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Hyperlocal: opportunities for publishers and developers

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 21:19:17 +0000

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Going loco: Everplaces and Circleme hit public beta

Bobbie Johnson — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 14:23:35 +0000

Anyone reading between the lines after the closure of ratings app Oink, may have picked up a signal about the state of social, local, mobile services today. After all, if a well-designed app with lots of press coverage can’t get enough traction to make it worthwhile, then perhaps the glut of apps that connect places and people together has reached its peak.

Even if that is true, however, there’s also plenty of room for movement — because as busy, as the market is, it’s also fairly open. Apps like Foursquare and Path continue to make plenty of noise, but there certainly haven’t been any clear winners yet; something that is merely encouraging more companies to keep trying to solve the puzzle.

Witness two European startups that are both going into public beta on Thursday — Everplaces and Circleme — and both think they’ve got twists on the SoLoMo formula that they hope will make them stand out from the crowd.

Everplaces

First up is Everplaces, a small Danish startup that has built a beautiful little service for storing snapshots of places you love and sharing your tips with people. Originally conceived as an “Evernote for places”, co-founder Tiny Thygesen says the team have spent the last few months working in private beta to try and develop a better idea of what users are actually looking for.

“We don’t presume to know what people want, so we decided to find out a lot about what it is people want to do,” she tells me. “We’ve definitely learned a lot: for example, we were surprised to find that most people use it for themselves before they share with others, which is different from what we were expecting.”

Users can take to the website or use an iPhone or Android app to track and record places of interest. These can be entirely personal and private, or shareable — which means you can follow other people’s recommendations, filtering them for areas of interest such as food, sports or hotel recommendations.

Since launching in December in an unpublicized invitation-only beta, the site has gathered a small user base who have uploaded more than 45,000 locations to the site. There has been particular traction in the U.S. and Germany, and plenty of requests for users for more tagging and filtering functions to help them organize the places they track.

With things still very early, Thygesen says the company is concentrating on growth rather than revenue, but suggests it may look at a TripAdvisor-style affiliate model, where recommendations that turn into purchases — such as finding a good hotel — give a little commission back to the company.

Overall, Everplaces feels clean and sophisticated, and there’s definitely a focus on reducing the noise that is often present in apps like this.

“There is a whole storm of services that bombard you with crap,” she says. “But I don’t want all the stuff, I just want the best stuff.”

Circleme

Meanwhile Italian recommendation service Circleme is taking a similar step forward by moving into public beta and adding a mobile app.

The site, which I wrote about in December, takes a broad approach to cataloguing people’s likes — with a database of people, songs, places and that today numbers more than 1 million objects. From today, users can sign up without impediment, and once they’re in the service they can now start connecting the things they like to physical locations. That allows other users to seek out things to enjoy in their local area — or even get notified whenever they happen to pass a point of interest saved by somebody they trust.

This is part of what the company hopes can help it stand out from market crowded with recommendation and taste-making services.

“People have likened us to sites like Pinterest, but we’re not really about collecting pictures of things you like,” says founder Erik Lumer. “We want to help you be able to capture the things you like at the time you’re doing them — say a movie you’re watching and want to recommend to friends.”

Like Everplaces, the beta has developed significantly since it hit the web: this time by including more commenting functions and social elements that let people discuss the things they are interested in with each other. (“It was a pretty obvious, but we found quite important, feedback loop,” says Lumer.)

It has added 10,000 users since Christmas, but is hoping that it can expand significantly now that the careful lockdown on new additions has been lifted. In the long run, the company wants to monetize by getting companies to associate themselves with popular items (BMW, for example, paying to incorporate extra material alongside item listings for their cars, for example) but — again — that will require scale.

What are the chances?

Whatever way you look at it, these ideas — however well implemented — face a tough job to stand out. Whether it’s Pinterest or Delicious on one hand, or new location bookmarking services such as Pinwheel or Pindrop on the other, the idea of hooking the things you like and the places you love is clearly one that is now part of the commons.

To stand any chance, both services must work the angles to find what makes them special. For Circleme, that may be connecting the dots between a broad recommendation service and a location-based network. For Everplaces, it may be tapping into local knowledge in a smart way. But they both think there is one element still missing from many of their competitors: a tie to real things.

“One difference is that we’re always referring to objects that exist in the real world,” says Erik Lumer of Circleme. “You’re not planting a picture or text, but a link to a real object — and once you’re dealing with real objects, that changes the ball game: if you plant a song, you can hear it, for example. In other services if you leave a note, you can’t really do anything with it.”

