It was a full house with hundreds of apps and products on display Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco this week. One of the teams that caught our eye was Chatscene, an app for meeting and finding people nearby.
While there are many messaging apps out there, Chatscene hopes that its hyperlocal focus will set it apart from the pack. The platform makes it easy to find and message people at the same location as you.
Chatscene was originally designed as a dating app, but co-founder and CEO Rob Chinery says that people are increasingly using it to find friends at concerts or sporting events.
He said they also get “a lot of people that just want to be nosy. People like people watching.”
Chinery said they’ve made it different than Foursquare’s Swarm because “there’s no check-in with us. Everything is done in the background.”
When asked about privacy concerns, he said that people can turn off the location-sharing at any time. He also pointed out that you can only see the locations of people who were already at the same venue, to prevent stalkers from finding and following someone.
Launched in August, Chinery is targeting college campuses and hopes that the app will grow via word of mouth.
For more about Chatscene, watch the above video.