This post was written by guest contributor Paul Bragiel, founder of Meetro, a location-aware instant messaging platform that was DeadPooled last month. Bragiel is also the founder hosted forum solution Lefora. See our coverage of these two companies here, along with our first post on Meetro in August 2005. Also see our post titled What To Do With Failed Startup IP?. In the spirit of openness, I write this post on what we did wrong at Meetro – a post mortem of sorts. You don’t see this often enough in the startup world even though the majority of startups go belly-up. Hell, there are probably a few today that will go away with a whimper. So much knowledge is lost. If you’ve had similar experiences, I encourage you to share them over at Lefora. To those of you not familiar with Meetro, we were one of the first location-based social networks. We figured out where you were physically and then we would tell you else was around you in real-time. You would then be able to instant message with them, check out their profiles, and hopefully meet up. Other functionality included telling you about restaurants close by, media created nearby, and various local information that pertained to your location. We also supported all your various instant messaging protocols (AIM, MSN, Yahoo) and a slew of other social features. Even with a robust product we simply couldn’t capture enough market share. So here are the major problems we had that, in the end, we couldn’t overcome. There were, of course, mini fires and random things but every startup goes through those. I have a feeling some of the other location-based startups out there right now are experiencing the same things. Most importantly, there was a “location problem”. It’s really hard to grow a product that’s 100% focused on where you physically are. Tons of companies have tried this before and most of them have died. We, of course, were cocky and had to give it a try. There was just something so sexy about the idea that you could load up a piece of software and it would tell you about someone nearby who was interesting to you. Someone will crack this and make billions of dollars on it. I can only hope to be involved in some shape or form, since it’s an itch that hasn’t gone away for me. → Read More

Meetro is finally coming out of the closet with the hosted forum solution we anticipated last October, and it’s pretty much what we expected it to be: a white label platform like Ning except without all that social networking humbo jumbo, just good old fashioned discussion threads. The product, once codenamed “Makaha”, is now officially known as Lefora. The team behind Meetro has effectively abandoned Meetro for Lefora, dropping all development and support for “the world’s first location-aware IM client and real-time social network.” Much of Lefora’s feature set should be familiar to anyone who used forums in the 90s (they haven’t changed much since then). But it also supports capabilities not found with many modern-day forum solutions, such as the ability to easily embed YouTube videos, files, and images. Lefora uses Amazon S3 storage to host files uploaded to its forums, currently with no storage caps. Lefora also surfaces the hottest topics and most recent activity on a special homepage, in addition to providing the standard structural overview of a forum. Membership to one Lefora forum can be easily extended to membership of another, since all of them access the same user base. The look and feel of Lefora forums can be customized extensively with CSS modifications, pre-made themes, and color adjustments. Categories and widgets, such as those for polls and hot topics, can be managed via drag-n-drop. The company’s working on an API that will allow developers to add their own widgets to the gallery, although you can already add your own custom, HTML-based widgets. Moderation is an important element of forum management and Lefora has decided to build their own spam detection engine from the ground up. The engine is similar to Akismet and that used by Gmail in that it leverages data from many properties to detect and eliminate spam more effectively. When we first wrote about Meetro’s plans, many commenters were skeptical that the web needed a Blogger for forums. CEO Paul Bragiel insists that forums are still very popular, with the top 2,000 forums boasting over 200m registered users. He believes Lefora will not only make it easier to create forums, but it will “light them up” as well since the platform has been designed with SEO optimization in mind. Threads are given URLs that reveal their topic, as with blogging platforms like WordPress, instead of ones that look suspicious to search engines. If → Read More