• Startup Battlefield At Disrupt: Day One, Session Two

    Devin Coldewey

    Devin Coldewey is a Seattle-based writer and photographer. He has written for the TechCrunch network since 2007. Some posts he’d like you to read: The Dangers of Externalizing Knowledge | Generation i | Surveillant Society | Choose Two | Frame Wars | The User’s Manifesto | Our Great Sin His personal website is coldewey.cc. → Learn More

    Tuesday, May 24th, 2011


    The second round of presentations from our Startup Battlefield is here for you to enjoy, in case you missed them yesterday. This round focused on “Disrupting Location, Location, Location.” To be honest, we expected more Foursquare clones, but were disappointed, if that’s the right word. The companies in this round were SpotOn, Karizma, Sonar, Arrived, and Churn Labs’ Gnonstop Gnome.


    SpotOn uses Foursquare and Facebook profile metadata to create personalized and “actionable” recommendations. A personal location discovery engine.


    Karizma is a free video-chatting app that connects you to people nearby who are the kind of person you want to meet. People like you, singles of the opposite sex, or just randoms.


    Sonar uses overlapping social networks to determine who in the room is someone you should meet, then gives you an easy way to non-creepily say “Hi, we’d probably make beautiful music/business”


    This app lets you organize meetups and reminders based on when you and your contacts arrive in a city or venue, as detected by your phone’s location. There are anti-stalking measures built-in.


    A strange but interesting app that lets you trade unique “gnomes” and transfer them between devices by a clever image-recognition method.


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