HipGeo Releases Ultimate Social Travel Blogging App for iPhone

FULLERTON, CA and LAS VEGAS, NV--(Marketwire - Jan 10, 2012) - HipGeo (www.hipgeo.com), a Los Angeles-based developer of a location-aware platform that records and displays the places users go and how they get there, today announced a complete redesign releasing a travel-focused app for the iPhone that provides the most complete interface on the market for users to track, document and share their travels. The free HipGeo, which is available at http://bit.ly/oQkCRd is designed to let mobile phone users post text, places, and photos which are recorded, organized and displayed around a user's travels or places graph.

HipGeo's Chief Product Guy, Rich Rygg says, "Our new update adds visual, location-based discovery and open social features. We're giving users the easiest set of tools to record a vacation, trip or event, instantly share with family, friends and the world, or later edit and post at their leisure. After we first launched HipGeo Trips, which allowed users to create animated slide shows of their activities, they requested more of a blog-like display to share their travels or trip journals, so we responded with this natural redesign. Traveling users can now post text, photos, and places of their experiences, combining interest and social graphs with a places graph. If Tumblr and Foursquare had a baby, it would look like the new HipGeo."

The specific "blogging-friendly" updates to the app include:

• A completely new blogging format with enhanced photo and map displays.
  
  
• Crowd sourced "place blogs."
  
  
• A fresher approach for users to consume all the travel content publicly uploaded to HipGeo, including content tagged as "nearby," "featured" and "interesting."
  
  
• Easier-to-use options for following other members of the HipGeo community, including trips in progress.
  
  
• New on-the-fly editing, sharing and privacy controls.
  
  
• Photo and location caching to record posts with your phone that are uploaded when user returns to higher signal or wifi areas.
  
  
• More effective passive "always-on" tracking, easily turned on and off by the user, which can work in the background even without a cellular signal.

"The HipGeo platform allows us to quickly develop and release apps which use GPS data to deliver location and travel information. Our technology makes quick modifications rather straightforward allowing us to quickly adapt to both user and developer requests, such as our latest blog like format. You'll see more and more great features at an accelerated pace in future releases. Our API is also publicly available to developers to add a WHERE to their WHEN and we're excited to see how they add on to our platform," says CEO Scott Daniel.

HipGeo launched its travel-tracking app in September 2011. Users can download HipGeo from the Apple App Store at http://bit.ly/oQkCRd and then record and share their trips through Facebook, Twitter, email, text or with an embedded HipGeo player on their blogs or web sites. Viewers of these trips can then see animated maps of the user's travels as well as slide shows of photos organized by location. Travelers can also share information such as locations, routes, places, comments, and photos.

About HipGeo

HipGeo (www.hipgeo.com) is a Los Angeles-based developer of a location-aware website and smartphone apps that automatically create a record of the places users go. APIs will be open to third-party developers by the end of 2011. The company was funded in May 2011, and its iPhone app was released in September 2011. The lead investor in HipGeo is Morado Venture Partners, a seed-stage fund run by former Yahoo! executives Ash Patel and Michael Marquez; other investors include Galen Buckwalter, former chief scientist of eHarmony, and prominent San Diego-based angel investor Robert Bingham.