Socialight / blog+news

Back when we started Socialight in 2005, it was totally unlike anything else out there. The world took note. Our cellphones were still clunky and we were still surprised when we saw a map on the web, but Socialight grew into a special community where people gather to tell stories about the places that mean something to them. It’s a great community, but it’s limited since it’s only one community.

Since then, the world has changed. Not only do we now expect our cell phones to have GPS and cameras, but a lot of people and companies have realized that tying stories to maps can be entertaining, useful, and profitable.

We’re about to launch something even more transformative than our first release. It gives you a whole lot of what you’ve been asking for, but probably not in the way you expected. We think it can change the way people, communities, and companies interact in the real world. CODENAME: ZSA ZSA

Everything happens somewhere and we’re creatures of the shared places where we live, work, and travel. But in real life, we each experience those same shared places differently. We want to learn about the world through the communities of people and sources we trust. But when we’re exploring the world with virtual tools, there’s no way to cut through the noise and just see, hear, and play how we want.

Socialight crafted Zsa Zsa to change that. Each community needs to be able to share what it wants to share in the way it wants to share it. Soon, people, companies, and existing communities will get the tools to do just that.

So why are we calling it “Zsa Zsa”? You’ll have to figure that one out for yourself!

We recently wrapped up a fun summer promo in New York City with Corona Beer.  90 days of Summer, 90 reasons to gather with friends around a bucket of Corona.

We provided the tools for thirsty Corona drinkers all over NYC to find the nearest “Summerbration” participating bars and clubs.  By texting “Summer” to our 5-digit shortcode, people got back a text message with the details on where to go, and how to get there, so they could get to the real business of enjoying a nice, cold Corona – at recession-friendly discounts!

I like how Corona used our platform, because it shows how even a most basic human need, like an ice cold beer, can benefit from a little modern technology.

Clive Thompson wrote about the “Future of the Web” for WIRED.com and includes a choice quote from yours truly.

The crux of the piece is this:

The whole reason the web revolutionized the world was that it rendered geography irrelevant. People connected worldwide based not on location but on their common interests: Model-train collectors and free-speech activists and Britney Spears fans could swarm onto the discussion boards and blogs, from Chicago to Tehran. By severing the link between location and geography, the internet turned everything upside down.

Now mobile phones are inverting everything again, in the other direction — because your location becomes most important thing about you.

Then there’s my zinger.

“It’s like this form of Terminator vision,” jokes Socialight founder Dan Melinger, whose app is set to launch soon on the iPhone. He thinks that as more and more people tag the real world, it will create a sort of parallel, invisible internet of data floating over our everyday lives.

“You can figure out the mood of a place by searching for all notes in an area,” Melinger adds. What types of music do people listen to in this neighborhood? What do they argue about?

I’m still patiently waiting for my retinal implants.

Read the whole post here.

I’m helping organize MobileCampNYC3 this Saturday, November 15th. Like BarcampNYC2, Microsoft is our host this time around. We’ll be in their midtown offices from 9:15am-6:00pm in what will be a fun and packed day.

The theme of the event is ‘best practices & design patterns’. The focus will mainly lie on the design of mobile software. Some interesting sessions have already been revealed:

• Future of Wireless by Ian Spalter, Creative Director of Mobile/Emerging Platforms at R/GA
• Location-based mobile social networking + proximity-based marketing by Murat Aktihanoglu
• Web-based mobile games and social interaction within mobile by Nick Smolney & Karen Schrier.
• Getting started on iPhone by Nick Clarey.
• Android development – discussion of development process for VoteReport.
• Best practices derived from building MobileDead, a multiplayer location based game.

Registration filled up a few weeks ago — I’m afraid I can’t even give you a chance to register now. So…sorry . Your best bet is to get on the waiting list.

The last two MobileCamps here in NYC had some great sessions about NFC, barcodes and games design. I met and got to hang out with interesting people at the after-party. I’m looking forward to a similar experience this time around.

I just scanned the attendees list and see a lot of familiar names. Team Socialight will see you all there on Saturday!

I’m going to be speaking with a fantastic panel on Monday at the 2008 YPulse National Mashup. The panel, organized by the furiously talented Alli Mooney from Fleishman Hillard focuses on “What’s Next in The Mobile Youth Space”. The other mobile futurists on the panel include John Poisson from Tiny Pictures, Mei Lin Ng from Mig33 and Stephen Saiz from Disney Mobile.

