Remember Brightkite? Launched with the help of TechStars back in August 2007, the location-based ‘check-in’ service once rivaled the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla, but never really got the traction it needed to keep on competing and win the day: the startup killed the check-in functionality about a year ago to focus on group texting.
It’s been quiet about Brightkite ever since, and the… → Read More
In what may be the first high-profile casualty of the location wars, Brightkite, an early player in the space, has today announced they’re officially killing off the check-in functionality of their service.
Brightkite noted back in September that they’d likely be partnering on check-ins with one of the other major location players going forward. At the time, they said: “We pioneered the check-in… → Read More
Back in September, we broke the news that not only had two of location startup Brightkite’s founders left the company, but that they were working on a new project together. While we weren’t able to dig up much about the new startup at the time, we did learn that it was called Forkly. Today, co-founder Brady Becker is opening up a bit more. “We’re hungry, and this time it’s personal,” he … → Read More
Brightkite has always been an interesting startup. They were in the location game early (a 2007 TechStars launch) — perhaps a bit too early, as the true hype in the space has only really began in the past year or so. Nevertheless, they were able to get an exit (well, sort of a merger/exit) in 2009. And they’ve been able to accumulate over 2 million users. And they’re still plugging away at… → Read More
Location-based social networking service Brightkite has experimented with the concept of badges in the past, threading in the footsteps of Foursquare and Gowalla, who have popularized if not pioneered the now-familiar virtual loyalty and rewards system.
Last May, the startup partnered with coffee chain Starbucks to create a set of branded badges, self-reportedly the biggest brand integration they… → Read More
Back in December, the location-based service Brightkite rolled out a new layer to its Augmented Reality (AR) view: ads. At the time, these were Google ads that showed up in a “relatively unobtrusive” way, as ReadWriteWeb put it. Now, those ads are getting more obtrusive because some big brands are on board.
Brightkite has been working with both Starbucks and McDonalds to bring more effective AR… → Read More
Back in March, I wrote about the problem of check-in fatigue. That is, with so many location-based check-in services now out there, it’s exhausting to open each one every time to check-in to the same place across multiple networks. The solution, for now at least, is Check.in. And it’s ready to open to everyone tonight.
Check.in is an HTML5 web app made by Brightkite that allows you to check-in to… → Read More
When partnering with brands for you location-based network, it’s probably best to choose companies that are ubiquitous. As in, Starbucks ubiquitous. With over 17,000 store locations around the world (including over 11,000 in the U.S. alone), the chain, as everyone knows, is everywhere. So it looks like Brightkite chose wisely.
Brightkite has a new deal with with coffee chain that with give users… → Read More
Last month, Erick wrote a post calling for the creation of an open database of places. As location-based services continue to gain popularity, each of them is building up these massive databases of places themselves, and this is going to become an issue as services like Twitter and potentially Facebook attempt to federate all this data. And Erick is hardly alone in thinking about this — nearly… → Read More
A mere month and a half after launching, Brightkite says its new Group Text feature is a big hit with users in the United States.
According to the startup, which boasts more than 2 million registered users, the average Group Text user sends a whopping 17 messages per day. Already, its total usage is growing 19 percent on average per day.
Brightkite is now sending more than 20 million messages a… → Read More
A mere month and a half after launching, Brightkite says its new Group Text feature is a big hit with users in the United States.
According to the startup, which boasts more than 2 million registered users, the average Group Text user sends a whopping 17 messages per day. Already, its total usage is growing 19 percent on average per day.
Brightkite is now sending more than 20 million messages a… → Read More
Last week, I wrote about check-in fatigue. While there is a lot of excitement right now surrounding location-based apps, and particularly the ones where you “check-in” places, trying to use all of them can be exhausting, as I found out at SXSW. So what’s the solution? Do you just pick one and stick with it? You could, but there’s no guarantee that all of your friends will pick the same one as you. → Read More
I didn’t have the same problems at SXSW this year that some people did. Was it too crowded at some events? Sure. But there were plenty of alternative things to do. Did some of the keynotes bomb? Yes. But there were plenty of other things to listen to. Did AT&T fail? No. Actually, they did an awesome job keeping the network up. Instead, I had a problem of a different kind: check-in… → Read More
My dialogue with those at the forefront of mobile, location based social networking continues here at SXSW Interactive 2010. Brightkite founders Brady Becker and Martin May were kind enough to take a moment and talk with me about some current and unreleased features of their service/software called Brightkite. They also showed me an unreleased demo of their new multi check-in web app. Stay tuned… → Read More
Brightkite is tricky. Tricky and smart.
