• May 27th, 2010

    BlockChalk Draws $1 Million In Seed Financing From Schachter, Battery, And Founder Collective

    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.

    Read more: http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/08/blockchalk-location/#ixzz0p9G5rRKM → Read More

    March 11th, 2010

    Vicarious.ly: SimpleGeo's One Location-Based Stream To Visualize Them All

    As I’ve made abundantly clear over the past several days, just about every service that has anything to do with location is launching something at the SXSW festival which starts tomorrow in Austin, Texas. Don’t believe me, here’s a small sampling (Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Whrrl, Plancast, Brizzly, Twitter). So, how are you going to wrap your head around all this location data? SimpleGeo has an awesome way.

    Vicarious.ly is a real-time location-based stream of information presented in a nice visual way. While the plan is to eventually launch one for many different cities around the U.S. and eventually the world, the first one is based around Austin, for SXSW. To make it, SimpleGeo partnered with BlockChalk, Brightkite, Bump Technologies, Flickr, Fwix, Foursquare, Gowalla, and Twitter to pull all of their location data and place it both in a constantly-updating stream, and put data points on a Google Map at the top of the page. These data points are represented by the logos of the various companies, so it’s easy to follow visually. → Read More

    February 2nd, 2010

    BlockChalk Locates A New Co-Founder From Craigslist (Another Former Delicious Key Architect)

    It looks like another Delicious key architect is migrating to the new location-based startup BlockChalk. The latest is Josh Whiting, who was formerly a lead engineer at Delicious for three and a half years (he was actually one of the first members of the team before they were acquired by Yahoo,. we’re told) before he left that role to become a senior engineer for Craigslist. Whiting joins former colleague, Stephen Hood, who was the product lead at Delicious before starting BlockChalk with Dave Baggeroer of Stanford’s Institute of Design.

    Along with his title of co-founder, Whiting will be BlockChalk’s chief engineer. The location space continues to be red hot right now, and BlockChalk has a compelling, yet simple product. It’s a mobile app that lets you adds notes to the real world by pinning them to any location. Hood notes that in the past few weeks alone, they’ve doubled traffic and users, and are now available in 111 countries, 8217 cities, and nearly 13,000 neighborhoods all over the world. → Read More

    January 8th, 2010

    BlockChalk Is Location-Based Sidewalk Chalk For Your Mobile Device

    With its new geolocation API, Twitter has the potential to delve into the realm of messages that are relevant based on location. But right now, most geotagged tweets are simply regular tweets that are being tagged with location, and really don’t have much specifically to do with it. Enter BlockChalk, a new service built around the idea of leaving simple messages directly tied to a specific location.

    The service, created by Stephen Hood, the former product team lead for Delicious, and Dave Baggeroer of Stanford’s Institute of Design, works because they keep it simple. 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. → Read More

    Upcoming Events

    E3 2012

    Los Angeles, CA

    Disrupt SF 2012

    San Francisco, CA

    Real-Time
    Crunchbase

    smartDIGITAL — Received $2.7M in Series A funding from Advantage Capital Partners
    5.30.2012
    smartDIGITAL — Company added to CrunchBase
    5.30.2012
    5.30.2012
    Compliance11 — Acquired by Compliance11, Inc..
    11.15.2012
    Facebook — Went public with stock symbol NASDAQ:FB.
    5.18.2012
    Compliance11 — Acquired by Compliance11, Inc..
    11.15.2012
    Bolt | Peters — Acquired by Facebook for $50M.
    6.21.2012
    Actual Systems — Acquired by Solera Holdings.
    5.29.2012
    5.29.2012
    ServerOrigin — Acquired by Black Lotus.
    5.29.2012
    smartDIGITAL — Received $2.7M in Series A funding from Advantage Capital Partners
    5.30.2012
    AudioCure Pharma — Received Seed funding from High-Tech Gruenderfonds and Dr. Schumacher
    5.29.2012
    CodeGuard — Received $1.3M in Seed funding
    5.29.2012
    Qualtré — Received $10M in Unattributed funding from Matrix Partners, Pilot House Ventures, and Eastward Capital Partners
    5.29.2012
    5.30.2012
    5.29.2012
    Dr. Schumacher — Invested in AudioCure Pharma.
    5.29.2012
    Foundation Capital — Invested in MobileIron.
    5.29.2012
    Sequoia Capital — Invested in MobileIron.
    5.29.2012
    Facebook — Went public with stock symbol NASDAQ:FB.
    5.18.2012
    smartDIGITAL — Company added to CrunchBase
    5.30.2012
    Actual Systems — Company added to CrunchBase
    5.30.2012
    AudioCure Pharma — Company added to CrunchBase
    5.30.2012
    Kurion — Company added to CrunchBase
    5.30.2012
    5.29.2012
    PayPal Media Network — Product added to CrunchBase
    5.29.2012
    Trivia Party — Product added to CrunchBase
    5.29.2012
    ACT for Lotus Notes CRM — Product added to CrunchBase
    5.29.2012
    VMobile - Mobile CRM — Product added to CrunchBase
    5.29.2012
    CrunchBase