But then you start noticing some differences. There’s no option to find your friends, and certainly no mechanism for following them. You can interact with anyone who “drops” into your location, but you’re most likely dealing with a complete stranger. If you ask a question or make a positive or critical comment, you’re just as likely to get a response from the venue’s owner as you are from one of its patrons. And once you’ve left a location, you’ll still be able to see all of the activity going on there, but you’ll find your ability to interact with the locale much more limited.

Evzdrop CEO David Rush said he and fellow co-founder Eric Brown were inspired to start Evzdrop in 2012 because of the difficulty of sorting useful information about a bar, restaurant or event from social networks.

“There’s a fire hose of information coming out of Facebook and Twitter,” Rush said. “Check-ins are more about showing where you are to friends, which is what Foursquare has become today. … We wanted to create an app that allows you to share a common interest in place — one that lets you get the perspective of people who, along with you, are actually at an event.”

To that end, Evzdrop has created a kind of geofenced social network, allowing only people who are actually at a location to engage with one another and the business itself. Everyone else is just a voyeur. They can follow all of the drop posts going at location, but they can’t participate themselves except to comment on other people’s drops.

From my experiences fiddling with the app, many of the drops aren’t terribly useful — “Dude, this band rocks!” — but as more people use the app, more useful information rises to the top through a “props” system that allows other people at vote up the most entertaining or informative posts.

The idea, Rush said, is to create not just a repository of immediate information — older drops disappear from the site — but a real-time dialogue between all of the people sharing the same space. That differentiates it from Yelp and other reviews sites, Rush said.

If Evzdrop can reach critical mass it should be able to tell if the Hamachi at the local sushi bar is particularly fresh or foul on any particular hour. Sports bar owners will be able to alert you to which games they’re showing in playoffs, or respond to requests from customers on the premise to switch to a different game. Concert attendees can demand a band play a particular song.

Do we really need another check-in app?

Of course, to get this kind of depth out of the service, Evzdrop really needs to scale. Right now it’s still a tiny operation. It has six employees and $500,000 in angel funding, and its Android and iPhone app only has a miniscule 11,000 downloads. Growing that base is going to be difficult to say the least. Not only are there numerous competing apps promoting their own take on the check-in, every major social network, review app and location-based service — from Facebook to Yelp to Google Latitude — have added check-in capabilities. The last thing most consumers want to do is download and register an account with another check-in app.

Building a business around social-location is also proving to be a difficult even if you 3.5 billion check-ins like Foursquare. New York’s check-in pioneer just raised another $41 million in financing, but it’s under intense pressure to prove it has viable business model.

Rush said that Evzdrop hopes to gain traction by targeting business owners and event planners, getting them to promote the app to their customers. Rush thinks the app would be particularly appealing for helping track customer sentiment and complaints at big events like concerts or benefits, where organizers can communicate with a lot of people en masse.

To that end Evzdrop is making venue owners a key part of the network, rather than just peripheral participants. They don’t get control their local social networks like, say, moderators on a discussion board. But they can communicate privately with their patrons, Evzdrop provides them with real-time data about the sentiment of their clientele. Rush said Evzdrop considers itself just as much a customer relations management (CRM) platform as it does a social networking app.

That business focus is also key to its business model. While any business owner can register their place with Evzdrop, gaining access to its customer communications tools, Evzdrop hopes to build a premium platform that would allow businesses to market promotions to their most frequent customers as well as give them more control over the interaction within the walls of their social networks.

Rush said one tool Evzdrop plans to implement is a means to flag negative sentiment, allowing a proprietor to intercept a critical drop before it goes live giving them a chance to address the complaint immediately. Rush said Evzdrop would never allow businesses to censor posts — every drop would still go live – just create a kind of early warning system for negative feedback.

It seems Evzdrop is trying to walk a fine line. It’s admirable that Evzdrop is trying to develop its business model at the get go, as opposed to Twitter and Foursquare, which built their social networks and then tried to figure out how to make money. But if patrons start perceiving Evzdrop as just a promotional pulpit for businesses, they won’t use it as a social network. And if Evzdrop can’t build up a social network, it doesn’t have a business.

Concert image courtesy of Flickr user humbert15.

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The Lightbank and Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup on Thursday revealed it is expanding its scope from small and medium-sized business to large enterprises. The company said it’s currently working with 40 national chains, which have installed its loyalty card scanning system in 500 locations. Belly said those chains collectively represent 40,000 restaurants and stores nationwide, though it didn’t reveal the names of the names of specific companies.

