Did you take us to Bilbao? Now let’s go together!

Dear Mobnoters,

Thanks to your votes we are finalist at Bilbao’s Start-up 2.0 contest!
http://www.startup2.eu

The final contest day on 24 april will see Mobnotes to compete on stage with ten other great European startups, and the first three project will be awarded in the next day.

What about to go together? You can do it by suggesting your favorites spots in the Basque Country such as bars, restaurants, interesting places to visit, beautiful and hidden city corners…
we really need you! We want to discover Bilbao through your suggestions.

Write about Bilbao here:

http://www.mobnotes.com/discover/all/0/all/0/all/2179/es_pv_biscaglia_bi...

Hasta luego!

Mobnotes Now Available in the Android Market

The Mobnotes experience in the Android devices offers all the core Mobnotes features including Gps location updating which allows users to discover nearby places and friends with easy.
Users can also track places and friends on the map view, respecting privacy. Beyond sharing their location and geo status information with friends on the go, Mobnotes users can also automatic publish their information with popular web services such as Facebook and Twitter.

You can download Mobnotes application on Android market, looking for "mobnotes" and use it right away for free.

"Currently, the Android aplication is the best Mobnotes mobile experience I never see, you can browse your surrounding and discover new places and friends in a simple and intuitive way", said Gino Micacchi, co-founder and CTO of Mobnotes, "but this is just the starting point for our next features".

Android is an open source mobile operating platform developed by an alliance of leading technology players and wireless companies including Google Inc., T-Mobile, HTC, Telecom Italia, Vodafone, and many others.

Google Latitude, a fascinating instrument for stalkers

This morning among press releases I read about Google Latitude, a new Google service that let you know where are your friends, in real time.

A very exciting service, as you can see, thightly integrated with google maps for mobile.
Our first reaction was to compare it with Mobnotes.
Well, the google GUI is very impressive, but the main drawback of Latitude is the real-time location push; this will raise a lot of privacy concerns, the same problem we had in mind when we developed Mobnotes: our service lets you disclose your position ONLY when you want, and only to selected friends; in fact, you need to perform a specific action to disclose your position (i.e. you need to push a button).


When building Mobnotes we chose the user-initiated location update instead of the in-background automatic update of Google Latitude in order to care about our users' privacy.

Let me explain with an example:
Imagine I take two cell phones, with Google Latitude on-board and with two user accounts coupled; then I leave one device on my wife's bag, or my friend's car, and so on. I would be able to see her/his movements, track their routes, spy their actions...

Probably the main competitors of Google Latitude will be Private Investigators, the CIA, stalker tools vendors...

Sorry Google, this time you did a weird job.

UPDATE: we are not alone... read what Privacy International said

 

G.

Looking forward 2009: Mobile and Location-based ads

Here at Mobnotes we love LBS (Location-Based Services), that’s why we have launched Mobnotes.
We all love the major players and contributors in LBS segment, Skyhook Wireless is one of new important player. Folks from Skyhook Wireless has done a great work, they are the one who made possible iPhone location awareness without using GPS (as you might Know GPS not always is that good) but using cell tower triangulation and Wi-Fi positioning on the top of regular GPS positioning. They are now delivering to other platforms as well, Windows Mobile and Android.

Reading on the company blog, we are really happy to see that new trend is something that we really care: “One very important trend that will arise in 2009 is mobile location-based ads”.
Continuing reading “Though the interest in this trend is widespread, there has not been significant action taken in the area yet. Over the next few years advertisers will begin to see the benefit of location for their advertisements. If we can track where consumers are, we can better target personalized advertisements toward them, and therefore increase sales. This will be something to keep in mind in the upcoming year, and it will be exciting to see just how this industry takes shape“.

We will need some more time to get the market ready, but advertisers should start thinking about ads and location value.

Another important trend should at least to be true finally: is 2009 the year of mobile browsing?
If we see at Mobile Facebook users stats, they grow up from 2 million (2006) to 20 million mobile users right now (2009), as told by Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer at Facebook, during last CES Palm Pre conference.

So mobile and location is all about Mobnotes!
Try our mobile version here: m.mobnotes.com (any Xhtml enabled mobile phones or better).


(on the left a Facebook Sheryl Sandberg's slide)

Mobnotes partners with Facebook to “connect” users

Hey folks, today we have just announced that Mobnotes partners with Facebook to “connect” users.
Here is a small video to show Facebook Connect 0'25":
http://www.mobnotes.com/tour/facebook_connect

After Twitter integration, we welcome Facebook as well.
You can give a try:
http://www.mobnotes.com/

Facebook Connect ready!

We're proud to announce that Mobnotes is the first company in Italy, and maybe in Europe, that fully integrates with Facebook Connect.

Mobnotes is now more viral and social.



We have integrated functionality such as “update geo status” on Facebook. When you add the geo status on Mobnotes it will be automatically posted to your Facebook status, adding the location information as a plus.

Every new mobnote will be published on “Facebook Wall”, as well as all main notifications (private messages on the top) will be available on both platforms.
All you have to do is authorize the connect between the two applications here, by clicking on the Facebook Connect button on the homepage.

With these new features you won’t need to duplicate your content for both social networks, your Facebook friends will be notified for about every new post you put on Mobnotes automaticly.

Twitter status update milestone

We recently released new Twitter–Mobnotes integration. We are very happy about this, Gino Micacchi (CTO) really worked hard to archive this, good job! Any new Mobnote and geo-status mobnote update are automatically twittered.


So you can now follow and get instantly suggestions and share your favorites mobnotes on Twitter as well, try it just follow us: Christian (http://twitter.com/cgrassi) and Gino (http://twitter.com/ginomi).

More to come, stay tuned ;-)
CG