Our CEO was recently quoted in New Media Knowledge, a learning and business information resource for digital interactive media in the UK, leading a discussion on the effect of Facebook Places on the LBS industry. Here is a brief snapshot of his thoughts:

… CEO of location-based social network Geomium, believes that Facebook’s entry into the location-based network scene will help open up the market, which is still in its infancy.
“The future is very bright for new entrants into the market that can deliver a strong and useful location-based services (LBS) proposition that will help make the everyday lives of people better,” he said. “It will be much easier to create a new community based around the full potential of LBS rather than try to convert an existing community, who signed up to a service for a different product.”

Read the full article at NMK.

If you're in London tonight stop by at the Hacker News London meetup and we'll buy you a beer! All we ask is that you check out the site, and give us some feedback. Full details below:

The third Hacker News London meetup shall be this Thursday from 18:00 at our usual venue The Waterpoet, 9-11 Folgate St, London E1 6BX.

Geomium, the next-gen geosocial application, as recently featured in The Next Web will be sponsoring the event. Ben Dowling, CTO/Co-founder of Geomium and HN London co-organiser, will be giving a short presentation introducing Geomium and then will let everyone have a play. If you would like to request a beta invite in advance you can request one at http://geomium.com or email Ben [@] geomium [dot] com.

We recently added full support for fire eagle to Geomium, which has got the guys at Yahoo! excited. They like Geomium so much they've added us to the fire eagle staff pics and listed us as a cool app on the application gallery homepage. Thanks!

If you're already a fire eagle user then you just need to go to your profile settings page to enable it, and then not only will your Geomium location be automatically set to your current fire eagle location, but if you change your location with Geomium we'll update fire eagle for you too.

If you're not yet a fire eagle user you might want to check it out. Our integration means you can use one of the many existing mobile apps to set your Geomium location from your phone. Of course, you won't have long to wait until our official iPhone application is out (more on that soon)!

You can see more details on our application gallery listing.

Last Thursday saw Geomium come in third place out of more than 40 of the top startups from all over Europe at the TechCrunch Europe Summer Pitch Battle. It was a fantastic event, hosted at London's new TechHub venue.

Around 200 people attended, including people from all over the UK, France, Italy, Spain and Ireland. A whole range of cool startups pitched for sixty seconds, sans slides. Eileen Burbidge has a great summary of all of the pitches. Unfortunately the pitches weren't recorded but we were able to snap some photos below. Here is a shot of Ben unveiling our new tag line: Live Local. Live Social. Expect to see it on the homepage soon!

Once everyone had given their one minute pitches the judges went away to decide who to put through to the next round, which allowed some more time for networking and drinks. After a short while the judges came back and announced eight startups that would make it to the final to the final round, for a three minute pitch with slides. The finalists were Geomium, CalaBoard, Crowdscanner, Duedil, MindQuilt, Me-stars, OneLeep, and Gourmet Origins (very good food, check it out).

Our CEO, Michael took to the stage in this round, giving an exciting talk on Geomium, and handling some questions from the judges about the business model and potential revenue streams.

When all eight startups had pitched the judges went off again, and when they returned announced that Geomium had taken third place. A great result! Second place went to Duedil who pitched a personal feedback application, with first place going to CalaBoard who presented some very cool augmented reality video conferencing software. It was a tough battle. Congratulations guys (and girls)!

Follow up from the event has been great, with Geomium getting mentions is both TechCrunch Europe and The Next Web. All in all it was a fantastic event. A big thank you to Mike Butcher and Elizabeth Varley for hosting it, and to the panel of judges: Katy Turner and Ben Tompkins of Eden Ventures; Eileen Burbidge of White Bear Yard; Wendy Tan White of Moonfruit and Paul Jozefak of Neuhaus Partners.

Check out our pictures from the event including shots of all of the final finalists pitching. Anyone with Flickr, please feel free to tag yourself or add comments.

About Geomium:

Geomium is a social community that allows you to see what's happening around you, make social plans, see what your friends are up to, meet new people and hook up in real life.

