The Socialight, December

28 December 2007

We just published our December newsletter. If you haven’t received it, enjoy this tease. Or view the whole edition (and consider a subscription).

Since we last spoke, we’ve enlisted a group of elite fashion mavens to pepper NYC with Sticky Notes, channeled London’s seedy underbelly, and practically lived on an airplane to spread the Socialight gospel coast to coast and across the ocean.

Grand Canyon of PA

As mentioned in our previous dispatch, Socialight is up-and-running and location-aware in London, providing the city’s residents with culture, nightlife, and events information on-the-fly, based on where they are. People have been steadily creating Notes and we’ve recruited more great content providers from around the world. It appears more and more people are waking up to the possibilities of location-based information and the potential of our humble Notes to create a new layer of content nestled atop the real world.

Read the rest of the newsletter now.

Science-Fiction Dream

26 December 2007

Happy holidays, Socialight fans!

Spock with TricorderAs I was thinking about another year gone by without the advent of mass-market flying cars, along came this quote about Socialight in a piece from The Press, New Zealand (22 December 2007):

…get ready for computing’s fourth wave. We have had the mainframe, personal computer and internet eras. The next big thing is going to be mobile computing coupled to the ‘‘geoweb’’.

It has been a science-fiction dream for a long time. To have a phone that not only— and affordably— browses the internet, but which is plugged into a geographically aware version of the net. Simms [Tomizone] says that, as you walk around, the phone will know where you are and bring alive your environment accordingly. Overseas, new kinds of social networking sites like Socialight are gaining traction. You can attach cyber notes to locations so anyone walking past will be alerted to events or have a run down of the inhabitants and history of the place.

Dan and I are at the Dow Jones Mobile Technology Conference today and there’s a great buzz and lots of interesting people around. I gave a presentation on Socialight earlier today which was very well received and then we found out that TeleAtlas named us as one of the finalists in their LBS Innovators Series. Nice!

The highlight for me was the great panel discussion this morning about location featuring Darren Koenig from TeleAtlas, Isaias Sudit from Loc-Aid and Chris Ackermann from the Travel Channel.