Rummble has raised $800k from m8 Capital. The social mobile location startup will use the new funding to further develop its recommendation engine for “finding places nearby”, focusing in particular on User Experience. The round follows on from Rummble’s previous angel investment.
Notably, it’s also the first investment of London-based m8 Capital, a majority-owned affiliate of AGC Equity Partners, which is targeting mobile startups and technology. As a result, m8′s Joe Kim will be joining Rummble’s board as Chairman. → Read More
Rummble has raised $800k from m8 Capital. The social mobile location startup will use the new funding to further develop its recommendation engine for “finding places nearby”, focusing in particular on User Experience. The round follows on from Rummble’s previous angel investment.
Notably, it’s also the first investment of London-based m8 Capital, a majority-owned affiliate of AGC Equity Partners, which is targeting mobile startups and technology. As a result, m8′s Joe Kim will be joining Rummble’s board as Chairman. → Read More
Social mobile location startup Rummble has added the ability for members to ‘check-in’ and recommend places via Twitter, rather than having to use the company’s Android or iPhone app or browser-based version.
It does this through a bit of nifty but fairly crude sentiment analysis, turning any tweet with the hashtag #rummble into something the service will understand. So, for example “Hanging out in Joes Cafe, 9th Ave, NYC. Great coffee and free wifi. 7/10 #rummble” would be interpreted as a check-in to Joes Cafe, giving it a Rummble of 7/10 noting the “great coffee and free wifi”
Obviously, the more information you can cram into 140 characters using trigger words such as “hanging out” or “just arrived”, along with the bare facts, the more accurate Rummble’s sentiment analysis will be. And, as noted, you’ll need to remember to include that #rummble hash tag. → Read More
Social mobile location startup Rummble has added the ability for members to ‘check-in’ and recommend places via Twitter, rather than having to use the company’s Android or iPhone app or browser-based version.
It does this through a bit of nifty but fairly crude sentiment analysis, turning any tweet with the hashtag #rummble into something the service will understand. So, for example “Hanging out in Joes Cafe, 9th Ave, NYC. Great coffee and free wifi. 7/10 #rummble” would be interpreted as a check-in to Joes Cafe, giving it a Rummble of 7/10 noting the “great coffee and free wifi”
Obviously, the more information you can cram into 140 characters using trigger words such as “hanging out” or “just arrived”, along with the bare facts, the more accurate Rummble’s sentiment analysis will be. And, as noted, you’ll need to remember to include that #rummble hash tag.
It’s been a busy time for the startup. At last week’s South by Southwest Interactive, the company unveiled an improved Rummble friends list for their iPhone and Android apps which lets users see not only the updates of their Rummble friends but also people they’re following on Twitter and other location-based services such as Brightkite, Gowalla and Foursquare. → Read More
The rapid evolution of mobile phones, both on a hardware and a software level, combined with a surge in application storefront releases, deployments of higher-capacity network infrastructure and recent developments in positioning technologies could drive revenues from mobile location-based services to more than $12.7 billion by 2014, according to a new report published by Juniper Research.
The report found that while MLBS had experienced a number of false dawns from 2000 to 2007, improvements in handset UIs together with easier consumer access to an range of app distribution channels had led to greater interest from service providers in providing mobile location-based applications. → Read More
Rummble, the location-based social ratings mobile startup, has just released a new version of its iPhone app containing what is effectively its answer to Foursquare.
The feature is called “Local Heroes” and is billed as “the fun side of Rummbling” but it is quite obviously going to be Rumbble’s way of attacking the buzz surrounding the game of checking-in and becoming a “Mayor” of a location as propogated by the New York-based Foursquare. Local Heroes is a feature listed under “Empire” which suggests that there will be yet more gaming elements introduced.
Rummble has until now relied on its users to create content about places they visit and rate their friends’ ability to do so – what it calls the Rummble trust network. But clearly that’s not quite enough in the face of big players like Qype, dominant in Europe for local reviews, and Yelp in the U.S.
So Rummble is entering the social location gaming pushed by the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla. → Read More
[UK] Social mobile location startup Rummble has gradually been updating its service over the last few weeks to meet the oncoming competition from new kids of the block like Foursquare. As we prefaced recently in the Summer, today it’s launched a new Android app for its service (download here). Rummble has had an iPhone app for a while and a Windows Mobile version is in the works.