Share and experience what everyone is up to and what's happening around you. Geomium is about having a greater awareness of your area. See the actual location of your friends and other people near you and see what they're doing. Discover what is happening in your vicinity and plan where to go out to and with whom. Find the bars and restaurants near you, with real time reviews and check out all of the hot events going on around you.

Geomium enhances local communication and interaction. Instead of sitting at home on existing social networks all day, why not go out and do something fun. Check out the hot band that is playing at the dive bar on the corner, grab some food at new restaurant that just opened in your neighborhood or meet that cute person down the street.

Geomium. Live local. Live social.

Can't wait to show you the iPhone and Android versions of Geomium. Just like the website the mobile apps will allow you to know "what's happening around you," see who is near you, and communicate and interact in REAL LIFE. Having the power of Geomium on your mobile device allows you to do all of this while your out and about, making it easier and better than ever!

We've been making great progress on the website over the last few months, and we'll shortly be sending out a new batch of beta invite codes. If you haven't yet requested one then now is definitely the time to do it: Request a private beta invite now and be one of the first to try Geomium!

Check back soon for screenshots and further details on the mobile apps.

Michael Ferguson, Geomium CEO, is attending the Location Business Summit in Amsterdam 28th-29th April. See the official website for more details about the conference. If you're in the area be sure to say hi!

During this private beta phased Geomium is still very much under active development. We're constantly rolling out new features, changes and improvements. In the past few weeks we've implemented some fairly significant changes, which are described below.

Events

Geomium now supports events, in addition to restaurants bars and people. After automatically detecting your location, or if you chose to manually set it, we'll show you what upcoming events are going on around you. For each of the events you can view details information about the event and the venue.

Comments

Users can now comment on other users shouts, enabling more interaction.

Additional Shout Page Options

Logged in users are now presented with a menu on the shout page, which allows them to view all shouts, shouts that are near their current location, their friends shouts, or their own shouts.

Stay tuned...

These are just the start of the features and improvements that we've got planned for Geomium, it's still very early days! We'd love to get your feedback though, so please get in touch via the contact page, or get in touch via twitter.

The Geomium founders will be attending the MiniBar Mobile event in Shoreditch tonight. If you're going to be there then say "Hi" to Ben and Michael, and we can have a chat about the future of location based services!

As previously posted Geomium attended the WhereCampEU un-conference in London. It was a great event with some really interesting talks and discussions.

The slides for our presentation are below. The talk was about the explosion of geodata, where it's all coming from, and interesting uses we can make of this data, which is something we're working on at Geomium!

The 2 day WhereCampEU event starts today, and Geomium will be there! Today the event is at WallaceSpace, 22 Duke’s Road, London, WC1H 9PN, and tomorrow it'll be held at The Guardian's offices at Kings Place, 90 York Way, London, N1 9AG. If you're going to be there come and say hi.

Last night Geomium presented at the Mashup* LOCATION event, hosted at LBi on Brick Lane.

Speakers at the event included Gary Gale, Director of Engineering for Yahoo! Geo Technologies, Yahoo! and Jon Fisher from Vodafone Internet Services.

It was a great evening, and photos of the event are up on Flickr. You can see some photos of the Geomium presentation below:

Michael Ferguson will be discussing Geomium and the future of location based communication to the Executive MBA class at the University of Oxford, Said Business School on February 23.

Geomium featured in microslot at OGN16. Michael Ferguson, CEO of Geomium, will be giving the crowd a teaser of what's to come with Geomium on February 17th. For more details see the Oxford Geek Nights site.

If you're a private beta user who uses Facebook Connect you can now have all of your Shouts sent directly to Facebook, so even more of your friends will know what you're up to. Don't forget you can invite your Facebook friends to Geomium too, with a Private Beta Invite.

Private beta users can now invite their friends to Geomium. Invites can be sent via email, or directly to Facebook. Your friends can only sign up if you invite them!

Geomium launched its private beta today. A select few individuals will be given access to the Geomium website to test out the features and provide feedback.

We'll be allowing more and more people access to the private beta over time. If you'd like access then you can request an invite.