LA Tech Community Growing

Many of you in the Los Angeles area are aware that the YellowBot team frequents many of the tech events in this area such as Lunch 2.0 (courtesy of Andrew Warner and Mixergy) and Twiistup (courtesy of Mike Macadaan). We're happy to be part of this community and look forward to doing more to support it.

So, we were glad to see Matt Marshall of VentureBeat reporting on the growth of VC investments and that LA was in the top 3.

The fastest growing major centers of U.S. venture capital investment are Seattle, Los Angeles, and the Washington DC metro area, all quietly growing their venture base over the last ten years, according to the National Venture Capital Association.

Thos of you interested in meeting us in person in the LA area, you'll be able to find us at most Lunch 2.0 or Twiistup events. We are also going to be at the TechCrunch/PopSugar event being held at The Vanguard on April 10 and MashMeet LA being held at SEVEN on March 29. See you there!

Fire Eagle Launches

Yahoo's Fire Eagle was launched today at O'Reilly's ETech conference (finally).

Users can go there and share their current location or use one of the applications that uses Fire Eagle to update their location as well.

Application developers can set or get a user's location. Local search sites such as YellowBot will be able to access this info and share it with other applications that utilize Fire Eagle to create a better user experience. Users must authorize applications to be able to access this info (for those of you concerned about how this feature works).

Users go to the Fire Eagle site to update their info (coming soon are other ways to update including SMS, Nokia ZoneTags, a mobile version of the site, and a Facebook app). Users will also manage access to their information on the Fire Eagle site.

What does this mean for local sites? At the very least, they make utilizing their sites easier by pre-populating the geography for a user. Most sites have both a location and a search term for finding businesses. Many UI people will be glad if they can simplify utilizing their sites by eliminating one of these form elements. Mobile sites will be able to provide accurate results about all sorts of information...how close your friends are, which restaurants around you are rated the best or have a special deal, etc.

The biggest hurdle, however, will be adoption of Fire Eagle. How many people will actually sign up and update it? That may really depend on which tools ultimately decide to utilize it. Twitter? Facebook? MySpace? All of them? Maybe a combination of smaller sites not concerned about utilizing a Yahoo service since they don't directly compete with them. What will it take? This application has plenty of potential but I'd like to see some wide adoption.

Their application gallery says:

There are many apps under development at the moment and they will be released soon, so please check back here often to great sites and apps from our worldwide developer community...

I will definitely be checking back and we at YellowBot will be evaluating the possibilities as well!