The Hotlist is a ‘geo-social aggregator’ that tells you ‘what is happening around you at any given point in time’. The service pulls in data from sources including Facebook, Twitter and Yelp. ‘A unified geo-database would simplify things,’ co-founder Chris Mirabile said a day before the launch of Facebook Places.

New York-based personalized recommendation engine SpotOn plans to release its iPhone app next month. SpotOn wants to be for new places to go “what Last.fm and Pandora is for music” according to co-founder Gauri Manglik.

Interactive agency Deep Focus recently launched GEOfocus, a marketing practice built around location-aware platforms. “Foursquare has trouble handling demand from advertisers, because advertisers treat them as a publication,” CEO Ian Schafer says.

Washington-based FortiusOne started as an academic spin-off working mostly for government and non-profits, but public destination site GeoCommons is increasingly used by media outlets like The Huffington Post and The Atlantic.

Founder Sean Gorman sees great opportunities in enterprise applications of location analytics. FortiusOne’s aim since 2005 has been to bridge “the old GIS world with the new world” according to Gorman. “The convergence is now actually happening.”

Ogmento founder Ori Inbar was chair of the Augmented Reality Event in Santa Clara in June and organizes a successful monthly augmented reality meetup in New York. Educating the market can push AR-technology further. “The information is already there,” says Inbar. “Presenting it in a way that is easy to consume is the challenge of application level development.”