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 company’s two founders moved on long before the pivot to group texting was announced, starting a new venture dubbed Forkly (our review).
Now, a reader tells us, it appears Brightkite (which remained the name even after their 2009 merger with Limbo) is changing course again. → 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 several years ago, but as we’ve said believe it is now a commodity. Expect to see less and less emphasis on checking in on Brightkite, and associated streams of user content. Where appropriate, we’ll support checking in to third party services like Facebook and Foursquare.” → 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 writes.
So what is Forkly? Essentially, it’s a recommendation app for finding food. But unlike the popular Foodspotting, which focuses on individual dish pictures, Forkly is focusing on personalized restaurant recommendations based on your own tastes. → 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 location — but going forward, they’ll be doing that without two founders, Brady Becker and Martin May.
May actually left a couple months ago, as Brightkite noted with a farewell post. But Becker has also left, we’re hearing. And his bio page seems to confirm this. And while they may be out of Brightkite, they’re not out of the location game, we’re also hearing. → 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 had done until then.
Today, they’re ramping up their badging efforts. → 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 ads to reality (pun intended). Rather than showing a Google ad at the bottom of the Brightkite view screen when you see a circle in AR view, there are now giant logos for the brands in the AR view itself. For example, see the Starbucks VIA logo in the image in this post. As you can see, when you’re near a retailer than carries VIA, the logo will appear on the screen. Clicking on the logo will give you more info below that including links and videos that you can play inline. → 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 a venue on multiple location-based services. Those services including Foursquare, Gowalla, and of course, Brightkite. This works by taking advantage of those services’ APIs alongside some backend place matching that Brightkite does on its end. The result is being able to check-in across multiple services in a few seconds rather than taking a few minutes to load up the various apps and hit the required buttons on each to check-in. → 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 of the service deals on drinks. They’ve also worked with Starbucks to create branded badges for the first time, moving into the virtual good realm that rivals Foursquare and Gowalla have been exploring for a while. Brightkite says it’s the biggest brand integration they’ve done so far. → 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 all the companies involved in the space talk about such an idea enthusiastically, and regularly. Yet no one seems to be doing much about it just yet.
Back in March, I moderated a panel featuring key members of Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Twitter, and Plancast. When I raised the idea of a unified place database, all seemed to be in agreement that it would be a good thing. Even when I brought up that their own place databases were a way to keep their users around, everyone seemed to think there were better ways to do that, and that the benefits of a unified place database would outweigh any costs. Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley reiterated that to Erick last month, saying that a “‘Facebook Connect of places’ would be amazing.” → 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 month, nearly half of which are regular SMS messages. → 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 month, nearly half of which are regular SMS messages. → 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. So the guys behind Brightkite have a better solution.
Check.in is an application that lets you check-in with multiple services at the same time. Or, as they put it, it’s “on check-in to rule them all.” While the team showed it to me briefly at SXSW (and CrunchGear got some video of it in action), they’ve actually given me access to it now to play around with. And I’m happy to report that it works great. → 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 fatigue.
Seeing as location was this year’s Twitter at SXSW, and seeing as I write a lot about location, I wanted to try to use as many of the services as I could during the actual conference. I drastically underestimated how much work that would actually be. → 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 for some follow-up conversations soon. → 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 Group Text service. It’s both a feature on the website and a standalone application in the App Store (it should be available shortly). With it, Brightkite is latching onto one of the most popular and fast growing categories in mobile applications: group texting. Unlike regular text messaging, this type of app allows you to message many people all at once (and go back and forth). And better, in a world where cell providers are still managing to rip-off users with their text message bundles or $0.15 rate per-text, group texting is absolutely free. → 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 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
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 earliest hot location players.
CMO and co-founder Rob Lawson admits that the network has been “pretty quiet for a while,” but hints at some exciting stuff coming up for March (yes, around the time of SXSW). But he also wanted to share some things they’re working on right now, and a few interesting bits of data. → 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 Facebook is poised to take over the geolocation space. In it, he makes a number of good points, but there’s one that’s particularly interesting to me. “At most, there are probably a few dozen people who you’d like to share your location with,” he writes. Overall, that’s likely true to a varying degree depending on who you are, but it points to a larger problem I’m starting to notice with these location services: The more people you follow on them, the less useful the service is. This is location’s social paradox. → 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 some device and it kept track of where you were. Other users could see where you were if they opened the app too, but generally it wasn’t about pinging your friends to let them know where you are and what you were doing. But Pulse makes Loopt much more of an active service. It recommends hot places, hot events, and lets you know what your friends are up to. → Read More
