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
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 favorite, Foursquare. But now Brightkite looks ready to strike back at the competition with Brightkite 2.0.
It’s not entirely clear when Brightkite 2.0 will launch, but indications are that it will be soon. Users have been receiving notices about it. We’ve obtained a whole bunch of screenshots purported to be of the new version. We’ve reached out to the company to verify these, but they definitely look legitimate. → 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. Limbo CEO Jonathon Linner will remain as CEO, while Brightkite founders Martin May and Brady Becker will take over product management and design.
Meanwhile, Limbo brings a lot of cash to the table, having just raised a previously undisclosed $9 million round of financing in January, 2009. Nexit Ventrures was the lead, and existing investors Azure Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and New Enterprise Associates also participated. Brightkite, meanwhile, started out as a TechStars startup and was funded with just $1 million in angel money. → Read More
We’ve been bullish about location-based social networks for quite awhile now, especially since Apple announced that it would open up the iPhone to developers. And with two significant developments in this space just this week (more on that below), we thought it would be a good time to take a step back and look at the options currently available through the Apple App Store.
What makes a “location-based” social network different than a normal one? At least as things stand today, location-based social networks run primarily on smartphones that have the ability to determine a user’s current location, usually by leveraging GPS or cellular tower triangulation. The social network then uses your location to reveal nearby friends and places of interest. See our Location Technologies Primer for additional information.
Currently there are six major location-based social networks available for the iPhone (see our comparison chart). All of them tell you how far away other members are from you, with most focused on helping you find your friends but some designed primarily for discovering strangers. A few of them chart the location of your friends’ on an interactive map (something I actually think all of them should do). They provide a wide range of privacy settings, but all will stop reporting your location when you simply close the application (Apple has yet to release its push notification system that will let these apps constantly report your location in the background). They also vary widely in how precisely they identify the locations of other members, although all but one of them work anywhere in the United States.
After testing this entire batch, I’ve come to the conclusion that none of them is quite ready to achieve mainstream usage. I believe most, if not all, of the following things must happen before location-based social networking becomes the new “killer app”: → Read More
Facebook and MySpace, the two largest social networks, eagerly launched new iPhone applications last Friday. Both quickly shot up the top apps list. Apple has since turned off the download count feature, but Facebook is no. 7 on the free list, MySpace is no. 11. But while both applications are useful for heavy users, they won’t drive new users to the services because they failed to leverage the killer iPhone feature – location awareness. The applications are pretty good mobile versions of the standard experience. MySpace, which we reviewed last week, provides users with most key features of the service, and they’ve added some nice touches like the ability to upload photos from the iPhone camera. You can download the application here (and add me as a friend). Facebook’s iPhone app is clearly better. They had a bit of a head start with their web app last year that was at the time the finest example of an iPhone-specific website. The new iPhone app was created by the same guy – Joe Hewitt – and includes deeper integration with the phone. Tap on a friend’s name and call them. Or use the included Facebook chat application and skip those text messages. One big problem with Facebook on the iPhone – it takes forever to load and the application crawls, just like the web version. Location? Hello? But both MySpace and Facebook miss the real opportunity to drive usage growth on the iPhone – location awareness. The reason? Privacy concerns. The lost opportunity? Huge potential user growth and connections. Social networks today rely on friends of friends or real world connections to drive growth. But a handful of iPhone-only social networks actually help drive new connections in the real world. And the backbone of those applications is location awareness. I’ve written about this opportunity repeatedly in the last year. In February I speculated on the demand for an iPhone-only social network to drive real world social interactions: “I think an iPhone-only social network…would be a huge hit…if it had presence awareness and was able to tell you both where your friends are and what they are up to. And also let you meet new people around you who were open to it.” In April I saw a demo of the new product Loopt was building for the iPhone. It had all the features I suggested, and more. Users of these new → Read More
It’s not official quite yet, but the iPhone App Store is live and you can download version 2.0 of the iPhone software – which is all you need to run the 552 applications currently available. We’ve been gathering videos and overviews of many of the applications and have held them until now. We received demo vidoes for dozens of applications, ranging from basic games to complex GPS-enabled social networking applications. Below are some of our favorites. Among the apps that we didn’t include below (primarily because of their simplicity) are Recorder (a voice recorder), Movies (movie showtimes), and iMaze (a basic maze game). Social Networking On The iPhone: The iPhone, with cult-like users and location aware technology, is the perfect social networking device. Earlier this year we speculated that someone would emerge with a killer social networking app for the iPhone. It turns out that there are lots of contenders. Loopt Loopt – We’ve been tracking Loopt’s efforts around their iPhone application for months now. In April we posted early screen shots of the app without saying who had built it. Think of Loopt as a simple social network to find local businesses, message friends and send status updates with where you are (using the iPhones location technology). And a key difference with Loopt and many of the other networks below: you can meet new people who are nearby, if they choose to share that information. If everyone used this, you could see who’s single in a bar before you approach them (and flirt with them by phone first), and know the first name and job of everyone at that cocktail hour at the tech conference. We’re big fans of Loopt, and will have more news on them later today. For now, download the free application here. Limbo Limbo – Limbo is another geo-aware social network that behaves like a mashup of Twitter, Loopt, and Whrrl. One of the app’s most compelling features is its grid-like diagram that visually groups your friends according to what they’re doing (for example, all of your friends that are Out Drinking will be lumped together, even if they aren’t necessarily drinking in the same place). The app accomplishes this feat by forcing users to select from a predefined hierarchal list of activities (while this might sound restrictive, the list is pretty comprehensive). This categorization allows users to see what they’re friends are up → Read More
Limbo is a San Mateo, California startup with funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Azure Capital. The purpose of the service is to auction off things like plasma TVs, iPods, cars and event tickets, with bids being placed via text messages. The hook is that the winner of the item isn’t the highest bidder. The winner of each auction is the person with the lowest unique bid for that auctioin, meaning no other person bid that exact amount. If lots of people bid $0.01 and you are the only person bidding $0.02, you win. The company is quick to issue press releases around the incredible deals that winner’s managed to get. This press release, for example, talks about a Salt Lake City woman named Sondra Peterson who won a $35,000 Hummer on a bid of $36.65. It’s not quite that simple, of course, or Limbo wouldn’t have much of a business model. Bids must be placed via text message or via regular phone. I placed a bid on the 42 inch plasma TV and it required a total of four messages – two sent and two received, to finalize it. Based on my pricing plan, that’s $0.22 on my cell phone bill, some of which Limbo will receive in revenue share. Also, the TV is a Limbo premium auction, which means I was charged an additional $0.99 for my bid. That’s a total cost to me of $1.21, and Limbo is going for more: my last text message said “Too High! Your bid of 1938c is unique, but there are 265 lower unique bids. Bid again? Rply “HDTB XX” where XX is yr bid in cents. *Bid award: 10 Loot” If I place another bid, another round of text messages will be billed to my phone along with another $0.99 bid charge. With all of these charges it isn’t hard to see how Limbo can become profitable on a per auction basis. All of these “loot” points are designed to get me to bid often as well. You get these each time you bid, and they can be traded in for tshirts and other items once you’ve accumulated enough of them. If you aren’t skeptical enough after understanding the basics, the fine print may be enough to keep you away. Auctions run for a very long time (the TV auction runs from May 15 to June 5. Such a long → Read More
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