Geo-messaging startup BlockChalk raised $1 million in seed financing from an impressive group of investors, including Delicious founder Joshua Schachter, Lotus founder Mitch Kapor, the Founder Collective, Battery Ventures, Harrison Metal, Josh Stylman, Tom McInerney, and David Liu. Schachter, in particular, has been investing heavily in geo startups (he is also an investor in Foursquare, SimpleGeo, Square, and Plancast).
BlockChalk makes an iPhone app that lets you leave notes around your neighborhood. They can be anonymous to report things like crimes, or a public shout-out to great neighbor. It uses a geo-fencing approach to revealing messages. Each message is pinned to a specific location, block or neighborhood, which other people using the app can see when they are nearby. As MG wrote in January:
You load up the application on your mobile device, it locates you, and you leave a message. This can be whatever you want: A note about a good cafe, a tip of something in the neighborhood to watch out for, a request to borrow something that someone else may have in the neighborhood, etc. When other people also using the app come upon the area that you’ve pinned your “Chalk” (their word for message) to, they’ll see it on their screen in a stream of Chalks.
The founders are Stephen Hood, who used to head up the product team at Delicious, Dave Baggeroer of Stanford’s Institute of Design, and Josh Whiting, a former senior engineer at Delicious and Craigslist.
Blockboard is a mobile bulletin board that uses your iPhone (and soon, your Android phone) to connect you with your neighbors. If it’s about your neighborhood, you can find it or post it on Blockboard. For example, you can: Ask a question of your neighbors (we’ll notify you when someone answers) See and post interesting photos from around the neighborhood Read the latest neighborhood news as reported both by the best local blogs and by your own neighbors Report graffiti, litter, or other...
Joshua Schachter is the founder of delicious, a popular bookmark-sharing service founded in late 2003 and acquired by Yahoo in 2005. In January 2009 Joshua Schachter joined Google. Joshua also created geoURL, a location-URL reverse directory, and was a co-creator of Memepool.
Founder Collective is a seed-stage venture capital fund, built by a collection of successful entrepreneurs. They are headquartered in New York City and Cambridge, but make investments all over the world.
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
San Francisco, CA
Berlin, Germany
