While location is in the spotlight these days, most apps and services revolve around geosocial or other mainstream concepts.  A new app launching from Hoovers aims to build on the location-aware mobile aspect when in comes to sales, prospecting and lead-generation in the B2B segment.

The app, dubbed “Near Here,” provides sales and business development professionals access to location-based business information on millions of companies in the United States and Canada in real-time. Easily viewable on a map or in a list, users can refine search results to meet their specific requirements by applying several criteria, including multiple ranges of revenue and number of employees at a particular location, multiple industries or a simple keyword search, and they can save those filters for future searches.  The search area is adjusted by moving the map or changing the search address.

Based on the data provided, users can quickly and easily place a phone call to the company, visit the company’s Web site, get step-by-step driving directions and even find local competitors.  Users also can sort companies in ascending or descending order by annual sales, company name or total employees, and bookmark their favorite locations for future searches and favorite companies.

Within the app, users can retrieve key data points on any business or organization in close proximity to their current location, including annual sales, primary industry, number of employees at any given location, key contacts and titles and much more.  Users can easily get a clear picture of the businesses around them and determine whether or not it’s an attractive lead to pursue.

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I spoke briefly yesterday in a post regarding the emphasis on location apps at SXSWi, and one in particular that has a lot of potential is Brightkite’s “Check.In” multi check-in app for services such as Gowalla, Foursquare, Yelp and others.  TechCrunch’s Jay Donovan had a chance to sit down with Brightkite founders Brady Becker and Martin May to demo the yet-to-be-released app and talk a little bit more about its future plans.

Starting as a pet-project internally at Brightkite, based on frustration in checking-in via multiple services, Check.In was created to solve the growing problem that many face as more and more services integrate check-ins.  While basic in nature, the app allows you to log-in, choose your location or recognize via GPS and use it to check-in to all integrated services.

For the time-being, Gowalla, Foursquare and Brightkite are included, though some mention of Gowalla being removed at launch was made due to the fact that Gowalla has yet to release formal APIs to allow for such integration.  For testing purposes, Brightkite was able to get around the lack of APIs from Gowalla, but has been asked not to include such integration on launch for some reason.

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I’ve always been intrigued with the concept of proximity marketing, but a perceived lack of interest in the U.S has made any news or advancements in the technology all but lost in the shuffle.  To me the concept provides a unique and inexpensive opportunity for marketers, but there has to be underlying factors prohibiting its advancement, but what are they?

With increased interest surrounding mobile marketing, it’s interesting that proximity marketing has been largely looked over, though both concepts are fundamentally different.  While there’s really no definition that exists which separates the two, the easiest way to distinguish proximity marketing from mobile marketing is simply the concept of localized content. Potential advertising audiences must enter a “localized” area such as a grocery store or a shopping center in order to receive the advertisement with proximity marketing, while mobile marketing doesn’t require such an attribute.

Education of marketers in the U.S is one prohibiting factor in my mind, with almost no news coming out regarding the technology, even though numerous companies exist on U.S soil that provide proximity marketing solutions.  Marketers are already bombarded with so-called new-age marketing channels, and adding one more to the mix will confuse the masses even more than they already are.  Still, proximity marketing offers something even mobile marketing in large part can’t provide; being extremely inexpensive and very easy to integrate.

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In case you missed it, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, an architect at Microsoft Live Labs, architect of Seadragon, and the co-creator of Photosynth demoed the truly amazing possibilities of augmented reality when integrated with mapping solutions at last week’s TED2010 conference.

The demo highlighted what’s possible with augmented reality, and what Microsoft is doing to leverage the jaw-dropping technology to bolster its mapping solution.  With augmented reality embedded into Bing maps, you’re left with a Google Street View-like interface that goes well-beyond anything offered today.  Things like the ability to walk indoors, look up at the sky to view astronomically correct data, view live-video of the location you’re looking at in maps, and view user-generated content and images layered directly on top of the mapping image are all possible with Microsoft’s new technology.

