this new stream, but wouldn’t say what the hold up was.
Twitter’s international traffic continues to flatten as the microblogging site’s number of unique visitors flattened in November. Twitter saw 60.3 million unique visitors in November compared to 58.3 million unique visitors in October. Though the site saw a rise of 2 million visits globally, this slight uptick in visitors only represents a 3.5 percent increase in traffic. Twitter’s November U.S. traffic has stalled as well; U.S. traffic rose by a little over 100,000 visitors, to 19.37 million unique visitors after seeing a 8 percent decline in traffic in October.
Over the past few months, Twitter has rolled out versions in Spanish, German, French and Italian which could help boost the international use of its site. But as traffic stalls on Twitter’s homepage, third party Twitter clients like Seesmic and Tweetdeck are growing like gangbusters.