This whole "social web" thing is crazy. I've just picked things that are different enough from each other to serve different purposes, and I've already stacked up 9.
VentureBeat reported that Aloqa announced $1.5 million in first-round funding from Wellington Partners and angel investors as well as Sanjeev Agrawal as the new CEO.
Mr. Agrawal is a former head of product marketing from Google and more recently was Vice President of products at TellMe Networks, now part of Microsoft.
Aloqa is a mobile search company that sends users information about events, friends and other data based on a user's location. Other companies moving into location-aware search and discovery include Google, Nokia and other startups Geodelic and Dopplr.
The company is also generating revenue by using the service to sell advertising based on users’ locations.
Unlike location-based services that rely on phones having GPS chips embedded in them, Aloqa uses information from a variety of sources like cell towers, Wi-Fi, and GPS to identify where a user is.
The service will be available first on Android phones, but the company intends to extend it to other major mobile platforms soon.
Source.
Because your iPhone knows your location, the app can show you nearby places to eat, stay and explore, as recommended by the Dopplr community. It also comes with built-in recommendations for 250 popular cities around the world.
Very excited to see Dopplr's iPhone app hit the Apple app store today. I've been privileged to be an early tester of this, and can't wait to use it for real over the next two weeks at OSCON in San Jose.
Congratulations to @mattb and all at Dopplr!
I've long been a member of DOPPLR, the social network for travelers, and I'm a big fan of it's Social Atlas. Whenever I'm planning a trip it's one of the first websites I check. Its great for getting a community view of where I'm headed.
Today DOPPLR have released an iPhone App that puts the power of it's Social Atlas in your pocket - and it's genius!
The App makes it easy to find places to eat, stay or see nearby (using the iPhone's geo-location) or by searching for details of a particular city. Adding new places to the Social Atlas or making recomendations is also really easy. If anything it's actually more fun to use than the website version.
What a great, useful travel App, and released just in time for my summer holidays too!
So after a good few days of spare time contribution to my Ruby Dopplr API, it is now functional and ready to use. This is pretty much a project I did for fun to put some things into practice, but hopefully someone can make use of it in a mashup or other application. At this point, much of the data is just returned as a hash from the JSON response, but I’ll be adding some deeper functionality in the future for more complex data queries and such.
To use the library, simply create a client with a traveller and city object. You can return some data from each object, or perform a search query.
require 'dopplr'
client = Dopplr::Client.new('token')
mikeric = client.traveller('mikeric')
vancouver = client.city('6173331')
mikeric.info
mikeric.trips
vancouver.info
vancouver.trips
client.search("Montreal", :city)
Basically, the other Ruby implementation uses method_missing for all it's API calls. This works, but it's not the best way in a practical sense. I find that having separate methods for their corresponding objects works nicely, in that you can see available methods for a given object by calling Dopplr::Traveller.methods or Dopplr::City.methods. Also note that method_missing, depending on how it's used, can be noticeably slower.
If you want a simpler but less practical solution, take a look at the “single” branch. It contains all the methods in a single Dopplr class. Check it out, fork it, enjoy.