The conference will be held at the Nikko Hotel in downtown San Francisco, one of my favourite spots for relaxing in the city, so if you’re interesting in hearing about how mobile social communication is evolving – swing on by.

I’ll be speaking this Friday at a Columbia Business School symposium here in NYC. If you’re in town and yearn to gain perspective on the industry they call “location based services” (LBS) from people working in the trenches like us, register and come by. It’s called The Focus on Locus and should be pretty good.

I’m scheduled to be speaking at 4:15 and am on a panel after that along with guys from NAVTEQ, Tele Atlas, Loopt, and UpNext, followed by drinks.

The full agenda with a blurb about my talk is here. Hope to see some of you there.

I’m excited to be speaking at the Internet Marketing Conference, part of Internet Week New York, this Wednesday. This year’s theme is “Mobile Marketing — The Next Evolution”. Socialight is looking at several models for paying the bills, including marketing.

To some, mobile marketing is a touchy subject. It is to me, and it becomes especially touchy with “location-based services” (LBS) like Socialight.

Some companies do it pretty well, some do it terribly. When done right, marketing content on your cellphone can actually be content that not only pays for the free and cheap services you use, but could also provide useful and enjoyable, targeted content. When done wrong, it can instrusive, spammy, feel invasive to your privacy, and be so annoying you want to flush your phone down the toilet.

I’ll be joining a roundtable with Peter Olfe, founder of Yojo Mobile (markers of MizPee!), Bob Page, Senior Director of Strategic Data Solutions at Yahoo!, and Lennart Svanberg, Producer of IMC. I’d like to cover marketing opportunities, data collection and privacy policies, and integration of marketing into services. If you’ll be there, stop by and say “hi”.

IMC New York 2008
Wednesday, June 04, 2008, 8:30 am – 5:00 pm (I’m on at 11)

New York’s Hotel Pennsylvania
401 Seventh Avenue (at 33rd St.)
New York, New York, USA

Today we announced the launch of the Socialight API. This gives developers the ability to build applications that leverage our system for location-based content all around the world. The Socialight API exposes many of the features of the platform using well-known standards like XML, GeoRSS and KML. These tools now make it much easier to tag and share content about places near you. For instance, imagine an iPhone app that highlights the coffee shops in your neighborhood with cute baristas. Or think of a GPS device in your rental car that shows you the best bars in Boston – and overnight parking garages nearby.

In addition to providing various API hooks that your application can use, we’ve also released some useful reference code in the form of samples. You can see some of this sample code in our API tutorial and as a Ruby command-line application. Most interesting of all, however, is the open-source release of our official Java mobile application. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for nearly a year now and after working a couple of months on the code, it’s finally ready for a release into the wild as an alpha.

With location-aware systems like Google’s Android, Apple iPhone, Dash, BugLabs and others in the market, it’s proving to be an exciting year for both mobile and local content. I look forward to seeing what you create. We can keep the discussion open using the developer group and, of course, please get in touch with comments directly.

For the past few weeks, we’ve been playing with the exciting features the iPhone SDK exposes. We know that there are many other mobile developers in New York City that have been doing the same. We wanted to help organize an event where all of these enthusiasts could meet and share their knowledge.

So this coming Saturday, April 19th, we’re helping sponsor an informal event called iPhoneDevCampNYC at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn. It’s modeled after the BarCamp unconference structure and will bring together iPhone hackers from around the area. The breakdown of the sessions will be part-discussion, part-classroom and part-workshop/hackathon. This variety should provide a good experience no matter what your skill level or interest with iPhone.

We’re excited to meet everyone and look forward to some interesting discussions and ideas.

It’s human nature to recommend great places to go in the places we know. “When you go to Vegas, you’ve got to have breakfast at Bouchon and watch Monday night football at The Dome.” Now Socialight’s lets you share your recommendations in a simple new way.

We’ve partnered with our friends at trailblazing digital marketing agency, Organic, to create “The Urban Mixtape”. Using Socialight’s Channels architecture, each Mixtape is an individually curated collection of places that is easily created, shared, and accessed on any mobile or web device, including via the GPS-enabled Socialight Mobile application. You can create a personalized walking tour for you or your friends.

We’ve started with an insider’s guide to Las Vegas for visitors to the CTIA conference going on now. Add some Vegas sticky notes from Thrillist, Travel Channel’s Anthony Bourdain, and Bravo TV. Members of Socialight can create their own Mixtapes and share them with friends for viewing on their mobile phone or the web.

(press release here)

UPDATE: some nice press coverage of the Mixtape on Adweek and on PSFK.