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What Did The Location War Look Like At SXSW? Like This.

Right before the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas a couple weeks ago, some of you may have read about SimpleGeo’s awesome location data visualization tool called Vicarious.ly. The site showed location information coming in to SimpleGeo from Austin in realtime, and included elements such as Foursquare check-ins, Gowalla check-ins, geotagged pictures from Flickr, and geotagged [...]

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Thu, March 25 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments

AT&T Emails SF Customers That The Network Is Getting Better (Did The Call Fail?)

When bashing AT&T’s network, two cities usually come up above all others: New York City and San Francisco. AT&T has even acknowledged just how bad it is in those cities. But they’ve also said for a while that they’re working on making it better. And apparently now that work is far enough along that they’re [...]

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Wed, March 17 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments

Spotify Consumes More Internet Capacity Than All Of Sweden

Today, during his keynote address at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek had a big revelation: “On certain days, we’re consuming more Internet capacity than Sweden has as a country.”
Ek made the statement when asked why Spotify chose to use a P2P model, rather than centrally store all of its music [...]

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Wed, March 17 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments

Ev Williams: Twitter’s First Principle, “Be A Force For Good”

We’re here at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas where Twitter co-founder Evan Williams doing a keynote Q&A with Umair Haque. Williams may use the time to talk a bit about Twitter’s upcoming ad platform. Update: It’s actually an “At Platform” called At Anywhere — more here.
Interestingly enough, Twitter saw its first burst of popularity [...]

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Mon, March 15 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments

Brightkite’s Sneaky Plan To Get Regular Users Into Location: Group Text

Brightkite is tricky. Tricky and smart.
While larger than most of their location-based rivals with over 2 million users, they know that in the past year they’ve lost some momentum to the newer check-in services like Foursquare and Gowalla. So they’re trying to do something unique to swing momentum back in their favor.
Today, at the SXSW [...]

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Sat, March 13 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments

CauseWorld’s New App Melds The Check-In With The Check-Out

Last night, we wrote about a CauseWorld teaming up with TechCrunch to provide double karma points during the SXSW festival starting today in Austin, Texas. These points, obtained through checking-in at various locations, can be used to donate to charities through big brands that support the app. It’s a great feature, and we hope you’ll [...]

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Sat, March 13 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments

The Real War At SXSW: AT&T Versus 15,000 Data-Crazed Velociraptors

We’ve talked a lot this week about the so-called “Location War” brewing at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas starting tomorrow. That war will happen, but actually, there are likely to be a lot of winners because a few of the location-based services should be able to leverage the exposure to gain usage after the [...]

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Fri, March 12 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments

Hot Potato Tosses A New Site, API, And iPhone App With Foursquare Integration At You

Back in November of last year, 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 [...]

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Fri, March 12 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments

iPhone OS 4.0 Looms, But When Will We See It?

Apple has set the standard that once every year they will release a new version of the iPhone. It stands to reason that this year will be no different, with a new model likely coming sometime this summer. But arguably just as important as Apple’s hardware refresh is the accompanying software refresh that comes with [...]

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Fri, March 12 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments

Vicarious.ly: SimpleGeo’s One Location-Based Stream To Visualize Them All

As I’ve made abundantly clear over the past several days, just about every service that has anything to do with location is launching something at the SXSW festival which starts tomorrow in Austin, Texas. Don’t believe me, here’s a small sampling (Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Whrrl, Plancast, Brizzly, Twitter). So, how are you going to wrap [...]

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Fri, March 12 2010 » Uncategorized » No Comments