With a fresh infusion of $4 million from Comcast Interactive Capital, which it raised recently in a series B financing (with previous investor BlueRun also pitching in), hyperlocal places database Fwix is pushing out a major upgrade to its developer API today. Fwix is creating an open database of places in partnership with Factual . Developers will be able to pull data about millions of places into their own apps, and edit the places as well by adding their own data or content.

Fwix started focusing on becoming more of a places database last year, but its API was clunky. Nevertheless, it served 20 million API calls in March, up from 11 million in February. Now with the new developer API, it will be easier to associate places with content such as news articles, Tweets, and check-ins. The API also includes an advertising layer which plugs into various mobile ad networks and geo-specific offers, including ones from Groupon, LivingSocial, YellowPages.com, and Gilt City.

Other efforts to create an open places database exist. What is unique about Fwix’s places database is that it can append location-specific content to a place such as news articles, Tweets, and photos. The Fwix database is set up to make it easy for developers to mix and match places with content and bring both into their apps. They can filter places by popularity (measured by check-ins) or other ways, and write back into the database with data generated by their users.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Fwix is rolling out new versions of its iPhone and Android apps, which adds social geotagging to its hyperlocal places directory. As we’ve reported last Fall, Fwix originally launched as a hyperlocal news aggregator but has more recently been transitioning to a hyperlocal places directory, sort of a cross between AOL’s Patch and Google Places.

For neighborhoods, businesses and points of interest, Fwix It culls local data from 30,000 blogs and news feeds; status updates from Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, Google Buzz, and BrightKite; geo-tagged photos from Flickr, Smugmug, and Picassa; local deals from Groupon, LivingSocial, and MobileSpinach; events from Eventbrite, Eventful, Zvents, Stubhub, Ticketmaster, reviews from Yelp, Citysearch, OpenTable, Yahoo! Local, and Zagat; and government data from SpotCrime, FixMyStreet, and SeeClickFix.

Fwix is launching new iPhone and Android apps that include the new places functionality to give users contextual information around businesses and neighborhoods. So Fwix’s technology will aggregate all the relevant social information around you can look for information around destination and places on the fly. Fwix says it will be geotagging check-ins, geotagged Tweets, reviews, events and local news and blog posts.

This is all part of Fwix’s evolution as a local data platform that is organizing the world’s information by location. A number of media publishers building on top of the company’s API including NBC, AT&T Interactive, New York Times Company, Viacom (BET.com), and others. By indexing the Web by location, Fwix is operating in 7 countries; 61,000 cities; and defined down to 87,000 neighborhoods in the US alone. Fwix says that its content and platform reaches more than 30 million uniques per month.

Hyperlocal news is consolidating with acquisitions, and Fwix has an compelling take on the sector by offering its data as a platform. It should be interesting to see if the startup ends up getting swallowed by a big media company in the coming year.

[crunchbase url="http://www.crunchbase.com/company/fwix" name="Fwix"]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Fwix is rolling out new versions of its iPhone and Android apps, which adds social geotagging to its hyperlocal places directory. As we’ve reported last Fall, Fwix originally launched as a hyperlocal news aggregator but has more recently been transitioning to a hyperlocal places directory, sort of a cross between AOL’s Patch and Google Places.

For neighborhoods, businesses and points of interest, Fwix It culls local data from 30,000 blogs and news feeds; status updates from Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, Google Buzz, and BrightKite; geo-tagged photos from Flickr, Smugmug, and Picassa; local deals from Groupon, LivingSocial, and MobileSpinach; events from Eventbrite, Eventful, Zvents, Stubhub, Ticketmaster, reviews from Yelp, Citysearch, OpenTable, Yahoo! Local, and Zagat; and government data from SpotCrime, FixMyStreet, and SeeClickFix.

Fwix is launching new iPhone and Android apps that include the new places functionality to give users contextual information around businesses and neighborhoods. So Fwix’s technology will aggregate all the relevant social information around you can look for information around destination and places on the fly. Fwix says it will be geotagging check-ins, geotagged Tweets, reviews, events and local news and blog posts.

