Meet the Father of Group Messaging – Upoc
Cynics say everything is derivative. The ignorant never know the difference.
But sometimes it’s worth looking back at what came before, if only to illuminate history for those who simply don’t know, but should.
Case in point: What’s hotter in tech than ‘group messaging’ in all it’s unvaried forms? (Forget group buying a minute.) Answer: not much. GroupMe, groupflier, Beluga, Fast Society, Kik, even Google. These are some of the players lately giving users the ability to communicate over their phones, via text, to many people in one shot. Another popular use is collecting your friends into groups, much like an email list – situational text communities if you will…
WhosHere? Two Billion Free Text Messages, That’s Who
I’ve been wondering what happened to WhosHere, and all at once a friend pinged me about them and I’m sent a news bulletin trumpeting how myRete (developer of WhosHere) has delivered its 2 billionth free message on behalf us its 2.5 million members. Nice.
So what is it? As the company states:
WhosHere is the first mobile social networking app for the iPhone to let users meet new people and interact based on proximity. The application introduces a user to others with whom they have something in common. When a user finds someone interesting, they can send free text and image messages and make free VOIP calls. All this is done without disclosing any personal information unless the user chooses to provide it.
..
Surprise! SoLoMo is Hot!
The Wall Street Journal reports today that the floodgates held back by VC stinginess, myopia and ignorance have been loosed following excitement over – yep – mobile social … or social mobile + local … or social local mobile if you like.
At least in the Valley, where these things tend to happen, pushing and shoving is going on to get a piece of several startups in the space (if SoLoMo can be considered one space, and we think it can).
“We would have people show up at our offices every other day wanting to meet while we were trying to get work done,” said Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom. Since launching in October, the service has nearly three million users, he said.
In addition, Yobongo Inc., a three-week-old iPhone app that lets users chat with people located in their geographic area, said Wednesday it raised $1.35 million. In January a group-texting service called GroupMe said it raised $10.6 million.
For the whole story check it here. And see their nifty chart below:…
5 Questions for Grant Ritchie of Locationary
This is the tenth in a series of Q&As with leaders / up-and-comers in the local space.
Who he is: Grant Ritchie, CEO of Locationary
What he does: A serial entrepreneur, Ritchie is a lawyer and technologist whose day-to-day includes providing Locationary oversight, guidance and direction over operations and technology systems. Prior to Locationary, Grant was a commercial and technology lawyer at a large Toronto firm and was part of the founding team that built and launched several online businesses including Moola.com (a game network with over 430,000 registered members) and CanadianHotelGuide.com…
Examiner.com Bets on Real IDs with Facebook Comments
Examiner.com continues to roll. Along with several others including TechCrunch it has implemented the next phase of Facebook’s Comments plugin. The somewhat controversial updated system integrates relevant, high‐quality, and authentic comments to publishers and sites that will be reciprocated on Facebook. Ah, the virtuous recirculation; the circle of SEO wonderfulness…
GroupMe Launches ‘Joinable’ Groups (Pssst, groupflier Already Has Them!)
We’ve been over this before: while at AOL in the ’90s I failed to get approval for something I dubbed “Broadcast IM” — the ability to send instant messages via IM (AIM) to more than one person simultaneously, with each user’s response seen by everyone. Kinda like a listserv. Kinda like, yeah, Twitter.
Anyway, a few years later along came the wonderful (for its time) Upoc — group mobile texting and voice messaging. Then the tech bubble and subsequent mobile innovation collapse and general malaise among Americans regarding their use of cellphones beyond blabbing. I feared data on cellphones would become “soccer” – popular everywhere else in the world but too difficult with T9 for lazy Americans. Tick Tock… Hello iPhone. At last things began to really change, as we all now know…
Geolocated Insta-Deals Demand You Buy Nearby NOW!
So you want to be on the receiving end of the latest revolution in capitalism: I’m speaking of daily deals of course. You’ve got lots of options, some of which are critiqued on this site, and some not yet. And one that doesn’t actually exist so I made it up – NeMeNo.
And now LivingSocial has done something very expected, as mentioned before, called Instant Deals…
5 Questions for Jack Eisenberg of MapDing
This is the ninth in a series of Q&As with leaders / up-and-comers in the local space.
Who is he: Jack Eisenberg
What does he do: One of two founders of MapDing (formed last September and self-funded) Jack calls himself a serial entrepreneur who wants to make life easier through mobile technology. “In a previous life, I published a year’s worth of research across Japan and the Netherlands on immigration. I also worked in city government, political consulting, and as an ESL teacher at a non-profit,” he said. The Chicagoan also notes “I will always be an autodidact.” OK!…
Shop Savvier with Groupon Integration
ShopSavvy just got savvier… or at least dealier.