Furthermore it has also implemented the Twitter’s new Geotagging API which provides accessible location context to tweets from Rummble check-ins and reviews. This works with new versions of twitter clients like Tweetie, Tweetdeck and Seesmic Web, which launched support for the Twitter Geotagging API earlier this week. That means Rummble users can geotag tweets with their current location (if they choose to share it) and any venue in the world. This real-time geo-data is consumable by everyone on Twitter, regardless of whether they are signed up to Rummble or not.
This is one of the first social apps (outside of twitter clients) to use geo tweets. It adds geo lat/long into tweets for Twitter’s Location-api for status updates posted out of Rummble. This covers the user’s location, check-ins and tweets posted of Rummble reviews of a bar or cafe etc. Tweets from the Gowalla and Foursquare aps are geotagged if the setting has been switched on in twitter settings. → Read More
Social mobile location startup Rummble has gradually been updating its service over the last few weeks to meet the oncoming competition from new kids of the block like Foursquare. As we prefaced recently in the Summer, today it’s launched a new Android app for its service (download here). Rummble has had an iPhone app for a while and a Windows Mobile version is in the works.
Furthermore it has also implemented the Twitter’s new Geotagging API which provides accessible location context to tweets from Rummble check-ins and reviews. This works with new versions of twitter clients like Tweetie, Tweetdeck and Seesmic Web, which launched support for the Twitter Geotagging API earlier this week. That means Rummble users can geotag tweets with their current location (if they choose to share it) and any venue in the world. This real-time geo-data is consumable by everyone on Twitter, regardless of whether they are signed up to Rummble or not.
This is one of the first social apps (outside of twitter clients) to use geo tweets. It adds geo lat/long into tweets for Twitter’s Location-api for status updates posted out of Rummble. This covers the user’s location, check-ins and tweets posted of Rummble reviews of a bar or cafe etc. Tweets from the Gowalla and Foursquare aps are geotagged if the setting has been switched on in twitter settings. → Read More
It’s pretty obvious that wherever you are in the world, you’re usually looking for the best bar, hotel or venue you can get for your money. And all the information is out there now, especially on live streams like Twitter. The problem is searching it and finding it. So if you could somehow match tweets to actual venues you could also use that data to rate the venue itself. The other thing you could do would be to create trust around the actual users which submitted the information.
Now, mobile startup Rummble is trying to crack this nut with a beta product called Tremors. This is a new Twitter app which does the following: it attempts to match tweets to venues, based on a combination of fuzzy word matching, the general location the tweet came from and then a rough estimation of whether the Tweet was positive or negative about the venue. Right now it works in New York and Austin, Texas (the SXSW venue) and London. These are a natural fit as they are likely to have a critical mass of Twitter users – San Francisco is coming. → Read More
Always nice for a reporter to bump into a developer who builds mobile applications for startups and gives you a live preview and details of yet-to-be-announced stuff. No worries, he has permission to talk about the apps (he thinks). The man I’m talking about is Julián Moreno from development house Droiders, and he and his team have been hacking away at some fine apps for the Android platform: Kyte, Rummble, TransDroid and an ebook reader for the Google Books database. → Read More
After hinting that it would do so last June, Google’s mobile team has released a Geolocation API for Google Gears. This works both on mobile phones and laptops running Gears, but developers will find it most useful for mobile applications. Unfortunately, they will be limited in that regard because Google Gears Mobile still only works on Windows Mobile phones, even though an Android phone is about to launch. (Maybe now that a new Android SDK is out, the mobile team can finally figure out how to make Gears work on Android too). Google figured out how to find a mobile phone’s location for its own mobile apps, such as Google Maps, and is now opening that technology up as an API to outside developers. Two UK-based mobile startups—Rummble and lastminute— have already built the API into their services. The Google Mobile blog explains: These two apps make use of the Gears Geolocation API. The API can determine your location using nearby cell-towers or GPS for your mobile device or your computer’s IP address for your laptop. Google provides this service for free to both developers and users. Gears is available on IE Mobile on mobile and Internet Explorer and Firefox on desktop. To use the location-enabled lastminute.com and Rummble web apps you will need a Windows Mobile device that supports GPS or cell-id lookup (for example the Samsung Blackjack II and HTC Touch Dual, see supported devices FAQ). We are working hard to bring Gears to more mobile platforms, such as Android and others. There is also more detailed information on the API on the Google Code blog. CrunchBase Information