But a quick glance on Belly’s merchant map in Chicago reveals plenty of big names: McDonalds, Chick-fil-A, 7-Eleven and Domino’s Pizza among them. For instance, McDonalds is offering up rewards like a free regular fries or free cookie after accruing a specified number of Belly loyalty points.

Belly’s system is pretty simple. Belly members either order a universal loyalty card with a QR code or download the Belly app to their smartphone, which displays the QR code on screen. All merchants have an iPad set up at the register or other convenient location, and customers scan their card or app into the tablet to accrue points for every visit. Get enough points and you can pick prizes. Those can come in the form of free goods, discounts or sometimes more off-the-wall rewards, such as a personal serenade from the store’s owner.

Belly has attracted interest from businesses nationwide, but its hometown of Chicago remains its biggest market with more than a thousand locations using the Belly system. As a Chicagoan, I’ve seen Belly pop up everywhere. My wife and I use it to get free booze at our local liquor store, and we’re saving up our points so we can get a free cooking lesson from the chef of our favorite local restaurant Bistro Dre.

While I love the idea of unique tailored rewards programs for local businesses, it’s easy to see the appeal for Belly to go after the national chains. Chicago has many e-commerce companies that were founded on the principle of targeting small, local merchants, but they’ve been shifting their focus to the national retailers and brands.

For instance, fellow Lightbank startup Boomerang has abandoned its original local-business focus and to turn its peer-to-peer gifting service into a viral marketing platform for big brands like Ghirardelli and Starbucks. Even suffering e-commerce giant Groupon(grpn) (see disclosure) has strayed from its local business focus to offer an increasing number of daily deals for national chains.

Disclosure: The author’s spouse is employed by Groupon.

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Belly is a Chicago-based startup backed by Lightbank and Andreessen Horowitz that is trying to take retail rewards programs down to the small business and the local level – while providing something much more sophisticated than the buy-10-get-one-free punch card. Belly users either use their Belly app or a QR code on a physical card to check in at a store’s iPad whenever they stop in at a participating business. That allows stores to track their customers’ purchases, award points and market more effectively to their most loyal customers.

The Belly Bites program adds a more active component to a normally passive rewards system. Instead of waiting on the customers, businesses can lure them in by offering a free tidbit, which is then highlighted in Belly’s app. In fact, customers can use the app as a sort of goodie radar, following the path of free treats and services around their neighborhoods. According to Belly, the free samples focus is much more manageable than a daily deal coupon campaign, while still introducing new customers to local businesses.

Belly also revealed today that it has revamped its Android app. The app is now compatible with all versions of the Google OS, but the biggest improvement is for frequent Belly users with the latest Android handset. The new Belly widget can be used to place a customer’s loyalty QR code on the home or lock screen of an Android 4.2 (Jelly Bean) device, turning it into a physical card.

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Today’s launch in Chicago; Reno, Nev.; Fresno and Sacramento, Calif.; and the region surrounding Los Angeles (though not in LA itself) – coupled with activations on Monday in Atlanta, Seattle and Minneapolis – bring its total upgraded footprint to 23 markets covering more than 100 million people. While T-Mobile doesn’t sell the device yet, customers with unlocked iPhones can use them on the carrier’s network. But only in areas where the upgrade is complete will they get anything beyond a 2G connection.

Though in the rest of country the network officially hasn’t seen the upgrade – which will move a portion of T-Mo’s HSPA+ network to the 1900 MHz PCS band – customers with unlocked iPhones have reported seeing HSPA+ signals from New York to LA, cities where their Apple devices would normally be restricted to pokey 2G speeds. Right up to its launch this week, Chicago was a hotbed of signal sightings so T-Mobile obviously has many more markets in the works.

T-Mobile is rushing to complete its network reconfiguration for a number of reasons. Not only will it be fully compatible with the iPhone’s 2G and 3G radios when it starts selling the device next year, but the sooner it relocates HSPA+ to the PCS band, the sooner it can start building its new LTE network.

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There are multitudes of parking spot locator and reservation apps, but SpotHero is trying to set itself apart from the pack by becoming a parking broker of sorts. As co-founder and COO Jeremy Smith explained at Excelerate’s demo day in August, SpotHero has built the back-end systems that not only allow lot owners to notify drivers of parking availability, but to tailor space reservation and parking pass offers based on inventory, demand and specific customers needs.

