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RateItAll helps businesses build their own Foursquare

RateItAll, the review site that has described itself as a “distributed Yelp for everything,” is going mobile. But it’s not just by releasing an iPhone app of its own — RateItAll wants to help companies build their own location check-in services.

There are a number of different companies that may want to build their own customized version of Foursquare, said chief executive Lawrence Coburn. A conference might want to encourage attendees to share their location with each other. A hotel might want guests to share which attractions they’re visiting. Those companies could take the basic template created by RateItAll and customize it with their own look. For example, RateItAll has already announced built apps for soccer website Footbalistic, where users can check in wherever they’re watching a game, and with the Online Marketing Summit.

To show off what RateItAll can do, the company has released an application called DoubleDutch (App Store link). It includes location check-ins, friending, stickers rewarding different types of user activity, and integration with Facebook and Twitter. Companies can add their own logos, stickers, and venue information, and they also get a tab within the application where they can add whatever they want.

RateItAll will charge a one-time setup fee for the apps, then make revenue sharing deals for advertising.

This move may seem like a big shift for a review website, but Coburn said the apps take advantage of the company’s database, so that they’re populated with locations and reviews. That should give RateItAll an advantage against other build-your-own-location-app services like Socialight. The apps also help build that database, since there’s an option to rate and review and location when you check-in.

The San Francisco company is announcing its service at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, where tons of other location-based services are also making news. RateItAll may be the only one of the bunch that’s trying to sell its product to companies, not consumers, but I was curious if there’s still some risk that the consumer apps might take off, gobbling the audience for RateItall– if everyone’s on Foursquare, who needs to check in on a South by Southwest app? Coburn acknowledged that he isn’t totally sure where the industry is going, but he noted that the success of Facebook hasn’t stopped build-your-own-social-network service Ning.

RateItAll’s audience has grown to 1.4 million unique monthly visitors, and it “just missed profitability” for the last few quarters, Coburn said. It has raised $1.4 million in funding.

Companies: RateItAll

People: Lawrence Coburn

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Universal Check-in App Confirmed: Brightkite’s Stealth Service

We write this for you, the tired, the weak and the weary, the dogged attendees of the South By South West festival in Austin this weekend. We know that you’re exhausted, but it’s not from the booze, the parties or the product pitches – it’s the endless location based check-ins. If only someone had solved this in time, right?

From what we can tell, the folks over at Brightkite have the solution with Check.in, but have yet to release it to the achey-thumbed, smart-phoned masses.

Sponsor

According to the splash page we found at Check.in, the app, which looks to be for both iPhone and Android, will be the “one checkin to rule them all”.

“Check.in takes the hassle out of checking in on multiple services,” the page reads. And at the bottom, we’re told that the service is “made by Martin May, Brady Becker, and Jordan Harband of Brightkite after sever check-in fatigue.”

When you take a closer look at the sole image on the page, which depicts a Check.in app on both iPhone and Android, we can see that the service appears to handle check-ins for Foursquare, Gowalla and Brightkite, and we would assume others are on the way. But we have to wonder how it would check in to Gowalla, as the company’s API is currently read-only.

Check.in would be the first of its kind in the market and would surely co-opt a large amount of traffic and make the “severe check-in fatigue” that much more manageable.

When we first wrote about this at the beginning of the month, the only response we received was “no comment”. We asked again today, but have yet to receive any comment. We’ve also asked the folks over at Gowalla and they had this to say:

“We currently do not allow write access to our API. For now we’re excited to see creative use of the read API while we continue to polish our own native clients.”

If this service is in the pipeline to be released soon, it looks like Gowalla would not be included in the check-in service and that would be a shame. It’s only Friday and there are a number of days left to SXSW Interactive, AKA “Nerdfest 2010″, but wouldn’t it be that much more enjoyable if you didn’t have to spend the first 10 minutes any time you arrived somewhere new checking in?

