Sonar Finds You The Most Relevant People In The Room

location, location, location device which describes itself as magical in this, in this program. So I mean, that's, that's a big sell. So I'm hoping they can, they can live up to it. So please welcome to the stage from Sonar, Brett Martin, the founder and CEO and Brent Hargrave, the lead developer.

Hello everyone. We're Sonar. Thanks for having us.

Before I begin, take a look around the room. Please, look at all the faces that surround you. Somewhere, someone in this room has your next big deal. Someone has the next great tech story. Someone in this room has the potential to be your next co-founder or maybe even your future wife.

I'm Brett, this is actually Ajay and we're Sonar and we're here to help you make that connection.

I don't know about you guys, but maybe you've come to an amazing conference like TechCrunch Disrupt full of brilliant and beautiful people, only to stand by the conference bar eating peanuts, wondering who you should talk to next.

Or maybe you've gone out to a bar, out to meet people, to a crowded bar and found yourself obsessively checking your texts, emails, and tweets, sent by people thousands of miles away. Or maybe, you just wanna tell everyone tonight that you're from San Francisco, and you wanna tell everyone that you're here to party tonight, or perhaps just that you're trying to hire ruby developers.

So have we, so has everyone, and that's why we built Sonar. The concept is absolutely simple. Sonar is a mobile application that uncovers the hidden connection that you share with everyone else in this room. Sound cool? Let's check it out.

So, you pop open Sonar and we give you a list of trending venues nearby. All it takes is one click to see how you are connected to everyone in that venue. We're at TechCrunch Disrupt, so let's see who I should be talking to. When you pop open the app, Sonar scours the web for people at this venue, then aggregates and synthesizes publicly available profile data, and then sorts the room by who's most relevant to you.

So, for me, the most relevant person here is Daniel Clauss, which is not suprising since I work with him. But just below him is Fergus Hurley, with whom I share a couple Facebook friends. Sounds pretty interesting, let's check them out. So, with one click, Sonar gives me an instant overview of Fergus and how we're connected.

I can instantly see that we share a bunch of interests on twitter and three Facebook friends. Sonar also provides me with a bio so I can get a quick overview of what Fergus is up to. He's a mobile entrepreneur and a product designer. Sounds like exactly the type of person that I came to TechCrunch Disrupt to meet.

But first, let's dig into our connections. Voilà! So this is kind of Sonar's magic moment. With one click, I can see Fergus, who five seconds ago was a complete stranger, that he's friends with three of my good buddies. Will Brestman was a friend-of-a-friend from college. Kyle Daugherty I worked with for three years out of school, banking.

And Trevor Owens who is a MIU Tech head mogul here in New York. So I can already hear, maybe, the clocks turning in your head. Which is like, wow, that's amazing and that's cool and that would probably work in most venues, but what about in a gigantic place like TechCrunch Disrupt? How am I actually going to find Fergus?

One of the best things about Sonar is that you're never more than one click away from a hyper- targeted introduction to the person you want to meet. "Fergus, what's going on? I used to work with Kyle and also TechCrunch. Let's connect. Let's hang out at the coffee bar when we're done." So, to summarize, with my first click, Sonar bottled the thousands of connections that I definitely would've missed in this room and then rank order them for me by importance.

With my second click, Sonar gave me an Instant personalized overview of Fergus and how we're connected. And with my third click, Sonar sent a personal hyper-targeted message to someone in this room with enough social proof to get the conversation started, but Sonar is not just a powerful hyper-local social CRM tool that is going to save you time and money.

We'll do that, but it's much bigger than that. Actually, our goal is to democratize the meet space. So, if you look at all great social web products, they give people a new medium of self expression. So does Sonar, a hyper-local one. So there's myriad services elsewhere that tell people elsewhere that you're here.

But Sonar is laser-focused on giving you a way to tell people here that you're here and this is what you're about. It's a form of visual, local self-expression that you can use to share what you're proud of and what you're looking for with the people here. So, I'll leave you guys with this thought.

We share so much of ourselves online right now. Why not use that information to connect with the person sitting next to us? So many of you guys paid thousands of dollars and flew thousands of miles to come to this amazing conference to meet that person, to make that connection, to get that story, to get that deal.

Are you guys really going to leave that up to chance? Download Sonar. We can help. Thanks a lot.

Sonar . I like that.


Thanks, man.

That was good.

All right so...Yersi?

I like it and I can see it can be very useful. It's like almost local LinkedIn in a sense, but more wide in the demography.

We think Sonar can have lots of use cases from business to social. It's whatever data layer you want to put on top of it. So we started with Foursquare, Facebook, and Twitter for our Beta, but you can imagine how cool this is gonna get as we start to add services, like LinkedIn Food Spotting, Last.FM, Event Planning, Plancast, Meetup, etc.

It's a premium business model or how do you guys plan to make money?

