transponder

Live from the Business of Software conference in San Francisco, it’s This Week in Startups! Jason’s guest on this special episode was Matt Mullenweg, founder of Wordpress.

PublicEarth describes itself as a wiki of places, specializing in collecting all those “long tail” places that most other databases tend to overlook.

Live Labs’ latest creation has launched. Pivot is a fun, powerful discovery tool, built on Seadragon and powered by Silverlight, that runs in Vista or Windows 7 with IE8. It looks great and allows for truly intuitive exploration of information.

Location awareness is hot, from gamelike social services such as Foursquare and Gowalla to platforms such as Google Latitude. Now one start-up is hoping to make it as easy for any company to integrate into a Web or mobile service as it is for retailers to use PayPal. Meet SimpleGeo, which on Thursday is launching into a private beta.

Every year at the Web 2.0 Summit Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker does a fast and in-depth presentation of internet trends. The report is available here.

If you face the prospect of keeping a sense of community among staffers in many locales, you might call in the Meat Team. No, not for a company barbecue, but to support and hone your in-house video efforts.

Okay, it should be clear after watching the Socialnomics video that social media can produce huge ROI, but only if you know what you’re doing.