You may have wondered what the founders of Symbian were up to these days, well it seems that they’re developing iPhone applications. Roger Nolan and Jane Sales formed development shop Ambient Industries and the first product to be released is named flook… as they describe it “the worlds first serendipitous discovery engine”.

While not easy to categorize at first glance, Flook is part browser, part twitter, part FourSquare all rolled into one from people who “hate maps and pins on small phones”.

Flook is current available for free but only on the iPhone. The foundation of the service is the ability to create and view nearby “cards” tethered to a geographic place. The cards are presented in the Flook “broswer window” in the form of a “stream” of nearby cards that you flick through one by one.

In a way the cards represent the new geographic web page and Flook is the browser, bringing beautiful and simple cards/pages of interesting new things from the world around them including a picture, description and map, as well as comments from the Flook community. Cards can be either created by users or by the Flook staff… and generally are descriptive of a place that someone found interesting, but can also include upcoming events scheduled to take place at a certain place.

A recent stream for me in NYC included a number of cards created by users for local bars and restaurants, others highlighting interesting architecture including over a dozen photos of various parts of the new Highline elevated park in Chelsea… I also got a card promoting SMX East the search engine marketing conference held recently at the Jacob Javits Center.  I also took a stab at creating a few myself, on a trip to the Children’s Museum of Manhattan with my kids.

If you find a card that you like, you can find who created that card and follow them to see what other cards they may create that you may also like ala Twitter, and like Foursquare, Flook has developed a gaming mechanism to encourage folks to create cards and reward those power users who create a lot of interesting cards.

Down the road it looks as though the company has API’s planned to allow developers to integrate cards into their own sites or maybe create games around creating and collecting cards. Quite conceivably, Flook could be a platform for city guides to quickly and easily publish up virtual mobile location  aware tour guides or for event companies to create fun scavenger hunts or bar crawls.

As the service just officially launched a few days ago, its a bit difficult to picture what Flook will become when it grows up. There is an emphasis in the service on the serendipitous way in which places are ‘discovered’ by merely flipping through nearby cards… which can be viewed as either very cool or a bit disorganized depending on how you expect to want to use the service… if you’re a type A personality,  this service may not be for you.   There is technology behind the scenes which is supposed to learn from all the flipping and looking at cards to determine what you may like and not like, and what you may be interested in seeing next… which should prevent it from just becoming a massive dumping ground for random thought as we’ve seen with applications like Nearby from Platial.

Overall, like Foursquare it’s a refreshingly different way to leverage the power of location and social networks, and good to see folks going in a slightly new direction with this sort of thing.