By using SpotHero’s platform, parking lot owners can sell discounted spot reservations for specific hours or days and even sell monthly passes through the startup’s website and consumer facing Android and iOS apps. Lot owners can even bid against each other for a customer’s business, Smith said.

Parking in a big city like Chicago may seem like a scarce resource, but in reality during most hours lots are sitting half empty. Consequently national and regional parking lot companies have taken a shine to SpotHero’s e-commerce platform in hopes of filling up those empty spaces. The service has been available for less than a year, but the startup claims to have generated more than $2 million in revenue for parking companies, even though its available in just two cities, Chicago and Milwaukee.

SpotHero was the first of the Excelerate’s 2012 class to raise funds, announcing an investment from Dave McClure’s 500 Startups the week before demo day (SpotHero won’t be participating in 500 Startups’ accelerator program though, choosing instead to remain in Chicago). SpotHero plans to use its new funding to hire more developers and expand beyond the Midwest.

Image courtesy of Alex 92287.

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While most carriers start their new network rollouts in the big cities and then expand outwards, Sprint has launched its LTE network in far more small markets than it has in big metro areas. In fact, Sprint has only gone live in six major cities: Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio in Texas and Kansas City, Atlanta and Baltimore. The rest of its two dozen or so launches have all been in small cities or suburbs.

A lot of activity is going on in the background though. Sprint has said it will have LTE live in 115 markets in the coming months – and not just in small towns and bedroom communities. Boston; Charlotte, N.C.; Chicago; Indianapolis; Los Angeles; Memphis, Tenn.; Miami; Nashville, Tenn.; New Orleans; New York; Philadelphia; and Washington, D.C. are all on the list.

What we’re likely seeing in Chicago is the first stage of a more aggressive metropolitan area rollout. While many of these outlying suburban communities can be covered with a handful of cellsites, building a dense network in downtown Chicago requires a lot more work. Instead of waiting until every tower is ready to launch, Sprint is probably just turning up individual markets as soon as they’re ready – regardless of their size.

It will be interesting to see if much of Chicago proper’s network isn’t already live. So if you have a Sprint LTE phone or modem and live within the confines of the Windy City, we’d love to hear if you’re seeing any 4G signals. Let us know in the comments below.

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Gigabit Squared has set aside $5 million for the Chicago project as part of its Gigabit Neighborhood Gateway Program in collaboration with partner Gig.U. The State of Illinois is kicking in $2 million, while the University of Chicago is committing $1 million now and plans to raise another $1 million in the surrounding communities.

The first phase of the project will bring gigabit fiber connections to 4,825 homes, businesses, schools, libraries and healthcare institutions in the Hyde Park neighborhood U of C calls home, as well as surrounding communities. For those of you unfamiliar with Chicago, the south side contains many of the poorest neighborhoods in the city, but right in the middle of them all, Hyde Park sticks out like a beacon of affluence.

By bringing in the surrounding neighborhoods of Woodlawn, Washington Park and Kenwood, the project isn’t just targeting college students, professors and administrators. It’s covering a lot a lot of territory beyond the University’s direct sphere of influence. What’s more the project will expand outwards over the next four years taking in more neighborhoods. Eventually the project hopes to connect 210,000 residents living in 79,000 households with a combination of fiber and Wi-Fi technologies, as well as link 10,000 individual small businesses. That’s a healthy chunk of Chicago’s south side.

To get that level of broadband penetration it’s going to take additional funds from Gigabit Squared as well as the university and local government. Gigabit Squared, however, looks like it’s just getting started. It’s raised $200 million and so far is only targeting six cities. Gigabit Squared president Mark Ansboury recently told GigaOM that the company is using these university collaborations as testbeds for making gigabit broadband profitable.

Though the city of Chicago isn’t investing directly in this project, it has a lot of vested interest in seeing it succeed. Last month, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced his intention to create new connected tech zones in the city limits through both public and private investment. Those goals line up with Gigabit Squared’s project perfectly. It will not only create a fiber broadband zone around one of the city’s premier educational institutions, it will bring broadband and Wi-Fi connectivity to underserved areas.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Henryk Sadura

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If it sounds like Chicago is angling to be the next candidate for Google Fiber, then you’re probably not too far off base. At a press conference on Monday, Emanuel revealed that Google Chairman Eric Schmidt was the inspiration for the idea. Chicago is in the process of overhauling its century-old water distribution system, and Schmidt suggested that Chicago take advantage of the fact it’s digging up the city to lay new data as well as water pipes, Emanuel said.

