Facebook has been poking around several Austin startup companies lately looking for talent acquisitions, and rumors are swirling that they’ve found a taker in beleaguered Gowalla. The company caused great excitement in the Austin tech community years ago when they relocated from Dallas to Austin, and garnered venture capital from top tier west coast venture and angel investors, spurning offers from locals. But no matter how hard they tried, they could never emerge from the [...]

So you’ve raised your B round, but an IPO isn’t really possible and the bigger fish aren’t yet sniffing around to acquire your company at a price that your venture backers are interested in. How do you sell some private stock to buy that sports car with cash? Welcome to the secondary market. Shares of stock in companies like Facebook and Twitter are changing hands, even though the stock is not publicly traded yet. How [...]

mobileTech Tuesday, by Steve Guengerich As we’ve discussed in this column before, Austin has a very robust mobile scene. But, then so do the Bay Area, New York City, the Boston 128 corridor, and for that matter Houston and Dallas. And, of course, if you start counting non-US domestic hotbeds, you’ve got thriving mobile scenes in Western and Eastern EU countries, China, Japan, India, Korea, Brazil, etc. As Kleiner partner Mary Meeker so nicely summed [...]

By nearly every account, mobile is the hottest area in tech. Looking at the data – from sales growth rates in hardware, led by Apple, to download volumes of software, represented by the ubiquitous app - the numbers are skyrocketing. Anecdotally, the man who coined ‘web 2.0′ for the last trend, Tim O’Reilly, remarked in a recent NPR story “The biggest thing that’s next, that’s on everybody’s mind, is the transition to mobile.” Fortunately, Austin is [...]

Here in Texas, it’s a downright shootout between location-based-networks. SXSW 2010 brought the big guns with contenders like Gowalla, Foursquare, and Plancast. But, the question remains: who is making money, and how?

Welcome to Texas, this is cowboy country and we’re bullish on Gowalla.

Foursquare and Gowalla are at the forefront of the emerging location-based market, but which service will win the space? Carla Thompson puts them both to the test.

Location-aware software is largely just a novelty right now, but over the next year will greatly impact entertainment, news, and even physical goods. Why you should get in now, or get left behind.

Following rumors from Silicon Alley Insider last week, Gowalla officially announced today a funding raise of $8.4 million in venture capital from Greylock Partners, Maples Investments, Shasta Ventures and others. Gowalla is a location-based social networking application for smart phones. Similar to Foursquare, they let you share and discover new locations based on your social networks. Users earn stamps for their digital passports based on the places they’ve visited, which range from Seattle’s Space Needle [...]

The location-based social networking space continues to heat up, and two horses lately seem to be separating from the pack — Foursquare and Austin-based Gowalla (both launched at this year’s SXSW in March).