Gowallais on target to hit one million users this month, and those users have now created and visited over 2.5 million locations (or ‘Spots’) around the world. Now the Texas-based startup is tweaking its simple location review feature, Highlights, to make it a little more useful. When Highlights wereintroducedto Gowalla back in September 2010, we described them as a useful way of simplifying location reviews while the startup itself called them ““Little rewards you can give to places that are important to your life”....

If you’ve been aGowallafan for a while, life just got great or ruined, depending on how you look at it. The app, which has seen rabid adoption from a small group of fans, has just undergone a major change and has turned into more of a “social guide” than just a check-in service. First off, it starts with new apps for bothiPhoneandAndroid. When you load up the apps (which look stellar, by the way), you’re gifted with the social guide feature that will give you recommendations from your friends, as well as “experts”....

It’s not just Foursquareplanning a UK office, onstage at theGeek’n’Rollaconference in London today, Gowalla’s CEO, Josh Williams has revealed the company’s plan base a small team in the city. In conversation with The Guardian’s Jemima Kiss, Williams discussed how, with user numbers now in excess of one million, 45% of the company’s growth is outside US – particularly Europe and the Middle East. Looking to support and fuel this, “four or five” members of staff would be based here....

AsGowalla, check-in location app that’s been twisting to grow from underneath Foursquare’s shadow is just passing its two year mark in the geolocation world. Today, Gowalla CEO Josh Williams detailed the company’s next moves in a Tumblr post titled “Going Forward.” As Gowalla has grown we’ve added many new features to the product. Some have had great success. Others haven’t worked out as well as we’d hoped. After the two-plus years of consistent feedback and amazing experiences, we believe this is an opportune time to prune the branches that were twisted in order to focus on the experience we desire to cultivate....

As vivacious technology enthusiasts, many of us willingly announce our location to the world through apps like Foursquare, Gowalla and Google Latitude. However, for the five million Americans who suffer from Alzheimer’s, location-based technologies aren’t frivolous, they are an incredible way to keep tabs on loved ones and can therefore be life-saving. It’s well-known that Alzheimer patients are at risk of becoming physically lost and thus vulnerable to injury, dehydration and exposure to harm....