The Banjo app may sound music-related, but in fact the service is far from it--the company Banjo is a four-million-user platform that helps people discover new locations, and its growing popularity has pushed it to make a few updates. With new contextual tools aimed at sharing and experiencing places and events spanning the whole world--all in real time--Banjo is strumming up even more wishful travelers.

The way Banjo works is it uses a specific algorithm to analyze over 500 million social feeds, and then organizes and distributes the location information it gathers from posts, events and shared links.

“At Banjo, we’re focused on one thing: building contextual engines that help everyone else understand what’s happening ‘there’,” said Banjo’s CEO Damien Patton (News - Alert).

Although the word “there” is pretty cryptic, Patton’s explanation hits the nail on the head: Banjo is not focused on simply geography, but on sharing all aspects of a certain place in real time. These elements include who is there, what is there, what is happening there, what people are doing there, when people were there and when they shared their experience with others online.

The amount of information Banjo provides is extensive and global, which sets the service apart from other geographical and travel-based sites and apps.

“There are so many apps and services trying to show the who’s and what’s around you right now, that exploring ‘here’ is not a problem we’re trying to solve,” Patton explained.

In short, Patton sums up the service as “there”-based and not “here”-based.

Banjo encourages exploration and discovery in a social way, rather than just supplying the bare bones of information news-style, and Google (News - Alert) is one company lauding the service for its innovation.

Google recently selected Banjo as one of the only app-services to showcase the new Google+ mobile integration, which has helped significantly extend Banjo’s social reach.

The full list of social sites Banjo leverages for its content are Foursquare, Facebook (News - Alert), Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and Instagram.

Interested in trying out Banjo for yourself? Visit here.