Everplace’s Tine Thygesen tells me something similar. Instead of focusing on vapid virtual connections, she wants to focus on real physical spaces — because they carry more meaning and have a more obvious use for people.

“We focus on fixing something real,” she says. “”People seem to think that if you take your Foursquare checkins and match them with your social graph that would be something — but it’s not really. The reality is that a lot of stuff has been built over the last 10 years because the technology was there, rather than because people wanted to use it.”

“What we found in our research was that 20 percent of smartphone users already struggle to remember places or cool things they’ve seen. So we have come from a human behavior and found a technology to fit, not the other way around.”

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The geo-social revolution that wasn’t

Ryan Lawler — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 01:24:11 +0000

Last year, SXSW was all about group messaging, with GroupMe leading the pack. This year, it was all about location-based social interactions, with Highlight the belle of the ball. Sure, some of the people in Austin seemed to understand exactly why they would want to use such apps, which are variously called Social-Local-Mobile (say it with me now — SoLoMo), ambient awareness or social serendipity. But what’s more interesting is how many people didn’t get the utility.

“Have you tried Highlight yet?” was a familiar refrain around Austin over the past weekend. And for those who hadn’t tried it out, there was the inevitable discussion — and confusion — as one party attempted to explain the concept to another. Once the app was demoed from one user to another, the question would be asked: “So why would I want to do this?” Maybe not everybody had that experience, but I saw this interaction unfold enough times that it seemed more than a few people were unsure of the ultimate use case of these applications, which include startups like Glancee, banjo, Sonar and Glassmap.

That’s hardly fatal, of course. It wasn’t readily apparent why someone might want to broadcast his or her location data when Foursquare first hit the scene, except maybe to Dennis Crowley and a few of his friends. And people were really confused about the utility of a platform that limited communications to 140 characters at a time when Twitter first started. Use cases develop, and the utility of applications and platforms become understood over time. Despite glowing reviews that each received at the time, I doubt the inevitable success of those platforms was etched in stone due to SXSW.

Which is why I think this question of who “won” the festival is so interesting. Erin Griffith has a thought-provoking piece on Pando Daily in which she gives some pretty good reasons why there wasn’t a breakout startup this year: Basically, all the geo-local hype that’s been dished out has created more noise than signal. The event is bigger, there are more startups than ever, and there are more apps coming out that are basically all doing the same thing.

So I think it’s too early to call winners and losers. If you really want to know who won, wait a few weeks. Maybe a few months or a year. Let’s see which of the apps that launched around SXSW gets downloaded by more than just a few tens of thousands of early adopters who descended on Austin for five days in March.

There are certainly some cases where press success stories become mainstream phenomena. Foursquare got a lot of glowing press during SXSW 2009, as did Twitter a few years earlier. But the first time I knew Foursquare “won” was the moment I checked into my parents’ local grocery store in suburban South Jersey and saw that it had a mayor. That experience showed that it wasn’t just the digital media set on the coasts and in major metropolitan areas that were using the app to signal whichever bar they had just arrived at. It showed that Foursquare was also being used by regular folks and in pretty banal places. But that was about a year, year-and-a-half after SXSW 2009.

At the same time, there have been just as many tech startups that have been lauded by the tech press but just never caught on. Hot Potato, for instance, was pushing the limits of social, location-based messaging and sharing around SXSW 2010, but failed to resonate with mainstream users. It ended up settling for a relatively modest acquisition by Facebook.

That said, just because users don’t quite “get it” right now doesn’t mean the SoLoMo segment is doomed. Ambient awareness seems to have legs, and there are good reasons to believe there will be consumer demand for this type of app in the future. And let’s remember that Foursquare was also considered creepy once upon a time, and that Twitter was ridiculed for being stupid until users saw real value from using it.

There will most likely be a winner at SXSW 2012, have no fear. We’ll just be placing that label on whichever startup it is as soon as it’s clear that the app has real user traction and isn’t going away anytime soon.

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NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 20:39:31 +0000

The fourth quarter may have lacked a dominating big-event product announcement like Q3’s Facebook platform extension or Q2’s unveiling of Google+, but the NewNet world continued to buzz along. In the battle for mind share, everyone wanted to be a platform. Meanwhile, consumer and social technologies continued to gain momentum, and new vehicles for content and service discovery presented both challenges and opportunities for NewNet companies. And it is hard to ignore the overcrowded but growing world of daily deals. This quarterly report analyzes these trends and others, and it also provides a near-term outlook of trends, technologies and companies to watch in 2012. Companies mentioned in the report include Amazon, Facebook and Socialcast. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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