Rakettitiede is a Finnish startup with less than 10 employees that is pitching a new location-based application called Grafetee. It’s not unlike Foursquare and other similar services, but it focuses on augmenting the user’s ability to share directly rather than just as a part of a social platform. And as it turns out, businesses are the target audience.

The idea is that a brand using Grafetee can embed a special button in their site that allows the end user to automatically pull geographical data such a store location, and then bookmark it. The app also covers events – a date can be attached to a location, in addition to custom content such as ticket pricing.

Another element that’s included in Grafetee is geofencing – segmenting certain areas so that, for example, if someone is driving by a local business, an ad might pop up and invite them to come in.  This can have a very wide range of other applications that are not confined to just advertising, as the Finnish police apparently discovered.

The nation’s police force, Poliisi, is testing Grafetee’s potential to increase public safety. Practically no details about their use of the app have been disclosed, but it will probably be used to enhance communications on the field in one form or another.

“We’re extremely excited to have the Finnish Police on board. Their testing and the ensuing refinements to the app will help us create truly useful location based services on our Grafetee platform.”

Another player in the geolocation scene is Geoloqi, and it’s also expanding. The company offers a development kit that saves a lot of the time it would take to code location-based features, and it recently became available on Appcelerator’s Titanium 2.0 platform.