Local Faves 1.1 is now available for download: https://www.skyhookwireless.com/localfaves/register/index.php.

New features and updates in this release include:

• Profile Page now shows own activity
• Ability to check-in with Foursquare when associating a venue with a fave
• Ability to create new venues (perfect for users in more rural areas)
• Ability to specify a custom username when not signed into Facebook  (prevents “anonymous” tags within your app).
• Better heatmap generation
• Better performance in large map areas
• More delegate callbacks
• Twitter component now using Oauth
• Numerous minor fixes and UI tweaks

Although the previous release of Local Faves will still work, it is highly recommended that you upgrade to 1.1. Twitter will completely drop Basic Authentication support by August 16th, so any Local Faves apps should be upgraded by then.

Many of these updates were based on feedback we received from users like you, so please continue to send us your ideas and feature requests.

Also, just a reminder that Skyhook’s Local Faves User Group can be found here.  You can ask/answer questions with other users, share ideas on how to use Local Faves in your apps and interact directly with our engineers.

For those of you who have launched apps using Local Faves, be sure to let us know when your apps are live in the App Store so we can help promote them and include you in media opportunities (some of our Local Faves users have been featured in articles in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Mashable).  Press coverage can directly impact download numbers, so please let us know when you are live!

We hope you enjoy the new features.

Skyhook, UDig, and the Country Music Association have collaborated to create a real-time map of geotagged mobile activity around the 2010 CMA Music Festival in Nashville from June 10 - 13.

The map will use Skyhook’s new data intelligence service SpotRank, which identifies the density of people in predefined urban square-block areas worldwide at any hour, any day of the week.

Visit http://skyhookwireless.com/spotrank/CMA.php to see Foursquare checkins, Tweets, Flickr photos, Music Fest concerts, and a heat map of all the mobile location requests coming out of Nashville. You can choose the speed at which the map plays, or just put it on autoloop and sit back and watch.  Move the time slider to show 8:30 pm on Thursday (6/11).  You will see a huge jump in activity at the LP Field concert stage, around the same time that Alan Jackson took the stage.  People were checking into the concert via Foursquare, commenting on the show on Twitter, and tagging photos like this one:

Over the course of festival SpotRank will give observers an exciting new view into the way that mobile device users interact with location-aware apps and how they move around a one-time event.
But looking forward, Music Fest serves as an example for how people are starting to use location-aware mobile apps and devices all over the world.

To use SpotRank for your event, contact spotrank@skyhookwireless.com