Grafetee Shoots Location Information From The Web To Your Phone

    Helsinki-based Grafetee is looking to become your home for location-based information. They’re positioning themselves as both a billboard for posts of location-based information, and as well as an innovative service that sends things from the web to a location-based feed on your phone. Grafetee just soft-launched last week, and is available for iOS and Android.

    Just opening up the Grafetee app doesn’t give you a complete picture of where the company is going. The app is currently like a collection of location-based feeds; opening it up gives you a chat function, where anyone can post pictures or updates based on location.

    The service also allows you to subscribe to public location-based feeds, such as Wikipedia’s geo-tagged data, Foursquare tips, Helsinki transportation stops, and I hear Yelp reviews will be added later this week. Users can also post and share their own public and private feeds, allowing people to build all sorts of lists, similar to Foursquare lists.

    This adds a good amount of content into the system, but the real innovation is in Grafetee’s patent pending solution to send locations from the web to your phone with one click, using a Grafetee button.

    For example, A real-estate company could add a “add to Grafetee” button on their housing listings, allowing you to send the location information straight to your phone.

    This service also supports the time element as well, making this a much better solution for than writing down the address and plugging the date and time of open houses into your calendar. A simple button, like a Facebook “like” button, sends all the relevant information to your phone.

    Grafetee also has implemented a bookmarkelet for your browser which essentially opens a pop-down form. There you can type in and send location and time information to your phone while copying information from websites that do not have a Grafetee button.

    Right now Juha Huttunen says that they’re working with “a number of interesting partners” in the real estate, governmental, and commercial sectors in Finland that have location-based content their users would like to bookmark. The companies would then implement the Grafetee button on their websites, and based on the successful use cases, Grafetee plans to then take the service internationally.

    “There are pretty interesting things we really didn’t think about when we were starting this, but it seems like it fits to quite many purposes,” says Huttunen.

    Taking it a step past Foursquare, the long-term vision for Grafetee is to have software that knows where you are, where you are going, and what you like. Grafetee then uses that data to serve you with information on happenings, events, or places, that you walk by. Huttunen says that that’s not something easy to implement at first, so they hope to gather users using this solution then take it towards that vision.