With that said, we have to wonder how much we would lose out on the features now offered by these services. Will Check.in also offer tips, photos, check-in commenting and all of that or will it just let us broadcast our location? For now, we’ll just have to wonder, but either way, fear not, a solution looks to be on the way.

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Lenovo ThinkPad bumps bring X201, X201s, X201t, W701, and W701ds into the Core i7 fold

Lenovo’s giving some of its ThinkPad flagships a nice little spec overhaul, specifically the X200 series of ultraportables and the spectrum-leaping W700 hardlyportable dual screen laptop. The new X201 and X201s start things off with a new option for touchpads on the 12.1-inch form factor, options for Core i7 and Core i5 processors, and sub-three pound weigh-ins on at least the 4-cell configuration. The X201s is slightly lighter and slightly thinner, and is limited to Core i7 procs, though neither version gets much under an inch thick. The X201t (pictured) is the well-leaked tablet version, adding on a bit more thickness in exchange for a highly configurable screen, which includes options for outdoor viewing, capacitive touch and of course pen input. All three laptops rely on Intel HD graphics and are rather extensively configurable, with batteries ranging up into the 12 hour ballpark with the 9 cell battery option on the X201 and X201s. Unfortunately you’ll still have to look to Lenovo’s consumer line for HDMI output — none of these machines are packing anything other than VGA.

Meanwhile, on the other end of town, the 17-inch, Wacom-equipped W701 and W701ds (dual screen) are making the leap to Core i7 as well, though the Core i7-920 Extreme and Core i7-820 QM Quad Core on display here is fairly desktop class. There’s also NVIDIA Quadro FX 3800M / 2800M graphics, and an option for a dual SSD drive configuration to really break the bank.

All of these laptops should be available in the beginning of March, with starting prices of $1,199 (X201), $1,599 (X201s), $1,549 (X201t), $2,199 (W701), and $3,799 (W701ds). Can’t wait to find out more? We’ve got a review of the X201t all warm and ready for you.

Lenovo ThinkPad bumps bring X201, X201s, X201t, W701, and W701ds into the Core i7 fold originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Feb 2010 00:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Metal Gear Arcade mixes 3D glasses with head-tracking for this season’s hottest new look

Despite a few harrying run-ins with some large white tents at Manhattan’s Fashion Week-hosting Bryant Park, we can honestly say we have no idea what’s “in” this year for arcade gaming headgear. Still, even with Konami’s lack of zebra print or a sly celebrity endorsement, we’ve got to hand it to them for this fashionable new “Metal Gear Arcade” number. The arcade game is based on Metal Gear Online, but the head gear adds 3D and head-tracking to the experience. There’s also a physical gun controller, and the sit down arcade cabinets pump out your gunplay in huge 5.1 sound. This new arcade incarnation of the game will be playable at the AUO Expo in Japan this week, but we have no idea how long it will be until we can look this badass from the comfort of our own couch. Hit up the source link for a riveting video in Japanese that details this exclusive, outside-the-house experience.

Metal Gear Arcade mixes 3D glasses with head-tracking for this season’s hottest new look originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 21 Feb 2010 06:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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SXSW Gets Seat-Level Check-Ins With SitBy.Us

Thousands upon thousands of people will be in Austin, Texas next month for the South By Southwest Interactive festival – and several different services will be competing to show you where you can find your friends at the big event. Only one app, though, is focused on displaying your location down to the level of where you are sitting!

SitBy.Us is a mobile web friendly application that lets you peruse the SXSW panel, keynote and party schedules, check in to rooms and locations, identify where in the room you are sitting and then see which of your friends from Twitter are there too. The service is a little unstable right now, but it looks like the kind of thing that’s going to get slammed in Austin.

Sponsor

SitBy.Us was built by a San Francisco/Chicago design and development shop called WeightShift. WeightShift has done work for Mozilla, Wordpress and others and has a strategic partnership with leading design firm Happy Cog.

If you’re going to SXSW you’ll have a lot of options for sharing your location and plans: Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, Gowalla, Plancast and probably others. But I wouldn’t be surprised if a whole lot of people are on SitBy.Us. It’s use of your existing social connections on Twitter and its very unique value proposition make it sound like a whole lot of fun.