Continuing the trend of deal-0-day sites integrating with other destinations and apps, ShopSavvy is partnering with couponing giant Groupon to deliver offfers direct to ShopSavvy smartyphone users…
WHERE Helps You Bump Into a Perfect Place
Ever debated about where to go and what to do? Sure you have. Where once you had to leave it to your brain and powers of persuasion you can now, finally, leave it to a machine. (And maybe a “bump”.)
That machine, evolved today by WHERE, Inc., is known as Perfect Places (seems every startup’s got “Place” in their name somewhere these days) which aims to help you and friends peacefully find cool things to do together by recommending nearby venues based on shared interests or tastes. This is a further improvement of WHERE’s proprietary recommendation engine, in use by four million people…
Crowdsourced Mapping Leads Your Cell to the Signal
Classic modern quandary: Travel to the lake for a little R&R even though there might not be a cell signal connecting your to precisely what you’re trying to briefly escape?
Sure, you could count on the carrier’s coverage map and take your chances. Orrrrr you could get hip and look to a crowd-data-sourcing-experiment being conducted by Staircase 3, Inc. ..
Deal of the Day: LivingSocial to Distribute Local Bargains on Examiner.com
Yahoo Local doesn’t have it. CitySearch doesn’t. Patch.com? Nope. Seems Examiner.com is the first “local service” striking a deal to distribute LivingSocial’s popular group-buying deals.
Announced today, LivingSocial will distribute it’s up to 90%-discounted deals to 130 of Examiner.com’s network of 240 local markets…
Snapshot: Mobile-Social-Local by the Numbers
I came upon some interesting numbers on mobile social media worth sharing. Lisa Braziel at ignite social media pulled together data from a number of different studies of late to tell a bit of a story about the recent evolution in mobile-social. Unfortunately, like most research of breadth, it’s a piece of the past and not a realtime reflection. So keep that in mind while digesting.
SNL Kagan looked at location-based services activity between ’09 and ’10, finding that usership almost tripled. Braziel concluded this, in addition to other data points, indicate 2011 could be the year of mobile social — where it goes truly mainstream. Take a look at the graphic from eMarketer…
AOL: Time To Pack It In Or Patch Things Up?
Wow, everyone’s ganging up on Patch these days. No surprise, since it’s tied so closely to Aol., a company that has been declared dead so many times by frustrated naysayers that if it ever did expire nobody would believe the news. Yeah, Patch probably gets the dark shade of that negative halo…
Hello Privacy, Meet the New ‘Presence’ – Location
[/caption]
Many years ago, when you were probably a tween, i was at AOL (sorry, Aol.) and a degree away from the following nugget. I think the folks involved included Ted , Barry Appelman and maybe Eric Bosco. I could have that a bit wrong but roll with me – I’m not the official techstorian and they’ll tell me if I’m wrong…
5 Questions for Lenny Rachitsky of Localmind
This is the seventh in a series of Q&As with leaders/up-n-comers in the local space.
Who is he: Lenny Rachitsky, 29
What does he do: C-Everything of Localmind, as-yet-launched startup funded by Year One Labs, an incubator out of Montreal
Describe Localmind as if a friend’s mother asked, “So what is this Localmind?
I’m glad you asked, Mrs. Mom…
Location-Based Firewall Blocks Content Here, Not There
Need to control what content gets through that iPhone based on where the user is standing? Welcome the very government-y sounding “Mobile Active Defense” from M.A.D. Partners, LLC.
This mobile firewall with “contents filtering mechanisms” enforces controls based upon the physical location of the mobile device using the company’s Mobile Enterprise Compliance and Security Server (MECS) for controlled access, security and compliance enforcement mechanism echoing “fixed” policies.
..
Civic Networking: The Next Next Thing?
This is the first in a series of guest posts by thought leaders in the local arena. We asked where local-social media might go in 2011.
By Tom Grubisich
Some Cassandras are forecasting the end of social networking. I will keep my ear next to my computer for the sound of some 600 million people migrating to the next big thing, but don’t think Facebook faces doomsday any time soon. Or Foursquare, Yelp or Gowalla, to name just a few of the proliferating social networks that have claimed a piece of Web space. But I do think social networking is on the threshold of an important evolution that will both affirm its basic value but also take it into new and ever more beneficial directions. Shaping this transformation are economic, technological and societal forces that are propelling people toward a path with many entry points but one destination: to act together and to do so smarter and locally…
After Three Years, Examiner.com Looks to a Future Off the ‘Farm’
Rick Robinson’s Turf Talk column appears every Wednesday.
Tumbling into toddler-hood and growing-like-nuts, Examiner(we’re-not-a-content-mill).com celebrates its third birthday this week. Over that short time the network of sites has generated nearly a billion and a half page views. Street Fight turned to woolly-chinned Examiner CEO Rick Blair to get a little insight on the direction of the 3-year-old company…