The concept
If you need to find out what’s happening nearby there are a number of sources you can use. The problem is most of them suck. Google is great for horizontal (popular) content but misses local, local newspapers are walled gardens and other startups are simply agregator.
LocalHero is trying to do things differently by building on existing content management systems and leveraging them by adding emergent technologies used in the semantic web. In that way LocalHero can find local content and identify both manually and automatically the people, things, places and events that are relevant to local people.
The philosophy
The philosophy can be summed up by one word: “open”. So far all the echnologies used have been open source and most of the technology developed will be open sourced.
All products created are intended to be standards compliant and all information collected and created will be shared openly. More information on the technology and approach is available in the FAQ section.
Beta status
LocalHero is under constant development and it is currently very much in a preliminary or testing phase (beta in geek speak). All features should work as described but may from time to time be inactive as development continues