Bethereapp. Hotels | People | Connections. Rround. Instalook App | Discover People and Photos around you in realtime. WhosHere. WhosHere. Young Start-up Hyphos Helps College Students Find Activity Partners - Liz Gannes - Social. I’ve often written here about “the social discovery opportunity” — that is, Web services that help users meet new people, but not necessarily with the intent of dating them. Sites like Tagged and MyYearbook have started to move away from the people-you-already-know scene of Facebook, but I think there’s still lots of room for innovation. If you had to bet on one environment where social discovery might work, it would probably be college campuses. High concentrations of young people with lots of energy and optimism seem like an ideal hotbed. That’s where Hyphos, a new Los Angeles-based start-up from some recent college grads, is focusing. Be warned, this is a tiny company – with only a few thousand testers — currently working on raising a seed round.
For instance, users get Groupon-esque daily emails, suggesting one person a day in their area based on common interests. Capecelatro argued that he’s tapping into a renewable resource. Hyphos Blog. Hyphos | The closest group of friends you never knew you had. Igobubble. The New Social Network: Who’s Nearby, Not Who You Know. There’s a new concept for social networking services taking root, and it’s not about re-creating your offline social graph on the Web, like Facebook does today. It’s about discovering the people who are nearby you now – the ones you probably would like to meet. This type of discovery mechanism is already being made possible by a number of services, including the checkin apps like Foursquare and Gowalla, the automated discovery of nearby folks via Sonar and Banjo, the group chatting in Yobongo, and the micro-networks that emerge through LoKast. All of these companies are playing with the idea of location-based social networks, attempting to connect you to others around you through varying means.
At this week’s TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, even more services emerged to compete in this space, too. The powerful capabilities of today’s mobile smartphones are allowing for a new kind of networking: social discovery services, not social networking services. WNM Live. Have Arrington and Conway screwed up big time with their investment in Highlight? Tonight I’m getting message after message that friend after friend has joined Highlight (the photo above is of Paul Davison showing it off to some of its first users back in December on the day it launched into a closed beta).
What is Highlight? Well, two weeks ago, in the Next Web, I named it as one of two apps that will “win” SXSW. What is it? It’s one of a new band of companies trying to own the “real time people discovery space.” Crunchbase says Highlight is a mobile ambient awareness app. Just for completeness, the competitors are Glancee, Kismet, Sonar, and Ban.jo with more coming this week (by the end of the week I’ll write up a more complete analysis of the competitors, since most of these companies, including Highlight, will ship major updates to their apps this week — I’m sure I won’t be the only one, either, given the attention these things are getting).
Why? There are a bunch of different ways to look at this: 1. 1. Some things. Have you ever thought about a doubling penny. Kismet. All The Location Apps You Have To Use At The SXSW Royal Rumble. It’s turning into a royal rumble at SXSW — the sheer number of location-based networking apps hoping to emerge from the conference as this year’s breakout hit is nearly overwhelming. What’s worse, they’re often so similar in nature, so it’s hard to discern the advantages of one over another. They can’t all be winners. Is the app for business networking or making new friends? Does it use check-in data from other networks like Facebook and Foursquare, or does it just connect you with your friends? How does the app know who’s nearby? Does it kill your battery? Below, we’ve rounded up all the hottest apps in the newly-hot, location-based networking space, so you can fill up your phone for SXSW…and beyond. To be clear, the idea for location-based social networking is hardly a new one.
While some of those same apps are still around, hoping to win the love of SXSW attendees, they’re now joined by a legion of others that have the same goal. But now, here are the new app contenders: 1. 2. 3. 5. 6. Guest post: Location-Based Services – it's game on! This ia a guest post by Justin Davies, founder of NinetyTen, a UK-based consultancy providing mobile community and location aware solutions to companies. Davies also founded the now defunct BuddyPing, an early mobile social networking community based on the realtime location of users. Not to sound too much like my grandad talking about the War, but when I was doing this, it was all about sending a text message to a person walking past Starbucks with a half price voucher. Back in my day, we had to pay for location information, none of this “SimpleGeo” or “Google Latitude” malarkey you youngsters have these days. The only phones that had a GPS chip was a prototype N95 I had to beg Nokia for, and some Blackberry phones.
