Yesterday, Kevin Rose’s new mobile app, Oink, hit iTunes. You can download the app, but you still need an invite to unlock all of its features. About an hour after the launch, I showed up at Milk, Rose’s mobile lab startup, near San Francisco’s Mission District to get a demo. In the video above, Rose takes me through the app and explains what he is trying to accomplish.
Oink is a location-aware app that lets you rate things in specific places and uses hashtags to identify those things. So you can rate the #sushi at a Japanese restaurant, the #burrito at a Mexican place, or a #bikepath in a park. You can rate anything, just add a hashtag or see what’s popular nearby. You snap a picture and rate the thing, then other people can add their ratings so that you can see the best #sushi or #beer ranked by location. You can gain cred for a particular hashtag if other people add their votes to yours.
Once Oink learns what things you are interested in, it can start showing you the best #tea, #sushi, or #beer wherever you happen to be. If Rose can get people to use this app and collect data about the real world, there are all sorts of interesting things he can do, from real-world recommendations about the things you care about to hyper-targeted offers.
Milk is a mobile development lab founded by Kevin Rose, Jeff Hodsdon, and Daniel Burka. Milk has announced its first mobile app, Oink, released last fall. The company has since been acquired by Google.
Kevin Rose is an angel investor and serial entrepreneur. He is a Senior Product Manager at Google and previously the founder of Digg and WeFollow and co-founder of Milk. Rose also co-founded Revision3, and Pownce (acquired by Six Apart). In addition, Rose is the founder of Foundation, a private newsletter and podcast, and formerly was co-host of the tech news podcast Diggnation.
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