While larger than most of their location-based rivals with over 2 million users, they know that in the past year they’ve lost some momentum to the newer check-in services like Foursquare and Gowalla. So they’re trying to do something unique to swing momentum back in their favor.
Today, at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, Brightkite is unveiling its new… → Read More
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… → Read More
Yesterday, I wrote that location was going to be this year’s Twitter at SXSW. Today, my inbox exploded.
It seems that just about every company, advertiser, and even plenty of users associated with the location space emailed me with pitches, ideas, thoughts, etc. To say that space is red-hot right now, is putting it mildly. One of the companies that reached out to me was Brightkite, one of the… → Read More
Popular location-based social network Brightkite has simultaneously released mobile apps for some Nokia as well as Palm smartphones.
The release of the apps follows earlier launches of Android, BlackBerry and iPhone applications. → Read More
There’s an absolute eruption of activity around location-based services right now. Companies are getting funded left and right, new ones are popping up daily, and certain ones are seemingly starting to take off. But for a number of them, there’s a very big wall looming. And the more popular they get, the quicker they’ll reach it.
A few weeks ago, our own Jason Kincaid wrote a post about how … → Read More
When Loopt launched in 2006 it was ahead of a curve that is just starting to be recognized: Location. Now, with services like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite, and even Twitter fueling the location-based services frenzy, Loopt realized that it needed to shift its strategy a bit. Enter Pulse, a new feature launching today.
Previously, Loopt was more of a passive service — you started it up on… → Read More
Brightkite was one of the early players in the location-based social networking game, which is a space that is growing rapidly. Originally a TechStars startup, Brightkite was bought in April by Limbo and has been flying a bit under the radar as a fresh crop of location-based services have popped up including the new favorite, Foursquare.
A few weeks ago, the startup launched Brightkite 2.0 for… → Read More
Brightkite has been one of the major players in the location-based social networking game for a while now. Originally a TechStars startup, the company was bought in April by Limbo, with the goal of merging the two location services. Since that time however, Brightkite has been flying a bit under the radar as a fresh crop of location-based services have popped up including the new early-adopter… → Read More
We the people of CrunchGear would like confirm a quick, informal meet-up today at 7pm at the View Lounge at the San Francisco Marriott. The meet-up will include drinking, talking about the iPhone 3G S, and the fondling of the Palm Pre, allowing you, the reading public, to try the cellphone of the moment before the next cellphone of the moment comes out. Special thanks to BrightKite and PageOnce… → Read More
There’s a good chance you didn’t even know it was going on, but last week Microsoft hosted a competition for mobile application developers on its Silicon Valley Campus in Mountain View, and yesterday announced Networks in Motion as the winner.
The startup was one of six finalists – selected out of a pool of 50 applications – invited by Microsoft to come present ideas for applications running on… → Read More
In the nascent world of mobile social networking, there are the big dogs (Facebook and MySpace) and everyone who wants to be a big dog. Two of the puppies just got bigger. Limbo is buying Brightkite, which all the tech kids are raving about, in a nearly all-stock transaction. It will change its name to Brightkite in a re-branding move, and gain Brightkite’s engineering team and product smarts. … → Read More
We all know how tagging makes the Web a richer place (by tapping into people’s desire to categorize things and share those categories, ad-hoc though they may be, with the everyone else). Tagging brings a bottoms-up order to the Web by making information more searchable and thus easier to find. Now it is time to start tagging the world. The real world.
In fact, millions of people are already… → Read More
Brightkite, a geo-aware social network from the TechStars class of 2007, has given us a peek at the site’s upcoming iPhone application, due to appear in the App Store in the next few weeks (pending Apple’s approval process).
Brightkite’s featureset will be familiar to users of similar applications like Loopt. The app allows users to syndicate their current location to their friends, meet nearby… → Read More
Today TechStars held its third Demo Day, offering a dozen of its startups the chance to display their wares in front of a throng of investors and the media. TechStars is a seed stage investment fund similar to Y Combinator and DreamIt Ventures that gives startups a modest amount of cash (around $5,000 for each founder) and a three month mentorship in exchange for a 5% equity stake in the company. → Read More
We’ve been tracking emerging mobile-only social networks such as ZYB and Mocospace and Mig33. All have unique selling points (Mocospace is dead simple to use, ZYB has a rich set of potential users from their address book backup service, and Mig33 has a VOIP tool that has attracted over seven million users), but there’s one solid gold feature that none yet have: physical presence… → Read More
Y Combinator wasn’t the only incubator to demo their most recent startups today. Colorado-based TechStars also brought their startups on stage – ten of them – to give the audience a first look at what they’ve been up to all summer. Each startup gave 5% of their equity in exchange for $15,000, operational support, office space and mentoring. Most of these companies are… → Read More
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