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Back-end geolocation data providers SimpleGeo announced today that it has raised over $8 million in Series A funding. Included among the investors is Redpoint Ventures, First Round Capital and Foundry Group, which like SimpleGeo, is located in Boulder, Colorado. While the news of the funding is certainly interesting, the more fascinating story about SimpleGeo is how the company got to where it is today.

Nokia acquired location-based services company MetaCarta on Friday, a service with two distinct focuses: geosearch and geotagging. With MetaCarta's geosearch technology, the service finds content, data and information about a place and then presents it in a single mapped-based view using any map server, whether one from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, ESRI or another company. The geotagging technology, on the other hand, lets MetaCarta pull geographic references from online content and then allow that information to be used in other applications.

If you believe in matches made in heaven then you will understand why the new partnership between Quova and SimpleGeo is just that.

Developers can now harness the power of Quova's complex IP geolocation technology within SimpleGeo's framework for creating location apps. Quova announced the partnership today at Where 2.0 in San Jose, and said it will broaden its customer base and provide new contexts for its data. In return, SimpleGeo wins by giving developers a more complete solution for geolocation.

Are location-based social networks privacy disasters waiting to happen? Or are the supposed "dangers" simply being overhyped by those without a thorough understanding of what these new networks can and cannot do? Today, these questions are the subject of a serious debate among early adopters - the group of people who are first to sign up for and try out the latest technology innovations, testing everything from iPads to mobile apps.

There are currently a number of location-based social networks clamoring for your attention, including earlier contenders like Loopt and Brightkite as well as the later-to-arrive, game-based networks like Foursquare and Gowalla. Even user review site Yelp is getting in on the action. So is Google. And so is Facebook, apparently.

But is sharing your location with your online "friends" asking for trouble?

It looks like while half the Web will be holding its breath over how Facebook will wield its newly-found patent power, with its patent of the news feed, the other half just found a reason to take a big gulp of air and look around.

At today's Mobile World Congress, augmented reality company Metaio unveiled its Unifeye Mobile SDK and Android demo at Sony Ericcson's Creation Day. The company is offering developers a chance to experiment with feature tracking, 3D animation rendering and real-time interaction. In other words, the world of augmented reality applications is about to heat up.

Less than a decade ago, online dating was by no way considered mainstream. Not only were you judged for putting your profile up on a dating site, but your choice of site between Lavalife, Match and Nerve Singles told others whether you were there to date, get married or make friends with benefits. Today, location-based dating sites are quickly gaining ground. With the increasing mainstream acceptance of services like Foursquare and Gowalla, new opportunities within the dating space have emerged. Forget badges and points, geo-locational apps already have the power to promise you love.

Google Buzz could quickly become the most popular location-based service on the Internet. Not only does Buzz integrate itself into Gmail, which will give it a large mainstream user base, but Buzz also puts geolocation front and center on its mobile sites. In addition, the new Buzz layer in the Google Maps mobile interface makes it incredibly easy to find geotagged Buzz messages around you.

Foursquare has come out strong in recent weeks with partnership deals that look to put it at the top of the location-based app game. Last week, it announced a partnership with Bravo, the style and fashion-centric television network, and today it has come out with a partnership with Zagat, the restaurant guide, and the New York Times.

As we wrote last week, Foursquare is competing in an increasingly crowded space. These partnerships may help it attract a whole new audience and remain competitive against other services like Yelp that are just joining in the location-based arena.

Apple just received a very interesting patent for a method of sharing location data during a phone call. Assuming that Apple implements this idea in its phones, you could soon press a button during a phone call on your iPhone and request location data