• LoKast Relaunches Group Messaging App With Photo, Video, Music Sharing

    Leena Rao

    Leena Rao is currently a Senior Editor for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... → Learn More

    Wednesday, May 25th, 2011

    We’ve written previously about NearVerse’s mobile app LoKast, a proximity based mobile social network. Today, the company is debuting a new version of its iOS app, which combines group messaging with location proximity and media sharing.

    On the app you can create spaces, which are visible by others within the app in the same physical place. These spaces essentially serve as min-social networks of sorts, where people can chat and share links, videos, images, music and more. Users can also make networks completely private.

    Previously the app was more of an open network, where users could find and share content with any other user that was in their proximity. Now with the ability to create ‘spaces’ within the app, Lokast becomes more of a group messaging app with a dash of location-based discovery.

    While the ability to share pictures and media within a group messaging app is appealing, the space itself is competitive, with GroupMe, Google, and many others also offering group messaging apps.

    Company: NearVerse
    Website: lokast.com
    Launch Date: December 1, 2008
    Funding: $1M

    NearVerse develops the NearCloud tech platform, unifying device-to-device and 3G / 4G wireless networking into a single system for 5-10x faster wireless Internet delivery and 5-10x more accurate location ID service, and LoKast, a real-time mobile messaging and media sharing platform, also supporting best-of-breed proximity-based functionality. NearVerse is based in NYC.

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