ReadWriteWeb

With SXSW well under way in Austin, Texas, the servers behind apps like Beluga, GroupMe, Kik and FastSociety must be working overtime. After all, people like talking to their friends, right?

In this same batch of apps, we've seen another phenomenon, though - apps that make it quicker an easier to talk to people you don't know - and we have one big question: Do people really want to talk to strangers?

As the president of Kauffman Labs, the Kauffman Foundation's program that supports entrepreneurship, Bo Fishback has seen a lot of startups. He's heard a lot of pitches from companies who insist they're "the next big thing." So it would have to be a pretty "big thing" to make Fishback jump from what he admits has been "the greatest job in the world," quit the Kauffman Foundation, and launch a startup of it's own.

But that's what he's doing, effective immediately. And by many accounts, it appears that his new project Zaarly will be - something huge. Built a few weeks ago over the course of the LA Startup Weekend, Zaarly has been in a whirlwind since: winning first prize at the Startup Weekend, getting tweets from celebrities like Levar Burton and Demi Moore promoting his pitch, and now securing $1 million in funding from some big name investors, including Ashton Kutcher and Paul Buchheit.

So what is Zaarly? It's a "proximity-based, real-time, buyer-powered market," says Fishback. But a better explanation might invoke one of Demi Moore's most famous movies, Indecent Proposal, and the notion that everything and everyone has a price. Zaarly's job: facilitate that transaction.

Yesterday location-based social network Foursquare rolled out a substantial upgrade to its platform. Foursquare 3.0 includes improved discovery, recommendations, and rewards for its users.

Those rewards are aimed at loyal Foursquare users who check-in regularly at a particular venue. So to make it easier for the quarter of a million some-odd businesses that have claimed their venues to offer these rewards, Foursquare has just announced an update to its Merchant Platform.

Apps like Plancast and Upcoming are great for finding out about big, pre-planned parties and networking events, but what about the impromptu afternoon game of beach volleyball or post-work happy hour?

Hurricane Party, a startup out of Austin, Texas, is launching just in time for SXSW and hopes that its iPhone app can fill this space and help users to "find, share and create a party on the fly."

AT&T has announced ShopAlerts, a new location-based service featuring ads and coupons from major retailers which are sent directly to subscribers' mobile phones. Initially, the service will be available in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco with sponsors including HP, Kmart, JetBlue, SC Johnson, Kibbles 'n Bits, Nature's Recipe and the National Milk Mustache "got milk?" Campaign.

What makes this new, opt-in service unique is that the alerts are only sent to users' devices when they are near a participating store or brand.

Local discovery app WHERE has partnered with mobile startup Bump for a new local recommendations service called Perfect Places. Bump's technology, which lets developers build apps that share data when users tap their phones phones together, is already available in a number of applications including PayPal, HootSuite and a universal remote control. With the new WHERE integration, mobile users can now bump phones to share local recommendations with each other. The app matches up the relevant similarities in users' interests for its suggestions, and it works even if the two end users are not yet friends in WHERE.

Facebook now publishes its millions of user generated event listings according to the standardized microformats hCalendar and hCard, according to an announcement today by microformats community leader Tantek Çelik. That means that the venues where all these events are being held are now described in a universally standardized way.

If Facebook were to take one more step and allow websites other than the big 3 search engines to index its events listings, then that could tip the scales and move everyone in the industry to understand places around the world in the same simple terms. Joe's Diner in Denver could be understood to be the same place across Facebook, Foursquare and a world of other location-aware applications if only one giant player in location listings had high-quality Place database marked up in the hCard microformat and publicly accessible. Is Facebook going to do that? Probably not.

SimpleGeo provides a platform for developers to build location-aware applications, and it has the distinction of being our Most Promising Company For 2011.

Spatial data is multidimensional, so SimpleGeo had to build its own indexing scheme for Apache Cassandra to handle its data. In this presentation, Mike Malone, an infrastructure engineer at SimpleGeo, explains how and why the company did it.

The open data service Factual has just updated some of its datasets and has also released a new iPhone SDK. The Los Angeles-based startup describes the move as another step towards its goal of "comprehensive, accurate, and accessible local data."

Factual is an open platform for developers and publishers to build apps with its datasets, accessible through its APIs or via a ">download. The downloads, in CSV format, are free for smaller developers as part of this release.

When Facebook Places launched last summer, one of the first questions (other than "how will this impact my privacy?") was "How will this impact other location-based startups?" While Foursquare was gaining tractions and users, some questioned if Facebook's entry into location would serve to squash it.

Foursquare has hardly been squashed. The startup ended 2010 with over 380 million check-ins and now boasts over 6 million users. But a new survey from MerchantCircle suggests that while users may be flocking to Foursquare, businesses' marketing dollars are going elsewhere.