How about a service that gets you the directions and list of places in an SMS? Does that interest you? Then LatLong would be the ideal choice.

LatLong is a Indian-based startup that basically offers you routes and directions on the map of the city. So how is it different from the other big alternatives such as Google Maps or Yahoo! Maps? LatLong is not just a map service, it can list out restaurants, petrol bunks, and shops (amongst many others) in any particular area (that’s right, not ‘city’, they’re narrowing it down to the area). You can then choose to lookup the route to these places, or send them an SMS asking them to send the list of places and the directions to them.

As an example, I asked LatLong to find me a petrol bunk in the area that I live. As you can see from the screenshot below, it correctly displayed all of the petrol bunks available in my area.

LatLong also works as a stand-alone SMS based service. Users can send an SMS “help” to 9008890088 to start using the service. The best part is, unlike most of the SMS services that require you to send SMS to a 5-digit premium number, LatLong’s number is local. So those of us with free SMS plans can conveniently message them and get back answers, FREE. You can try out a demo here.

Unfortunately, since the startup is still small, LatLong is currently operating only in Bangalore and Chennai, with plans to include Mumbai by next month. Another drawback is that their website is quite slow in responding to queries, and the SMS service takes at least an hour or more to send out replies. We love the service, and we’re sure that it will be a hit in the upcoming weeks.

Check out LatLong on the web or send “help” to 9008890088 to get started.

Printing a web page could not get any easier. PrintWhatYouLike.com lets you edit a web page on-the-fly and print just the information you want. Sounds pretty good, right?

PrintWhatYouLike facilitates printing of exactly what you want from any web page, minus all the clutter. It’s sort of an online web page editor, if you may call it, that lets you edit a web page and then print it straight away from the Web, without having to install any additional software.

You can cut, add, stretch, compress, and more so that your print does not appear broken, filled with ads, or with any other unwanted content.

The only drawback I found was that you could not save the page to come back and edit later. That was hover solved with the help of Scrapbook (which by the way, has some really cool page editing features we missed out).

Check out what we have done with Harmless Geek.

Presenting StatusHQ.com – a new web startup that makes it easy for you to keep up with your own groups. It could be basically said as Twitter+BrightKite for firms/professional groups/closed user groups. It has got 4 plans to choose from : 3 paid plans ($40-$10) and a FREE plan. You can have a maximum of 5 members in the group for the FREE plan, and you can have more than one group.

Status is part of a new trend of LIGHTER communication tools. When you need to get up to date with your group, a single screen shows what everyone is doing and where they are. This means you can stay in touch on your own terms, without using heavy attention-stealing tools like email.

Updating/checking in could be done in 5 ways:

• Web UI
• SMS
• EMail
• MAC DashBoard Widget
• iPhone app

I tested it with creating a group for the lovable geeks here at HarmLessGeek and here are some screenshots that’ll give you the feel.

StatusHQ  is suitable for web startups, organized freelancers Music Bands and the like. If you ever need a solution to keep up with your group, look to nothing other than StatusHQ.