I found out about SitBy.Us from Portland, Oregon’s Josh Pyles. I’m going to figure out where he’s sitting in Austin and thank him.

You can make friends with the ReadWriteWeb team on Twitter, and thus find out where we’re sitting in Austin, via the RWW Team list. Sit by us!

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Foursquare Signing Mainstream Partnership Deals Left And Right

Foursquare continues to sign interesting deals with major players in a wide range of fields. Following the service’s Bravo deal a couple weeks ago, they’ve reached a deal with restaurant rating guide Zagat, according to The New York Times. And AdAge has some details about deals with even more partners, including HBO, Warner Brothers, and the History Channel.

The service has been on a roll lately. They’re now seeing over a million check-ins a week, with that rate doubling in the last month alone. And these new deals can only help them as they bring the type of mainstream appeal that it took services like Twitter so long to find.

While Zagat is an obvious partner thanks to its restaurante recommendations, the entertainment partnership appeal may not be immediately apparent. But as you can see on the Foursquare page for the movie Valentine’s Day, those promoting the movie have added 50 “Romantic Tips” around the cities that the movie takes place in, New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Boston. Any Foursquare user that checks-in at one of these places will unlock a special badge for the movie.

The new HBO show, How To Make It In America, meanwhile, has four special badges that you can unlock: Culture, Living, Cocktails, and Nightlife. Each of these is obtained by visiting venues from the show.

And the Zagat deal is interesting in that it goes beyond simply offering food and restaurant recommendations. The service plans to have a weekly web video series entitled “Meet The Mayor” in which they interview the Foursquare “mayor” of a restaurant in their guide.

Another deal that Foursquare recently signed was with Harvard.

These types of deals are crucial to Foursquare not only because they point to an eventual money-making opportunity, but also because they give the service a way to fend off attacks from Yelp (which just launched a check-in feature on its own iPhone app), and soon Facebook. Meanwhile, these deals give brands a fun way to interact with the public. It’s advertising, but it’s interactive.

Now Foursquare just has to solve that douchebag problem…

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Xbox v1 games, systems no longer Live; Microsoft’s pulling the plug April 15

It’s been no secret that original Xbox games have been the vestigial limb holding back much wanted features including raising the limit on our friends list to over 100 or mobile tie-ins, and on April 15 all that will come to an end. Even those Xbox Originals downloaded to the 360 or played via backwards compatibility will be cut off, so we’d suggest getting those last few rounds of Halo 2 in now or at least look into an alternative solution like XBConnect. Affected users should keep an eye on their inbox, Xbox Live GM Marc Whitten has promised “details and opportunities” to come for you as partners in this process — we’re figuring a coupon or two or an extended XBL subscription on the way out the door is the least they can do. For the rest of us already living in the future? The timing of this announcement mere days before the X10 event in San Francisco February 11 can’t be coincidental, we should find out what comes next by then.

Xbox v1 games, systems no longer Live; Microsoft’s pulling the plug April 15 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 05 Feb 2010 04:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Check-In For Charity: Loopt Giving To Haiti If You Visit Chipotle, Panera, Or Whole Foods

We recently wrote about location-based mobile social network Loopt’s push to launch deals for check-ins, and today, the startup is putting use check-ins to philanthropic use. For every check-in at Chipotle, Panera Bread, or Whole Foods around the country, Loopt will donate $1 towards the Haiti earthquake relief. Half of the proceeds from the check-ins will be given to the American Red Cross and the other half will be donated to Doctors Without Borders.

Loopt founder and CEO Sam Altman said the spots were chosen primarily because they are seeing many check-ins at these vendors. It’s truly a generous and worthy initiative and it also provides a noble inventive for users to enable Loopt’s check-in technology, which the startup recently launched.

Text messaging has also played a significant part in fundraising for Haiti earthquake relief; with mobile donations reaching $35 million.

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