This is all part of Fwix’s evolution as a local data platform that is organizing the world’s information by location. A number of media publishers building on top of the company’s API including NBC, AT&T Interactive, New York Times Company, Viacom (BET.com), and others. By indexing the Web by location, Fwix is operating in 7 countries; 61,000 cities; and defined down to 87,000 neighborhoods in the US alone. Fwix says that its content and platform reaches more than 30 million uniques per month.

Hyperlocal news is consolidating with acquisitions, and Fwix has an compelling take on the sector by offering its data as a platform. It should be interesting to see if the startup ends up getting swallowed by a big media company in the coming year.

[crunchbase url="http://www.crunchbase.com/company/fwix" name="Fwix"]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Fwix is rolling out new versions of its iPhone and Android apps, which adds social geotagging to its hyperlocal places directory. As we’ve reported last Fall, Fwix originally launched as a hyperlocal news aggregator but has more recently been transitioning to a hyperlocal places directory, sort of a cross between AOL’s Patch and Google Places.

For neighborhoods, businesses and points of interest, Fwix It culls local data from 30,000 blogs and news feeds; status updates from Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, Google Buzz, and BrightKite; geo-tagged photos from Flickr, Smugmug, and Picassa; local deals from Groupon, LivingSocial, and MobileSpinach; events from Eventbrite, Eventful, Zvents, Stubhub, Ticketmaster, reviews from Yelp, Citysearch, OpenTable, Yahoo! Local, and Zagat; and government data from SpotCrime, FixMyStreet, and SeeClickFix.

Fwix is launching new iPhone and Android apps that include the new places functionality to give users contextual information around businesses and neighborhoods. So Fwix’s technology will aggregate all the relevant social information around you can look for information around destination and places on the fly. Fwix says it will be geotagging check-ins, geotagged Tweets, reviews, events and local news and blog posts.

This is all part of Fwix’s evolution as a local data platform that is organizing the world’s information by location. A number of media publishers building on top of the company’s API including NBC, AT&T Interactive, New York Times Company, Viacom (BET.com), and others. By indexing the Web by location, Fwix is operating in 7 countries; 61,000 cities; and defined down to 87,000 neighborhoods in the US alone. Fwix says that its content and platform reaches more than 30 million uniques per month.

Hyperlocal news is consolidating with acquisitions, and Fwix has an compelling take on the sector by offering its data as a platform. It should be interesting to see if the startup ends up getting swallowed by a big media company in the coming year.

[crunchbase url="http://www.crunchbase.com/company/fwix" name="Fwix"]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

For the past two years, Fwix has been building a hyperlocal news site for cities and neighborhoods around the country in a very automated fashion. Its homepage for every city has been three columns filled with recent news and blog headlines, along with other local data like weather (see second screenshot below). Today, it is scrapping that approach to become more of a hyperlocal places directory.

“We are automating Patch and building richer places pages and city pages,” says CEO Darian Shirazi. With everyone on the Web crazy for Geo and trying to tap into local commerce, places directories are becoming more valuable. (They are also better for SEO). Whereas AOL’s Patch is building out a directory of places in 500 small towns by hand, Fwix is creating an automated directory filled with maps, news feeds, events, photos, reviews, Tweets, status updates, and check-ins.

In a sense, Fwix is really a cross between AOL’s Patch and Google Places, which is also created by automatically indexing of parts of the Web. Fwix can create a places page for 50,000 neighborhoods and 15 million businesses and points of interest. It culls local data from 30,000 blogs and news feeds; status updates from Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, Google Buzz, and BrightKite (but not Facebook); geo-tagged photos from Flickr, Smugmug, and Picassa; local deals from Groupon, LivingSocial, and MobileSpinach; evets from Eventbrite, Eventful, Zvents, Stubhub, Ticketmaster, and Upcoming; reviews from Yelp, Citysearch, OpenTable, Yahoo! Local, and Zagat; and government data from SpotCrime, FixMyStreet, and SeeClickFix.

The layout of each page is now centered around a map with dots linking to recent stories, check-ins, Tweets or what have you. In the middle column there is a stream of recent headlines, geotagged photos, events, and reviews (most of which are linked to the dots on the map). Below the map are hot places where a lot of check-ins, news ,a nd Tweets have been occurring lately.

