Loopt

Well, this is an odd one.

Green Dot, a company that provides prepaid debit cards to consumers, has acquired mobile location-based application developer Loopt for $43.4 million, the companies announced today. The deal is an all-cash transaction, and will include Green Dot setting aside $9.8 million as a "retention pool" to ensure key Loopt employees stay put.

Though Green Dot's Loopt acquisition might not make sense at first glance, considering how different the companies are, it appears Green Dot has bought the firm for its mobile-development expertise. In a statement celebrating the acquisition, Loopt co-founder … Read more

Impulse buyers, beware. Loopt is jumping on the deal-a-day bandwagon, pushing alerts for deeply discounted goods and services in its location-aware social-networking app for iPhone (iOS) and Android.

Loopt's new "Reward Alerts" program, announced today in time for next week's South By Southwest technology and music conference, will push notifications for instantly redeemable deals.

However, to keep its daily deal from being a dime a dozen, Loopt will push a few high-value deals at various times throughout the day. Deals are based on your location, possibly down to the city block if the provider wants, and … Read more

Facebook just launched a new suite of features for Facebook Places that might be the beginning of the end for Web privacy as we know it. Luckily Natali Del Conte is around to calm us down and explain what's really going on with the new location-based deals.

Facebook Places is a service that lets users share their location directly on their mobile phones, but the latest product is called Deals, and it allows businesses to advertise to target customers by offering a special discount for those who "check in" at a location.

Once users activate it, Facebook will share the deal on their walls so others can cash in as well, and business can even offer "loyalty" discounts for members that return to a venue. The FourSquare and Loopt offices must be getting pretty hot right now.

If mobile tracking weren't enough, soon you won't even be able to watch a movie without being watched yourself! In an effort to combat Web piracy, some movie theaters are installing video cameras in front of the movie screens, designed to also monitor crowd reactions to trailers for market research on what audiences prefer to watch.

Even worse, the same company, Aralia Systems, is also planning to roll out infrared scanning systems at the ticket-purchasing stations that scan for recording devices and will sound an alarm to alert management if an illegal instrument is detected. It sounds similar to the TSA's "enhanced" security screenings we've been hearing about recently!

Internet "Captchas" have been around for a while--they're tests placed on some Web sites to determine whether the user is human, and they usually come in the form of a randomly generated word or phrase that you have to copy into a field to gain access.

They're only slightly irritating and require little participation to enter, but a software firm called NuCaptcha is hoping that video advertisement captchas will be the online ads of the future.

Instead of traditional squiggly words, the new system forces users to watch a video advertisement with a short message scrolling across it. After it's done, it'll ask you to identify and retype a part of the message to continue toward your destination, and although it sounds like an annoying process, companies like EA, Wrigley, and Disney have already signed up with hopes that people will actually pay attention to the ads instead of just clicking through. Soon we'll be reminiscing about a time when all you needed was a pop-up blocker to surf under the radar!

Thanks to Natali Del Conte for joining us on this rainy Thursday, and be sure to check us out tomorrow morning with Steve Guttenberg, aka The Audiophiliac!

Knowing where your friends are, and seeing their location are two very different things. Loopt's latest iPhone update, and soon-to-be Android update, illustrates this point nicely.

Today the iPhone version of the app is getting an update to finally include integration with Facebook's Places feature, which was rolled out to users in late August. Now Loopt users can check in to both networks at once, and see where friends are from both places on a single map.

Of course Loopt is not the first iOS app to map out Facebook friends (Sobees got there last month), but it'… Read more

Though it was announced way back in February at Mobile World Congress, the LG GT540 has finally made its way to North America. Canada's Rogers Wireless is now offering the entry-level, Android 1.6-powered device for as little $30 Canadian (about $28 U.S.) with a three-year service agreement. The LG phone, released as the "Loop," features a 3-inch touch screen, a 3-megapixel camera, and a 2GB microSD memory card. Other details include support for Wi-Fi, GPS, and memory expandability up to 32GB.

Though the phone is being released with a rather antiquated version of Android, LG … Read more

The long-rumored geolocation "check-in" feature at Facebook is slated to debut within weeks, multiple sources familiar with the matter told CNET.

It's going to take the form of an application programming interface (API) for third-party companies on the Facebook developer platform, integrating existing "check-in" start-ups more deeply into the massive social-networking service and in turn permitting location-aware data to become a part of existing platform applications.

Facebook declined to provide much detail. "We are working on location features and product integrations, which we'll be launching in the coming months, and we'll share … Read more

Users of location-based social network Loopt who are looking for discounts or other deals in their neighborhood now have an easier way to find them.

The service is expected to launch a new feature on Friday for its Looptstar application, which differs from Loopt's core app in that it's focused on finding nearby deals. The update takes the idea of showing you what deals are in your immediate vicinity and puts them into one large directory that users can browse without actually having to be at those places.

"Users had been asking us to see all the … Read more

Google co-founder Sergey Brin adores the company's social network called Google Buzz. We know this because an engineer working five feet from Brin used Google Buzz to say so.

"I just finished eating dinner with Sergey and four other Buzz engineers in one of Google's cafes," engineer John Costigan wrote a day after the Twitter-and-Facebook-esque service was announced. "He was particularly impressed with the smooth launch and the great media response it generated."

You might call Brin's enthusiasm premature, especially since privacy criticisms prompted Google to make a series of quick changes a … Read more

"We're going to be giving away, literally, hundreds of tacos," Josh Williams, founder of mobile networking start-up Gowalla, said to CNET in an interview last week about his company's plans for the annual South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSWi), which runs March 12-16 in Austin, Texas.

"We're bringing, like, playground-style balls and chalk," said Dennis Crowley, the co-founder of Gowalla rival Foursquare. "You'll be able to win prizes at ad-hoc foursquare games that you see around the convention center."

Eighteen months ago, neither Gowalla nor Foursquare existed. But their similar &… Read more