Virgin Mobile USA and New York City-based startup buzzd on Wednesday announced a service that allows Virgin Mobile subscribers to share entertainment information and personal reviews about what's hot and what's not in their towns.

The service, called “buzzd on Virgin Mobile,” is a combination Zagat-style listing, social network, and location-aware application that offers data about local spots and events along with personal reviews and ratings posted from the event or location.

Groups of friends can stay in touch with each other while sharing information on what's going on around town.

Location-aware services on mobile phones have attracted a fair amount of VC investment, but the market, which includes a number of high-profile providers such as Loopt, Whrrl, and Helio, has failed to garner widespread adoption among mobile phone users.

“The key for many of these firms is not so much the mobile part, it is the social network part. Getting large and small groups of friends signed up on the same network is the challenge,” said Frank Dickson, an analyst with Multimedia Intelligence.

Seven-month-old buzzd, which has taken $3 million from Monitor Ventures and Greycroft Partners and expects to announce another funding round in the next month, makes the service more easily accessible via both SMS and the mobile web.

“With us you don't need carrier relationships or handset relationships, the consumer just types in buzzd.com on the mobile browser and away they go, so we are both off-deck and on-deck,” said Nihal Mehta, CEO of buzzd.

Despite the success of Apple's App Store, which offers downloads of mobile apps, Mr. Mehta sees downloading as a drawback because most consumers avoid downloading anything to their cell phones.

“Outside of Apple's six or seven million users, most handset owners find downloading thick programs to their phones to be extremely cumbersome, and that's a big hurdle when you are building a business like ours,” he said.

Buzzd, which claims to have “several hundred thousand” active users per month, offers its application to consumers for free and generates its revenue from advertising.

“We have more active users than Loopt and Whrrl combined, and that's because we use SMS and the mobile web, and the others don't,” Mr. Mehta said.

Delivering content-based applications on mobile devices is very complicated. Device compatibility, network compatibility, operating system compatibility, and access rights management are a part of the long list of hurdles.

The mobile web and SMS offer developers a way to bypass some of the complexity.