When you are looking at a city level view, the left hand navigation bar lets you zoom into specific neighborhoods. Each business or place also has its own custom page. Fwix also picks up trending keywords from local news feeds and Twetets.

Most of the individual elements which go into Fwix’s new places directory are available through its API, although the completed directory is not. As I’ve argued before, it is time for an open places directory so that companies can stop duplicating efforts contribute to one big places directory that keeps getting better and better for everyone. The problem is that a lot of licensed business directory data is mixed in with the open stuff, but we’ll get there some day.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Fwix, a news site that offers a stream of hyperlocal, realtime news by location, is launching a new portal today that aims to give anyone a real time view of what’s happening in a location. You can access the new search portal here.

Fwix Local Trend Search allows users to search for anything that is happening at any geo-point. The search feature rounds up news, events, government data, business reviews, check-ins from Foursquare or Gowalla and more on a map of a given area. You can expand the sphere of location to show coverage from a greater area or a more localized location. For example, you could see all of the hyperlocal news from the city of San Francisco, but can then pinpoint the Mission neighborhood and see all of the most recent news relating to that given area.

One question I had for Fwix’s CEO and founder Darian Shirazi was how the site determine an article’s “location.” Dhirazi tells me that Fwix’s proprietary technology analyzes and indexes nearly 40 million pieces of content to determine and scan for any reference to location within the text of a document. So if a restaurant review refers to an establishment in the Financial District of San Francisco, the content will be geolocated to that area. The site will also serve hyperlocal, targeted ads on top of search results.

Of course, with the introduction of a news search portal, Fwix now competes with Google News. But Shirazi thinks there can be mutiple players in this space, especially considering Fwix’s emphasis on hyperlocal news. And Fwiz already has a number of well-known media partners on board to integrate the technology, says Shirazi (the partners will be announced in a few months). Fwix just inked a deal with The New York Times Company to deliver local and hyperlocal content across the publisher’s properties.

Fwix, which also recently launched an iPad app, is getting into the geolocation game, adding geo-tagged status updates (from Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, and Brightkite), geo-photos (from Flickr, yfrog, Smugmug, and Twitpic), local events (from Eventbrite, Eventful, Upcoming, and Zvents), nearby reviews and restaurants (from Yelp and Citysearch), concerts (Songkick), local crime and government data, weather, listings (Oodle, Trulia), and deals from local merchants (Groupon, Town Hog, and Living Social) to its feeds. Clearly, Fwix wants to be a destination that you go to not only for news, but for all contextual information around a given locality. The new search portal makes it much easier for consumers to sort through this flux of information.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Up until now, fwix has stuck to indexing and serving up hyperlocal news from neighborhood blogs and news sites. Its main competitor in that respect is Outside.in. But fwix is moving beyond local news to create a broader geo index via publisher widgets and its API.

In addition to its existing local news API (which is already being tested by the New York Times Co. and the UPI), fwix is adding geo-tagged status updates (from Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, and Brightkite), geo-photos (from Flickr, yfrog, Smugmug, and Twitpic), local events (from Eventbrite, Eventful, Upcoming, and Zvents), nearby reviews and restaurants (from Yelp and Citysearch), concerts (Songkick), local crime and government data, weather, listings (Oodle, Trulia), and deals from local merchants (Groupon, Town Hog, and Living Social). A little map pops down you tell you where these places are.

Publishers and sites can pick and choose whatever data they want and create widgets with a customized local feed they can place in a sidebar. These could include Tweets about about the publisher’s business, Flickr photos, check-ins, or Yelp reviews. Widget publishers can also opt to include ads in the widgets targeted to the same location and content on their sites and split the revenues with fwix. Affiliate links to group buying deals is another source of revenue.

“What we are building is this massive geo index,’ says CEO Darian Shiraz. Developers can use the API to pull in localized status updates, photos, and more. Publishers can create their own widget from any of the given geo streams. Mobile apps can also use the data. Fwix is at first exposing all of this new data only through its widgets and APIs. Eventually, fwix will roll it out on its own site as well.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch