There’s a great write-up by Courtney Boyd Myers, focused on our Socialight Concierge offering, in PCMag’s Connected Traveler section.  I love the lede:

The Garment District, known as the fashion design center of New York, and perhaps the world, is home to numerous showrooms like Oscar de la Renta, Donna Karan and Calvin Klein. But between dodging vendors selling knock off handbags and restaurants barely maintaining health codes, navigating its barren waters in search of the promised land of sample sales and Karl Lagerfeld could be a tourist’s worst nightmare. Now, with the help of a new mobile app developed by the Fashion26 hotel and Socialight, help is just a few taps away.

Wyndham Hotels’ Fashion26 opened in April 2010 with the goal of catering to fashion forward tourists. Fashion26, already on Facebook and Twitter, wanted to stand out among other NYC hotels says Diedre Yack, the hotel’s Director of Sales and Marketing at Fashion26. Her team wanted to find innovative ways to connect with guests. In December 2009, they found Socialight, a mobile location based service based in NYC that had just begun to develop a location-based services platform for the hotel and tourism industry called “Socialight Concierge.”

Read the full article here.

Happy holidays, Socialight fans!

As 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.

A front page piece in The Economist‘s Technology Quarterly insert traces the rise of the geoweb from its first clear description in Neal Stephenson’s brilliant fictional work (and my personal fave sci-fi novel of all-time), Snow Crash all the way to Socialight. The article ends with a look toward the future; the real-world browsing we’re enabling with Socialight is identified as what will be common in the near future.

Here’s a quote from the article’s final paragraph:

…the incorporation of satellite-positioning technology into mobile phones and cars could open the floodgates. When it is available, simply moving about one’s neighbourhood can then be tantamount to browsing and generating content without doing anything, as demonstrated by a company called Socialight. Its service lets mobile users attach notes to any location, to be read by others who come along later. Taken further, the result could end up being a sort of extrasensory information awareness, annotation and analysis capability in the real world. “When that happens”, says [Google Earth chief technologist] Mr Jones, “then the map is actually a little portal on to life itself.” The only thing that can hold it back, he believes, is the rate at which society can adapt.

Article in print here.

An insightful story featuring Socialight was just published on the front page of LiveWire, the tech section for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, Melbourne. We’re psyched to get some love from our friends down under, home of the gap year and my personal favorite publisher of local guidebooks, Lonely Planet.

Here are links to page 1 and page 2 of the article from the print version.

Piers Fawkes came by our Greenwich Village office a couple of weeks ago to interview me for his trends site, PSFK. Video from the interview was just posted.