Little known Bangalore based location-enabling company Imere Technologies has sold a minority stake Rediff.com, a NASDAQ listed Indian Internet company. The quantum of the minority stake has not been disclosed. Imere uses Cell-ID, Wi-Fi, GPS, IP Addresses and proprietary algorithms for providing location relevant inputs for both mobile and Internet applications, and can work without GPS on mobile phones, and tries to provide location accuracy online without entirely being dependant on IP addresses. Over and above financial support, Rediff will also provide "platform support" to Imere: In the past, Rediff has invested in two companies whose it has deployed - Quillpad (Tachyon), in which Rediff has 26% stake, finds use in Rediff's Indic language email and search, and Eterno Infotech powers Rediff Mobile and its mobile Indic language tools. Buddy Finder App: Ohe! Among its mobile applications is Ohe! which also works without GPS. Keep in mind that most of the handsets in India are unlikely to be GPS enabled, at least for the next 2-3 years. Ohe! has a buddy finder application that allows users to define their privacy settings, and locate buddies close buy, and also connect with interesting people around them. Competing with this application in India are Google Latitude, and more recently, Reliance BIG Maps. LBS: Hot or Not? The Imere software has features like point of interest lookup (example: for restaurants, ATMs etc), positioning via geocode and reverse geocode, and location aware push ads. Carrier services include fleet scheduling and resource tracking, proximity based notification (push or pull)…
