ReadWriteWeb

Yahoo announced last night it has acquired Koprol, an Indonesian mobile location-based service. With Koprol, which launched last year, users are able to see where their friends are and what they're doing in real-time. Like Foursquare here in the U.S., Koprol lets people check in when they arrive at a particular location and then share tips, reviews, photos or other messages with nearby users.

At the recent ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit, I convened a session about emerging mobile applications for sensors and other Internet of Things technologies. It ended up being a lively discussion on the possibilities for new types of mobile apps that will take advantage of sensor and RFID data. The raw notes of the session are here, thanks to Pat Burns. In this post I'll flesh out some of the ideas.

This will be a 2-part post. In Part 1, we'll cover food and supply chain apps, social networking, and retail. In Part 2, we'll look at future apps for environment, buildings, and health.

In preparation for the upcoming ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit, we're outlining the 10 leading trends of the Mobile Web in a 3-part series of posts. In Part 1 we explored 3 important design and development issues for the Mobile Web. Now in Part 2, we look at 4 classes of mobile applications that have become popular in 2010: geo-location, Internet of Things, Augmented Reality, and mobile social networking.

We'll explore these and other trends with you at the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit, a 1-day event we're running on Friday 7 May, in Mountain View, California. That's the day after Web 2.0 Expo (2-6 May), so we hope you'll extend your trip to the West Coast to help us define the future of mobile! To be certain of getting a ticket, we invite you to register now.

Loopt, makers of a popular mobile social networking application of the same name, is introducing a new iPhone application today called Loopt Mix. Where their original app focuses on connecting you with your friends while you're out and about, Loopt Mix is more about introducing you to "the people you wish you knew." In other words, "people" like that attractive person giving you eye from the other end of the bar.

Social web aggregating iPhone app Zensify launched yesterday with a wave of tech blog coverage. Early reviewers were excited not just about the app's ability to display updates from friends on multiple networks in one interface - the big innovation is that Zensify creates a "hot words" tag cloud showing what topics are trending among your friends alone.

Unfortunately Zensify doesn't work as well as we hoped it would. Its problems may be instructive to similar projects elsewhere or they may point to trouble inherent in this kind of social network user experience. Here are three interesting problems we see so far with this new app.

Whenever there is a conference or event, there's a secondary bit of action taking place behind the scenes: the backchannel. Here, the attendees are live blogging, twittering, posting photos, and streaming live video about what they're seeing on stage or in and around the venue. Twitter has always been the microblogging platform of choice in this scenario, but starting today, they just might have new competition from Brightkite, the mobile social networking service that's making a name for itself among the early adopters.