Of course, the possibilities when integrated with mobile devices will define mobile advertising, social networking and just about any other segment for a long time to come.  It’s an exciting technology and is becoming closer than ever to becoming a reality- or “augmented” reality if you will.  Hit the read more link to view the video, be prepared to be amazed…

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Today, at day two of MWC in Barcelona, SEVEN announced the general availability of its unique “Ping” mobile push solution for messaging and applications.  Focused on mobile operators and device makers, the solution allows for “push enabled” messaging, social networking and mobile apps on any mobile device- from “super-phones” to feature phones.

Ping is centered in the cloud, keeping all content and data stored away from the device itself, offering significant efficiencies in wireless data synchronization, such as savings in precious battery life, reduction of the cost of service delivery, superior user experience and optimization of data traffic on the network- which in some instances represent the majority of an operator’s traffic.

Put simply, the Ping solution allows operators and their partners to efficiently provide push applications such as email, instant messaging, social networking, and any application that needs to be connected to or exchange data with the cloud, to mass market devices, including lower-end feature phones, smartphones and next-generation “super-phones.”  SEVEN is also opening its platform to partners and customers, enabling them to take full advantage of the SEVEN push and synchronization technology.

“From the get-go, we envisioned a mobile world beyond pure voice and messaging, and hence designed our System SEVEN platform to support all forms of data, not just email,” said Trevor Fiatal, CTO and co-founder of SEVEN.  ”Doing so has given us the scalability to meet global customer needs – whether for traditional messaging such as email or for newer trends such as today’s high-growth social networking applications.  We believe that this foresight and experience in building a push-enabled network that can easily grow as new mobile markets mature has been and will continue to be a key advantage for SEVEN over our competitors.”

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One of the biggest announcements thus far coming out of MWC is that of Adobe, who today will announce intentions to bring its AIR platform to mobile devices- essentially halting the problem of mobile app interoperability once and for all.

With AIR running on mobile devices, Adobe is furthering its plans to allow for a “write-once, deploy-anywhere” solution for both the mobile Web and apps- something plaguing developers faced with creating an app, then porting it to a growing number of devices, OSs and platforms since the beginning.

Adobe is starting things off with a focus on Blackberry and Android devices, allowing developers to create apps that are able to store data locally on the phone, access other data on the phones such as photos, and be distributed as regular apps in the Android and Blackberry app stores.  The same apps created with Flash developer tools will even be exportable as iPhone apps, creating a truly centralized and comprehensive development platform.

Adobe wants developers to create apps using its developer tools and then output them as AIR apps for Android and Blackberry phones, native iPhone apps, or Flash apps on the Web.  The company is trying to create a ubiquitous environment for its Flash technology, and is heavily integrated with the upcoming Flash 10.1 player.  Purposed to be available during the first-half of 2010, the new Flash player will run consistently across both the desktop and many mobile browsers (except the iPhone), negating the need for “Flash Lite.”

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Sony Ericsson, in an attempt to regain lost market share in the ever-competitive smartphone market, had a bevy of announcements in the day leading up to MWC.  Along with the debut of three new devices, the company unveiled a new mobile content platform centered around user-generated content.

As the company puts it, Creations “focuses on facilitating the evolving needs of consumers, content publishers and developers, creating a community and a movement where they come together to personalize, share and continuously evolve and co-create mobile content.  In other words, the company is building on the popularity of the “YouTube generation” to capitalize on user-generated content, getting away from the notion that most mobile content derives from big-name brands and publishers.

The new platform delivers on Sony Ericsson’s newly instituted Co-creation strategy by enabling mobile phone users to create and publish their own content such as video, audio and imaging to be shared, explored and remixed using content-creating mobile applications and tools.  Content will no longer be static as Creations allows content creators to produce content on the move from their mobile phone.

Along with its “Creations” platform, Sony Ericsson also debuted three new devices; the new Vivaz Pro, Xperia X10 mini and Xperia X10 mini pro.  The Vivaz Pro builds off the recently introduced flagship “Vivaz” smartphone the company announced in January, adding a QWERTY keyboard, a new touchscreen and the ability to produce and broadcast HD video.  The Xperia X10 mini, along with its “pro” counterpart, bring smartphone-power in a compact shell, measuring smaller than a credit card.

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