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Burbn , a stealthy startup that brings mobile location check-in gameplay (à la Foursquare and Gowalla) to the mobile browser, has raised $500,000 from Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. Burbn founder Kevin Systrom confirmed the round to us after it was written up in TechCrunch this afternoon. Burbn is a nifty little HTML 5 mobile web app that offers yet another place to tell your friends where you’re grabbing a coffee or seeing a concert. But what’s cool is how it runs through a mobile browser without losing much of the experience afforded to native iPhone and Android apps. Burbn loads quickly and pulls in GPS information through the browser just like an app. The only material difference is …

AT&T will be selling a couple of 3G LaptopConnect devices in the form of the AT&T USBConnect Turbo and AT&T USBConnect Velocity from March 7 onwwards. The latter is touted to be the first GPS-enabled LaptopConnect device from AT&T with a microSD memory card slot, where it will work in tandem with a free software application. Using the help of the Option GPS Control Panel, alongside location-enabled sites such as Yahoo! Maps and Bing, directions and local points of interest are a snap to read about. As for the AT&T USBConnect Velocity, you get a built-in microSD memory card slot as well, letting you tote around your data anytime, anywhere you go. Here are what most people are looking forward to…

AT&T is late to the Android games, but they’re making up for lost time with five Android handsets in the first half of the year. First up: the Motorola Backflip , coming March 7th for $100 with contract. Wait… $100? To me that seems a little steep, but I guess that’s because I’m not the biggest fan of Motoblur, Motorola’s social UI. The Backflip also has a touch panel on the back, though that doesn’t function as anything more than a D-pad, along with a 3.1-inch hi-res screen and a 5MP camera (with flash) on board. It’s also compatible with AT&T’s speedier 7.2 HSPA 3G network. Most importantly: if you’ve been stuck in an AT&T contract and worrying that the Android grass is greener, you’ve …

Looks like Nokia has shifted the goalposts in the yet to be unreleased N87, also known as the Nokia Vasco. Apparently, it might come with a larger 3.7″ AMOLED touchscreen display instead of a 3.2″ one which was previously anticipated. Apart from that, we too hear whispers of the following specifications appear on the N87 - a 12-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics and Xenon flash, Wi-Fi connectivity, GPS support, HD video playback, an integrated FM radio and FM transmitter, a 600MHz ARM Cortex 8 processor, a dedicated graphics processing unit, 256MB RAM and a choice between 16GB and 32GB of internal memory. Do you think the Nokia N87 will be unleashed to the masses at MWC 2010? …

Oh-ho-ho this is rich . Some German pranksters saw a Google Street View car parked outside their place in Berlin and managed to sneak a GPS device onboard. Watch the Googlemobile roam around on Google Maps here . [ fffff.at (NSFW) via Reddit ]

The story here is that someone secretly affixed a GPS tracker on a Google Street View camera car and you can follow the car’s progress using Google Maps while it’s photographing the streets of Berlin. Sort of ironic, isn’t? But either the car seems to be stopped or Google caught wind of the stalkers because I haven’t seen any progress the last few minutes. Or maybe they’re eating. Either way, click through for the live Google Map. [ ffff.at via reddit ]

Over the next decade, systems that track and record our movement through physical space will be woven inextricably into everyday life. Already we operate some location-based systems: dashboard navigation systems, smartphones with GPS features, and electronic tags that help us zip through toll stations. But in the coming years, location-aware tools will become more common, sophisticated, and indispensable. There are good reasons for people to be nervous about this: Locational records convey where we travel and with whom; where we have lunch and with whom; which political meetings we attend; where we go to church; what kinds of nightclubs we frequent; with whom we conduct business meetings; and with whom we spend the night. The records won’t be available to everyone, but they will likely be sold to …

Curious what your future phone will look like? OK, so this isn’t some sleek device that interacts with a chip wired into your ear canal, but rather your phone two or three years into the future, which is slightly less visionary, but still pretty cool. I chose the features for this phone based on what I know chipmakers are doing and betting on, but if any of you have a different vision, feel free to lay it out. This is a plausible gadget, but certainly not the only phone. I also talked to Jeff Brown, a principal analyst at Portelligent, to get a sense of how feasible some of this stuff is, as well as with my …

Back in March, Google CEO Eric Schmidt caused a little controversy when he was quoted as thinking of Twitter (and the other micro-messaging services like it) as a “sort of poor man’s email systems.” He later clarified his remarks a bit. Tonight, he has joined the service. Current Googlers such as Hunter Walk (YouTube) and former Googlers such as Chris Sacca welcomed Schmidt to the service tonight, pointing to his account, eschmidt0 . Yes, you’d think he could have gotten a better name (for example, ericschmidt is currently suspended, and presumably available). But maybe he’s continuing Google&#…

It’s not that I don’t think this is a good idea. It’s just that I am absolutely certain that these won’t be as cool as you want them to be. Think about it. If it’s projected on or inside the goggles, it’s covering up the slope — and at any rate you’d get a headache switching focus between it and the real world. If it’s projected onto your eye, that’s freaking science fiction; if these guys had eye projection technology that works as advertised, they’d be contracting with the Pentagon, not making extreme sports accessories. So it’s also got to have a GPS unit, camera, accelerometer, controls, plus CPU, …