gowalla

Before Facebook goes public next year, it wants to know a bit more about what you do when you're out in public. The social networking giant is acquiring geo-social app startup Gowalla.

With 20,000 attendees and corporate outposts by the score, this year's South by Southwest Interactive has a carnival-like atmosphere. From its origin as a sort of spring break for nerds, the event has grown into something more like Disneyland for adults.

What's to look forward to in tech for 2011? Here are a few: Consolidation in enterprise computing, a check-in shakeout (Foursquare's Dennis Crowley pictured) and a surge in crowd-sourcing businesses.

Consumers love to save on everyday purchases and in 2010, stores and technology combined to offer a new way to do that in the form of location-based discounts, which reward shoppers for coming into a store. The use of location-based rewards is still pretty new, but according to Sports Authority,...

Check-in service Gowalla was always prettier than mobile social network leader FourSquare, but it still could never catch up with its rival. Its new version, Gowalla 3, could change that: It allows users to easily check in on multiple social networks and track friends across them. Goodbye, check-in fatigue; hello competition.

To get me and the masses of Americans to check in more often, I think Gowalla, like Foursquare, will have to find a better way to show me the do-re-mi.

Today Facebook launched Deals for Places, an add-on to Facebook Places which brings discounts and deals to Facebook users at businesses large and small. The Facebook Deals will be rolling out to users over the next few days and will be delivering buy-one get-one free deals at restaurants, cheap...

Check-in phenom Foursquare just passed 3 million users, a milestone that cements its growing lead in mobile social networking. But how did it outrace competitor Gowalla, which was born at the same time and with arguably better technology? By having the right real world social networks, of course.

Location-based services have seen rapid growth, with Foursquare in the lead. Facebook, wanting a piece of the action, has bought NextStop. The social travel recommendation site's location-based technology and engineering talent will be valuable to Facebook.

The idea may seem somewhat silly, but location-based services, such as Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt and others, are likely to become an enormous market. And investors are racing to get a piece of the action, which will escalate valuations.