Rummble Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Europe is a hotbed of mobile startups right now, so appropriately enough the Mobile 2.0 event which started in San Francisco is putting on a one-day international event tomorrow in Barcelona which focuses on mobile startups, dubbed Mobile 2.0 Europe. I’ll be moderating a panel there, hosting a TechCrunch networking party and we now have the exclusive on the early stage start-ups selected for the competition: aka-aki (from Germany) focuses on Proximity Networking, as in mobile social networking with Bluetooth-sensing capabilities which are pretty interesting. For instance, it will build a network of encounters with other Aka-Aki members even before you sign up, populating your network automatically. We’ve written a lot about them here. Dial2Do (from Ireland) lets you do common tasks by calling a number and speaking. You can send email or SMS and post to Twitter for instance. It asks you two or three questions like “Do what?”, “To who?”. You say what you want, it recognizes what you said and completes the task. That would probably make it pretty handy for those tasks you’d like to do while driving but now can’t due to the increasing number of laws which band people from talking on the phone while driving. Shout’Em (from Croatia) is a “roll your own” hosted mobile social network which has an Android client already. The video looks slick at least, but it will be interesting to hear more about them at the conference. youlynx (from Spain) is a social media network, not unlike a mobile YouTube, but you can send pictures as well. It would be good to see if they have any plans to extend this idea as currently its a fairly simple video sharing site for mobile content. Zipipop (from Finland) is a start-up that is developing Zipiko, a mobile service for sorting your social life on the go, as in, broadcast where you’ll be at a certain time in the day. Think Dopplr, but on a much more granular level perhaps. Rummble (from UK) is a location based discovery tool and social search platform we wrote about here and here. Rummble’s idea is that location will soon be a “given” (via FireEagle, Google or GPS) on the mobile, as will social networking, so the value lies in filtering all this data to make it relevant in the mobile experience. ViaMobility (from France) is a mobile widgets and applications startup with a → Read More
Mobile social network startup Rummble launched a Facebook application today. People still can’t sign up direct from the main site as it remains in closed beta, but by adding the FaceBook application they can. Beta testers can signup when they load the app. This allows them to share their favourite places with friends. The mobile site is at http://m.rummble.com. Why is Rummble doing is this way? Founder Andrew Scott tell me “we’re opening up in a controlled manner”. I’m not sure if that means they don’t have enough server grunt yet or not, but it might be worth checking out. Here’s my previous review of Rummble. → Read More
Chuck a stone into the UK startup scene at the moment and the chances of you hitting an entrepreneur peddling a site which allows people to share and rate things – anything in fact – in a local area, are pretty damn high. Let’s look at one list: Welovelocal, Revmap, Wehanghere, FridayCities, Qype, Tipped and TrustedPlaces. And I’m sure I have missed a few others. Admittedly not all of these sites have significant funding. Some are little more than Google Map mashups just ticking over on a server. But it’s quite clear that not all will survive, and the US market, which is further down this road, is providing an early view of what might happen next. In the US right now there is a shake-out happening amongst sites which allow people to create local reviews. Judy’s Book is shutting down operations. Other players have fallen in the last year, including Zipingo, while Insider Pages was sold for a tiny profit to CitySearch. One of the few remaining, and doing OK, is Yelp, despite fierce competition from Yahoo! and Google. So does the shakeout in the US provide an indication of where the UK is headed? Suddenly the US market seems to have worked out that local reviews might have something to do with the mobile phone. Whrrl is a new, principally mobile, service that allows users to aggregate information as they visit different places. Reviews based on location are filtered based on ratings via the accompanying social network. Some commentators are calling it ‘Yelp plus Twitter’. A wiki format in Whrrl enables users to write reviews, add photos etc. But the key with Whrrl is that you can filter your searches based on your trusted network before expanding the search outside that network. This Facebook-like approach means users have a lot of control over the information they publish and make visible to their network. Client software on the phone is supported on about 10 handsets for the AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile networks. Whrrl’s parent company, Pelago, has raised $7.4 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Jeff Bezos and Trilogy Equity Partners. Over here in the UK Rummble, founded by Andrew Scott, is doing something similar, but with a twist. Currently in closed beta and privately funded, Rummble could be the Whrrrl for the UK. You build your social network on Rummble with a basic relationship (i.e. → Read More
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