According to Crain’s Chicago Business, the city is also willing to offer up access to other urban bric-a-brac that make up Chicago’s municipal infrastructure, from utility and light poles to dark fiber already strung under the Chicago Transit’s authorities elevated rails and within its subway tunnels.

There are a lot of cities vying for Google’s attention in case it chooses to expand its fiber project, and Emanuel isn’t betting the farm Chicago will be its next benefactor. He didn’t mention Google Fiber specifically in his speech, and instead announced that Chicago would issue a request for proposal asking any interested company, local university or other organization to submit ideas for implementing all or parts of the broadband rollout. Emanuel said he anticipates members of Chicago’s growing startup and entrepreneurial community would play a key role in contributing ideas.

Chicago’s Merchandise Mart, new home of Motorola

The goal of the project is to build gigabit last-mile fiber infrastructure in 15 “innovation zones” located in commercial and industrial corridors throughout the city. A second aim of that fiber build-out is to bring cheap broadband access to underserved and disadvantaged neighborhoods in the city – of which Chicago has plenty – and develop training programs to teach residents in those areas the “digital skills” necessary to put that access to use.

Finally, Chicago plans to launch a network of free Wi-Fi hotspots throughout city parks, plazas and other public spaces. The first of these networks went live this month in Chicago’s touristy Millennium Park. Though this component may seem like the least ambitious of Emanuel’s plan, it may well be the most controversial. During the first internet boom, Emanuel’s mayoral predecessor Richard M. Daley proposed an ambitious plan to blanket the entire city in Wi-Fi, but after several false starts the project was killed in 2007.

Chicago isn’t exactly starving for broadband either. Because of its central role in commodities and futures exchange markets (Where did you think pork bellies were traded?) Chicago’s downtown business core has some of the fastest internet access in the world, which the new River North tech community is tapping into. But Emanuel’s aim is to convert industrial zones lining Chicago’s miasma of waterways and railroad tracks — once devoted to slaughtering livestock, packing meat and manufacturing cocktail weenies – into high-tech zones. Also, the educational institutions around which tech communities like to congregate are well outside of the downtown core.

Chicago skyline image courtesy of Flickr user Bert Kaufmann; Merchandise Mart image courtesy of Flickr user HarshLight

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“The whole theme of the store is to show how you can use technology and how we can bring it life for you,” said Kent Mathy, president of AT&T’s north central region. With that idea in mind, AT&T wanted to create a flagship showroom that was “less transactional and more experiential,” Mathy said.

If it sounds like an Apple Store, there are a lot of similarities: the lack of registers — employees use iPads as point of sale devices – and the Apps Bar, which looks strikingly similar to Apple’s Genius Bar. The big difference is AT&T isn’t necessarily showcasing its own products. All of the devices in stores are, of course, for sale, but the focus is on the different apps and services that run over those devices.

The 40 customer-facing employees who staff the store all moved from different parts of the country, having been selected from AT&T’s 26,000 retail staff for their expertise, Mathy said. They will be manning the different the store’s sections demoing different use cases for AT&T smartphones and other connected devices.

The “Get Fit Boutique” for instance will feature health and fitness apps and show customers how they can link external devices like the FitBit to your phone. App Bar employees will be available to answer technical questions and troubleshoot any app or device related problem.

There will also be boutiques for AT&T’s U-Verse broadband and TV services, a connected car demo of the Nissan Leaf, and Ma Bell’s new Digital Life connected home platform – though the service isn’t yet available in Chicago. The flagship location will also sell items unavailable through other online or brick-and-mortar AT&T retail outlets, such as limited edition smartphone cases designed by local Chicago artists.

AT&T hasn’t yet decided whether it will bring the flagship concept to any other cities, but Mathy said the Chicago location isn’t just a temporary trial fixture. AT&T intends for it to be a permanent location, he said.

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While Excelerate focuses on Chicago-based startups ,this particular class had a much broader background with entrepreneurs temporarily relocating to the Windy City from as far away from India and France. The graduates also spanned every corner of the technology map, from new e-commerce platforms and photo aggregation services to a company trying to teach computers to see as humans. While all 10 companies made an impression, here are the ones that grabbed my attention in particular:

Orbeus

It may seem like another Face.com competitor, Orbeus but it’s taking its image recognition software to another level, identifying context as well as people in digital photographs. Founded by a handful of MIT and Boston University scientists, Orbeus seeks to identify anything and everything in a photo or video from where it was shot to items within it.

