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"An iPhone geolocation app that has been very quiet about its plans to date has been San Francisco based PlacePop.\r\n\r\nPlacePop is emerging out of Ooga Labs - a San Francisco based incubator that is also behind companies like Medpedia, a user generated database of health and medicine information, and Wonderhill, a social gaming company.\r\n\r\nBefore you dismiss PlacePop as just another &amp;quot;me too&amp;quot; check-in app, you may want to check out the people involved in this project.\r\n\r\nOoga Labs was founded by James Currier and Stan Chudnovsky.\u00A0 James and Stan earned a nice exit for early social quiz company Tickle by selling it to Monster.com in 2005, and since then have been active investors and board members in a number of high profile start-ups.\r\n\r\nAnd the PlacePop team is also impressive.\r\n\r\nEx Friendster President Kent Lindstrom has been leading PlacePop since May of 2009.\u00A0 Lindstrom played a big role in orchestrating Friendster's turn around, in the process helping the company raise $30M in funding from likes of Kleiner Perkins and Benchmark Capital.\r\n\r\nThis would appear to be serious team.\r\n\r\nBut let's get back to the app.\r\n\r\nTo date, we've seen most of the check-in iPhone apps fall somewhere along a continuum ranging from pure utility (Yelp), to pure game (MyTown).\u00A0 Foursquare and Gowalla both sit somewhere in between.\r\n\r\nPlacePop has placed itself squarely on the utility end of the continuum.\u00A0 They are aggregating content from Yelp and Twitter, making their service immediately helpful in terms of venue discovery.\u00A0 They are also pretty clear about their intentions to be a &amp;quot;frequent flier program for everything.&amp;quot;\u00A0PlacePop thinks that check-ins should earn you rewards, not badges and points.\r\n\r\nIn talking to PlacePop community manager Julia Graham, it sounds like a lot of market research was conducted to determine their direction.\u00A0 They aren't convinced that adding game elements is a winning strategy, at least in terms of reaching mainstream users.\r\n\r\nIn terms of features, PlacePop isn't bringing much new to the table yet.\u00A0 They do have a nice photo tool that let's you add photos of venues - much like Gowalla's recent addition.\r\n\r\nAnd there are still some glaring omissions, like the ability to find friends using your Facebook or Twitter accounts.\r\n\r\nBut given the team and resources behind this effort, I think PlacePop is worth keeping an eye on.\r\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://thenextweb.com/insider/2010/03/21/placepop-stealthy-frills-social-checkin-app/>