• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, May 7, 2015

To realize its dream of becoming a “crystal ball” for events around the world, social news start-up Banjo just raised an additional $100 million.

The Series C round was led by Softbank along with existing backers, including BlueRun Ventures.

Banjo is trying to merge expertise in the fields of big data, social, local and mobile in order to make sense of real-world events in real-time.

“We are building a crystal ball -- a way to see and know virtually everything happening across the globe the moment it happens,” Banjo CEO Damien Patton said in a blog post on Thursday. In more concrete terms, that means organizing social activity by location for enterprise clients and average consumers.

“We are working on connecting the world’s disparate real-time data streams and harnessing them into one unified source of unmatched insights,” Patton explained. Among other uses, Patton said Banjo needs the fresh funding to hire additional data scientists.

Potential applications include emergency response, driving conditions and what Patton calls “smarter marketing decisions.”

The promise of location-based social networking has never been brighter. By 2016, 90% of smartphones will be enabled with GPS technology, and as a result, the global, real-time, mobile location-based advertising and marketing market is expected to reach $9 billion by 2017.

As such, Banjo is hardly the only company trying to organize social data by geographic location.

Among other efforts, Facebook recently began testing a service that pops place-based information right into users’ News Feed. Twitter, meanwhile, recently partnered with Foursquare to expand its location-based efforts, and surface more geographically relevant information for users.

Also, Foursquare just rolled out Pinpoint -- an ad platform that targets consumers based on the places they’ve been.