“Computers can read like humans, but they can’t see like humans,” Orbeus CEO and co-founder Xing Meng said during his presentations. “We help computers see better than humans.”

So rather than just match names to faces, Orbeus can mine images for all kinds of information. By identifying the dishes in the Foodspotting pictures you take, it can tell that you’re a vegetarian and tell social networks to stop serving you up ads for steakhouses. It can identify how many times a particular logo shows up in the video frame of a sporting, helping marketers with strategic brand placement. It can determine from your Flickr photostream whether you like to vacation on sandy beaches or in Vegas casinos.

Technology like this raises some big privacy concerns, as my colleague Derrick Harris has pointed out, but it can also turn digital images from random collections of pixels into data just as meaningful to machines as they are to people.

Lasso

This startup is delving into the crowded field of social planning and meet-up apps, populated by Facebook Events, Plancast, Saambaa and Giddyup, just to name a few. But Lasso co-founder Wes Dearborn said most of those apps are two rigid in structure. Lasso’s iPhone app switches the focus away from the event, location or time to the people itself.

Dearborn said the social planning tool millennials most commonly use to plan social outings is plain-old SMS, spawning massive chains of text messages. Lasso is building off the texting trend. Its app allows user to reach out to all or a select number of friends with a suggestion for an activity or gathering, something as simple as “let’s hang out on Friday.”

At any time, friends can suggest a specific time, location or activity using in-app planning tools, but those plans are subject to change at anytime depending on which way your circle is leaning. Rather than create an event-planning app, Lasso has created an app that facilitates casual social activities between friends, making logistics secondary.

Cureeo

Wine used to be the purview of the stuffy elite and viticulturally knowledgeable, but in the last 20 years it’s become accessible to the mass market. Cureeo wants to bring about that same transformation in the art world by combining an online gallery for selling art with an informational portal that translates the esoteric terminology of galleries into layman’s terms.

While the market for $2,000 artworks may never scale down to the consumer masses, the vast majority of people with the means and inclination to collect don’t have the background or training to make purchasing decisions, Cureeo CEO Maida Swenson-Fortune said. “The general public feels that unless they have a friend in the industry they’ll be duped,” she said.

Cureeo isn’t just the wine industry as an example, it’s following the playbook of wine critic Robert Parker, who in his newsletter The Wine Advocate began using a 50-100 point scale to rate bottles of wine. Cureeo is developing a methodology that will assign ratings to its wares determined by how the market’s current valuation of the artist’s work and experts’ views on that value’s potential for appreciation.

Those scores will then been compared against the price of every painting, sculpture and photo sold on Cureeo’s website, generating a 50-100 point rating aimed at helping collectors get the most value from their investment. That may seem like it punishes the artists trying to maximize their sales on Cureeo’s site, but co-founder and head curator Stephanie Coate said the methodology would also benefit artists who often have no idea how to price their work.

Pictarine

Pictarine CEO Guillaume Martin was definitely the most entertaining presenter at Excelerate at the expense of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Martin’s premise was a simple one: Photos have become the currency of social media, expressing much more personality and depth of meaning than status updates or “likes” ever could. The problem is there is no single source from which we can view all of the photos you and your friends collect.

As the uber-social network, Facebook is aggregating photos from multiple photo networks such as Instagram, Flickr and even directly from your mobile phone, but it’s fallen flat in presenting those photos, opting instead for news feed clutter, Martin said. To put his way: “Mark is between your friends and you.”

Pictarine’s app – which the startup surprisingly chose to build for Android before the iPhone – is as simple as the company’s premise. It creates a meta-social network aggregating your friends’ photo streams from Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, and Instagram.

Whimseybox

Forget wine clubs and farm shares, Whimseybox is delivering a monthly craft box to its subscribers for $25 a month, which they can use to make their own DIY creations. According to CEO and founder Alicia DiRago, crafting has become a $30 billion industry, but the primary supplier of craft supplies, Michael’s, doesn’t even have an e-commerce presence.

Whimseybox plans to fill that gap by creating an online community that will not only provide ideas and inspiration for the growing number of do-it-yourself crafters, but also sell the materials necessary to bring those ideas to life.

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