From Venture Capital Dispatch:

The idea for Gypsii came while Dan Harple was commuting the way most people do in Amsterdam – riding a bicycle.

Harple, a serial entrepreneur, was looking on his mobile phone for nearby restaurants, but he couldn’t find good results.

“I was riding my bike around searching and I’d get Web sites,” Harple said. “But I’m on my bike and I want to know where I am, and what’s here right now.”

Shortly after that, in 2007, Harple set out to build a mobile-phone technology that helps people find and share information about what their friends are doing nearby.

The application he built became GeoSolutions BV, doing business as Gypsii, an Amsterdam-based company that has gotten adoption through major telecom companies in Asia, Europe and Latin America. The telecoms either install a Gypsii app on handsets or use the Gypsii technology to build their own applications. The technology enables users to do things such as view blogs, news, events and social media content, filtered by location.

In one example, China Unicom partnered with Gypsii, using its technology to launch Unispace, a social networking application for the iPhone in China that enables people to post messages, photos and other content and see where their friends are posting content nearby.

Now the company has used the high profile provided by this week’s South By Southwest tech conference in Austin, Texas, to launch a U.S. version of its service – an iPhone application called Tweetsii.

In addition to pulling in Tweets and other content based on location, the new app enables users to view nearby “check-ins” – a feature in which people note their presence at a location such as a restaurant or other business – from hot start-ups such as Foursquare and Gowalla.

Harple says this U.S. version of Gypsii moves beyond services that only have check-ins because it enables people to easily filter through a variety of other social media content as well. It also enables users to comment on and tag messages with photos or multimedia, or to create their own locations.

“The DNA inside Gypsii is search,” Harple said. “It’s a lot more than saying you checked in somewhere. We spent two and a half years developing an algorithm that delivers highly relevant results to people where they are and connected to their social graph.”

Harple knows a thing or two about search and Internet-based media, having founded two previous venture backed start-ups. Insoft Inc. was acquired by Netscape Communications back in 1996, after raising at least $9.2 million from Apax Partners, Edison Venture Fund, Adams Capital Management, New Enterprise Associates and Philadelphia Ventures. Then in 2005 he sold Context Media Inc., which provided enterprise database search and media sharing services, to Oracle Corp. after raising $42 million from Lehman Brothers Venture Partners, NEA, Adams Capital and Shamrock Ventures II.

After its success with major carriers overseas, Gypsii faces a challenge breaking into a U.S. market that Harple acknowledges is often more focused on viral growth, hype and being the “next big thing.” The check-in space is very crowded with a range of companies including Foursquare, Gowalla, Hot Potato and Twitter itself, which recently released a feature that allows people to post their location. Gypsii will need to figure out a way to break out from the noise and grab its own viral growth.

Harple believes the enterprise-grade search technology he’s built will win out eventually, and he hopes to sign up manufacturers and carriers in the U.S.

Gypsii is backed by about $40 million from private equity firm Horizon Group and U.K.-based Schroders, including an $11 million round in January led by Schroders.

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