Geolocation services come of age. Jason Wilson, co-founder of Platial, in San Francisco on Thursday (iPhone photo by JD Lasica). Platial helped pioneer place-based social networking This is the first of a multi-part series on geolocation startups and services. Target audience: Entrepreneurs, founders, startups, geolocation services, mobile ad networks, businesses, educators, journalists, general public.
For years, entrepreneurs, tech observers and funders have known two things about the geolocation space: It holds an enormous amount of promise, and it’s taking an awfully long time to get there. Geolocation startups are hot in Silicon Valley right now, from Zkatter, a San Francisco-based startup from British young gun Matt Hagger that wants you to capture and share moments in real time through mobile video, to Findery, the venture-backed San Francisco startup from Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake that wants you to leave notes, media and digital objects for others at specific locations.
What’s my connection with geoloco? 2 February 2013. Qwiki - Storytelling. Coming soon to your iPhone | interest graph marketing. | Picle. Storycam - broadcast your stories. Startups Skip Video, Hang Hopes On Shareable Multimedia. When Instagram joined Facebook last April, a race to crown a “Instagram for Video” revved into full throttle. With Instagram's $1 billion price tag fresh in their minds, investors rushed to fund or acquire a piece of what seemed to be the next step in the evolution of social media.
First, we shared our thoughts. Then we shared our photos. Next, we would all want to share our videos. And then, just as drastically as social video apps had taken off, they flopped. Viddy and Socialcam, two of the most popular social video apps, went from together having more than 100 million active monthly users in June, according to AppData, to less than 5 million in December. Video no longer looked to be instafuel for the next Instagram. Music, photos, video, slideshows, audio--simultaneously. “It’s more than a niche,” says Doug Imbruce, the founder of a startup called Qwiki that automatically compiles multimedia presentations.
Qwiki's app automatically compiles a multimedia presentation like this one. Startups Skip Video, Hang Hopes On Shareable Multimedia | interest graph marketing.