So we know where people are, who people are, where they are and what they're talking about. So, we think that we're gonna be in a nice place with all the data that we have. But, if there's one thing sort of the social web has taught us is that one thing people love is attention. So, we're actually kind of interested to follow this concept of promoted people.

So, it's a concept that at any venue, you can rise yourself to the top of the list. Put me higher on the list. Yes. That's an interesting model. I mean, it works, if you've ever heard of Baidu. It's one of the biggest, fastest growing networks in the world. it's a dating service, and people pay for promotion.

It's a common model with dating and also it's a common model with professional services like LinkedIn. So if you could imagine what about the ability to send a personal message to someone else in this room?

I mean, personally what I like about this is that I understand that if I'm the only person using Sonar it still works correct? In other words, your product has network effects, but it also has what people call a single player mode, in other words, like because Josh Actor great delicious always talks about how the best products have single player mode.

They're useful if you have one user, but they also have networking effects, sort of multi-player mode. I understand that yours does and that's a really smart way to kind of getting it going. We call it bootstrapping the single player use case, and we do that with consumption. The plan is to get people on board.

You guys can pull it out, download it right now. It's Sonar in the apps store and get value out of it and as more people get on it, we want to use it, people could use it as a customizable platform to express themselves and what they are looking for. So, I like it a lot. This is an app I've wanted for a while, but there are probably going to be privacy concerns.

How are you addressing this?

Privacy, so Sonar only uses publicly available profile information. There's nothing we're using that you have not already published on the web, and we're totally fine if you want to yourself out of Sonar. You're absolutely fine to come in and remove your profile, but I think that, like with all privacy things, you'll realize that people value it this much, but when you show them how much they have to gain by projecting themselves, people will end up using this service.

Does that mean I have to opt in to opt out?

If you're not publishing yourself on the internet, you do not show up in Sonar.

Cool.

So you have check-in? I saw a check-in button there. So, are you guys building your own kind of check-in database or are you using an API from somebody else. I don't know if you missed that part of the presentation.

We're happily living on top of these other platforms and, you know, we're using their data, so we want to syndicate our data back to them. We will have a Sonar check-in and perhaps that will enable you to share different types of information than you are That we are sharing with Foursquare. But, I think one of the great things is that everyone is trying to compete for the client, right, to be the check-in app.

And, while we do think that our app. First off, people are always curious and other people always want to know more. Second off, we think we do provide unique value that no one out there does. But thirdly, we have notifications in our app. So, let's say there's this cool app I heard of called Foodspotting.

And, let's say you're at a restaurant and took a picture of food right, but you were signed in your Foodspotting account to Sonar, you could have basically we would notice you checked in on Foodspotting at a restaurant, we'd get that, then we'd analyze in the background if there was anyone relevant to you at that restaurant, maybe perhaps someone that has the same taste as you in desserts.

And then, we would send you a push notification being like, "Hey, you might want to connect with this person or ask them what dessert you should get. But we don't live or die by being a client.

No, that's really smart, you should have access to our API.

I like that.

Food-Spotting is getting a lot of promotion on this stage. People will identify the decision maker in the group.

We would also love to work with the Hunch API.

Alright, any final questions?

Yes, when did you start the development?

A little less than six months ago.

How many people?

Oh we're but four. I'm Brett, this is M.J. Brent, our technical co-founder, is busy coding away and when he is Somebody has to work.

Someone has to work. We can't all be socialites.

What have you done before?

Wow.

Next question.

No, I wouldn't know the answer to that, that was great, that was like, "Oh, I don't want to really say."

How about banking in it's presentation.

Oh banking.

I grew up in a small mid-Atlantic white-trash beach resort town. I went to college in New Hampshire. I banked. I lived on a sailboat for seven months. I came back and I started a band. I went to Italy and lived on a Fulbright Scholarship for a year. I came back, I spent six months disillusioned, wondering what I should do.

I went down to Austin, taught myself how to code Ruby. That business failed. I came back here, started a mobile incubator, actually with Daniel Klaus, and then this I'm pulling out of the incubator and spinning off.

Wow.

Nice.

Nice.

Wow.

Well, and he's way more impressive than I am, so...

Well, we want to hear what you do then, if that's more impressive than that. That's, can we get him a microphone?

He 's got a mic.

Yeah, just talk. Well, yeah, there you go.

I was born in Japan. I'm Indian by descent. I lived there 18 years. I can speak 3 languages. I went to NYU Stern and I studied finance and information systems. I graduated from Stern and I worked at two banks. I didn't like working at the banks and I just taught myself how to code in IOS and I found Brett.

And I'm here today happily coding away.

Nice.

Well that's a lovely story. And a perfect way to end, so a round of applause please for Sonar.


We're done, thank you. Thank you.

All right, I'm not even sure if I'm allowed to say, "I like that" at the end of pitches. I guess I'm supposed to be unbiased, but I do like that. Yes, I also like Karizma and Spoton, for what it's worth. But I particularly like Sonar.