Rummble
by Mike Butcher on June 19, 2009

It’s pretty obvious that wherever you are in the world, you’re usually looking for the best bar, hotel or venue you can get for your money. And all the information is out there now, especially on live streams like Twitter. The problem is searching it and finding it. So if you could somehow match tweets to actual venues you could also use that data to rate the venue itself. The other thing you could do would be to create trust around the actual users which submitted the information.

Now, mobile startup Rummble is trying to crack this nut with a beta product called Tremors. This is a new Twitter app which does the following: it attempts to match tweets to venues, based on a combination of fuzzy word matching, the general location the tweet came from and then a rough estimation of whether the Tweet was positive or negative about the venue. Right now it works in New York and Austin, Texas (the SXSW venue) and London. These are a natural fit as they are likely to have a critical mass of Twitter users – San Francisco is coming.

by Robin Wauters on June 19, 2009

Always nice for a reporter to bump into a developer who builds mobile applications for startups and gives you a live preview and details of yet-to-be-announced stuff. No worries, he has permission to talk about the apps (he thinks). The man I’m talking about is Julián Moreno from development house Droiders, and he and his team have been hacking away at some fine apps for the Android platform: Kyte, Rummble, TransDroid and an ebook reader for the Google Books database.

Google Offers A Geolocation API For Gears (But It Only Works On Windows Mobile)
29 Comments
by Erick Schonfeld on August 22, 2008

After hinting that it would do so last June, Google’s mobile team has released a Geolocation API for Google Gears. This works both on mobile phones and laptops running Gears, but developers will find it most useful for mobile applications. Unfortunately, they will be limited in that regard because Google Gears Mobile still only works on Windows Mobile phones, even though an Android phone is about to launch. (Maybe now that a new Android SDK is out, the mobile team can finally figure out how to make Gears work on Android too).

Google figured out how to find a mobile phone’s location for its own mobile apps, such as Google Maps, and is now opening that technology up as an API to outside developers. Two UK-based mobile startups—Rummble and lastminute— have already built the API into their services. The Google Mobile blog explains:

These two apps make use of the Gears Geolocation API. The API can determine your location using nearby cell-towers or GPS for your mobile device or your computer’s IP address for your laptop. Google provides this service for free to both developers and users.

Gears is available on IE Mobile on mobile and Internet Explorer and Firefox on desktop. To use the location-enabled lastminute.com and Rummble web apps you will need a Windows Mobile device that supports GPS or cell-id lookup (for example the Samsung Blackjack II and HTC Touch Dual, see supported devices FAQ). We are working hard to bring Gears to more mobile platforms, such as Android and others.

There is also more detailed information on the API on the Google Code blog.

Europe’s Mobile 2.0 startups come together
30 Comments
by Mike Butcher on July 3, 2008

Europe is a hotbed of mobile startups right now, so appropriately enough the Mobile 2.0 event which started in San Francisco is putting on a one-day international event tomorrow in Barcelona which focuses on mobile startups, dubbed Mobile 2.0 Europe. I’ll be moderating a panel there, hosting a TechCrunch networking party and we now have the exclusive on the early stage start-ups selected for the competition:

aka-aki (from Germany) focuses on Proximity Networking, as in mobile social networking with Bluetooth-sensing capabilities which are pretty interesting. For instance, it will build a network of encounters with other Aka-Aki members even before you sign up, populating your network automatically. We’ve written a lot about them here.

Dial2Do (from Ireland) lets you do common tasks by calling a number and speaking. You can send email or SMS and post to Twitter for instance. It asks you two or three questions like “Do what?”, “To who?”. You say what you want, it recognizes what you said and completes the task. That would probably make it pretty handy for those tasks you’d like to do while driving but now can’t due to the increasing number of laws which band people from talking on the phone while driving.

Shout’Em (from Croatia) is a “roll your own” hosted mobile social network which has an Android client already. The video looks slick at least, but it will be interesting to hear more about them at the conference.

youlynx (from Spain) is a social media network, not unlike a mobile YouTube, but you can send pictures as well. It would be good to see if they have any plans to extend this idea as currently its a fairly simple video sharing site for mobile content.

Zipipop (from Finland) is a start-up that is developing Zipiko, a mobile service for sorting your social life on the go, as in, broadcast where you’ll be at a certain time in the day. Think Dopplr, but on a much more granular level perhaps.

Rummble (from UK) is a location based discovery tool and social search platform we wrote about here and here. Rummble’s idea is that location will soon be a “given” (via FireEagle, Google or GPS) on the mobile, as will social networking, so the value lies in filtering all this data to make it relevant in the mobile experience.

ViaMobility (from France) is a mobile widgets and applications startup with a Mobile Widget Player. France seems to have a penchant for mobile widgets as another startups called Goojet launched there recently.

And if you’re free in the evening, come over to the TechCrunch / Mobile 2.0 Europe Party at Shoko Club near the beach with speakers, organizers, startups. Check out details for the party and the sponsors after the jump.

Read More

bugbugbugbug
Techcrunch on Facebook