Yes dear Location Based enthusiast, these are bright times, and this does finally seem to be the year of location (though, admittedly, this has been the case for the past 3 years). I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but location is big news at the moment. (Source: The Next Web) ShoutPlans - Social Calendar | Maximize Your Free Time | Events, Activities, Interests & More.
Peeriscope | Professional networking iPhone App | Conference mobile networking | Alumni, Event & Meetup discovery. Glassmap. Mingle. Manage events and expand your business network through Unsocial. It is a mobile iphone, android, blackberry, and windows mobile 7 application. Surprise! Location App Highlight Actually Creates Serendipity. The big promise of location-based mobile apps is that they can help you find something great in real life without you meaning to look for it. But that hasn’t usually been my experience. Instead, whether because of the friction of having to check in, the lack of adoption by friends outside of tech, or whatever else, I simply forget to use them. That has changed with Highlight, a new passive location app for iOS that shows you when Facebook users with friends and interests in common are nearby. Since it launched last week, I’ve gotten in touch with an old friend/source who’s now at a big new company, discovered a couple previous acquaintances who happen to live or work near me, and got the heads up about a fellow blogger creeping behind me at work.
But before I get into that, what’s different about Highlight from the million other location apps out there? The combination of the Facebook social graph and the frictionless sharing experience makes discovery uniquely automatic. Glancee.com 476 UVs for April 2012. Message Sharing Service. AthElite. Angel Investors and Startup Funding. Popset. Phonedeck. Helping your family and friends find you. | PigeonMe App. ► Young Love by Mystery Jets and Laura Marling | you and me | meljoy | 8tracks. The Ultimate Guide To TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2011. TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco has just wrapped. In the feverish air of anticipation we carefully cultivate during the Disrupt season, you may have missed some of the talks, panels, launches, or startups that have taken place here at this incomparable conference. Don’t worry. We’ve collected all the content by our writing and video teams here in this handy omnibus post.
If you only share one item today, make it this one. Almost everything that happened on stage was captured by the unblinking eye of TechCrunch TV, so there is video at the bottom of most posts and many even have crowdsourced transcriptions. More video can be found here at the TCTV archive for the event. Session one: Disrupting traditional markets Session two: Moving the web forward Session three: Entertain us Session four: Customer-friendly enterprise Session five: Local networks Session six: Increasing understanding Congratulations to the winners! Best of luck, Mike. Rate Your Ex. Thirsty. Hackathon Highlights: Staff Favorites From The Disrupt SF Hackathon. It’s been nearly 24 hours since the start of the Hackathon and the hax0rs have hax3d. We’ve seen 130 projects pitched in just 60 seconds each, all created in under 24 hours.
While all of the projects were wonderful (really — this was perhaps our best Hackathon yet), some of them really struck the right key with the TechCrunch writers in the audience. In no particular order (and with no indication as to who might walk away a winner), some of the staff favorites: ClubReport – Gives you a live audio stream of clubs around the city, helping you figure out which one you want to hop to. Justabout – An About.me for business. Easy, 30-second websites for businesses, primarily meant to group their social network accounts together in one easy to find place.
Weather Checker – A mashup of Weather Underground and Google Calendar. SportBot: Monitors and analyzes tweets about sporting events, and generates a live blog-esque text summary of the event based off popular tweets. Where Is Waldy? Tracks Is Sort Of Like Color For Normal People. Of all the things written about the heavily funded Color, there is no denying that it’s confusing to a lot of people, at least at first.
Updates have helped this a bit, but the app relies so much on technology in the background, that it almost seems as if you’re doing something wrong when you’re using it. Tracks, a new app launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, offers similar photo clusters done on the fly. But it’s much, much easier to understand. The examples the team gives for uses range from a pub crawl with friends to a family vacation. You and the people with you (who have to be explicitly invited into a group, rather than Color’s automatic method) create picture albums on the fly. These are called Tracks. And these tracks are then viewable both in the app and on the web in a beautiful, optimized experience.
To me, the latter is something that has always interested me about Color. Also cool is the map view, which shows the path of your Track. Here’s their presentation.