The new Socialight Community Platform, launching this week, is designed to help enterprise clients connect multimedia content and information to a map interface, which users can access via website, WAP site, or iPhone app. Think of it as Ning for LBS. Ning developed as a MySpace alternative for organizations to create their own niche online social networks. Likewise, Socialight allows anyone build their own Foursquare, Yelp, Gowalla, or SitOrSquat, customized for their own objectives.

Read the whole piece here.

With iPhone, Apple turned the US mobile market upside-down. A hardware manufacturer was able to assert more pressure than ever before over a mobile carrier. Mobile application developers were able to access device functionality more easily, and got a (relatively) straightforward marketplace in which to do business. Regular people simply got a powerful device that was easy to use, with a great mobile browser and a huge selection of useful and entertaining apps. Apple quickly took the majority share of mobile pageviews, compared to competing operating systems, even while those other OSes had more devices in people’s hands. Not only did this mean Apple had yet another winner (remember iPod vs. previous MP3 players) on its hands; it meant every OS-maker, device manufacturer, and carrier had to change their game plan.

For Socialight, the iPhone meant getting great apps into a store and available to millions of people became a lot simpler. It also made location-based services finally work. The 3G iPhone has GPS, Wifi, and cell-ID positioning. That trifecta meant we could usually get a good fix whether the user was indoors, on a city street, or out in the country. That was never the case before.

When I first saw the iPad, I thought, “What’s the big deal? It’s just a huge iPhone.” Well, that is pretty much exactly what it is. It sorta kinda shares a form factor with “tablet PCs”, but in reality, it’s not much like them, with touch interfaces slapped onto old operating systems and the hardware modded to sew things together. By adding a new form-factor with a 10″ screen to an interface, OS, and set of 140,000 apps designed with touch in mind from the start, Apple created a new category.

Why? Because of a wide open field ripe for new use cases. The use cases are just starting to be developed and the public hasn’t yet started testing them. Just like Twitter, with their simple API and dead-simple web presence, enabled a plethora of applications Twitter’s founders never dreamed of, Apple created a simpler, more accessible platform and will now let the community create what the service, or in this case product/service, will become.

By enlarging an iPhone’s 3.5″ screen to 10″, the ways to use the thing expand wildly. It becomes a device for multiple people to use at the same time. You can monitor a data visualization or video stream from across the room. You no longer have to squint at maps; they become big and beautiful and, in the car, can finally replace those accordion-fold ones stashed in the glovebox.

At first, I was unimpressed, but over the past couple of weeks since Apple’s announcement introducing the device, the ways iPad could be used started coming to me. Jobs demoed by sitting in a minimilist, black, comfy chair. But that’s like the blank slate from which to start.

What about:

• …the family, sitting together on the couch, watching cable on the living room’s 42″ screen while interacting with related content on the 10″ iPad. Maybe they’re watching Anthony Bourdain on (Socialight customer) Travel Channel and exploring big maps and pictures of the places he’s visiting tonight in Prague. Or maybe they’re seeing if they can beat the tv contestants at Jeopardy;
• …the group of friends, hanging out in a booth at the bar swiping through photos from last night’s party;
• …the road trip “navigator”, sitting in the passenger seat of the car, figuring out where to stop next on the 3G, GPS-enabled iPad. The location of the car is a breathing blue dot on the 10″ map (a completely different experience than a map on the iPhone’s 3.5″ screen, not to mention the old accordion fold). The navigator taps a marker and a beautiful, big panoramic photo taken from the scenic overlook a few miles ahead fills the screen. It’s worth a stop;
• …the breakout group of 4 elementary school students sitting at a classroom table, playing an educational game on an iPad (which had better be enclosed in a kid-proof case), all interacting at the same time on the multi-touch screen.

Today, we don’t know what will work and what won’t. We don’t yet know what the successful usage models will be because they haven’t been tried. We’ll only know in a year, after the developers get lots of new stuff on the device and after people get their paws on it.

So, yeah, I wasn’t so excited for this thing right after Jobs’ latest song and dance, but I am now. Let the fan-boy jokes begin.

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 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.

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.

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’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.

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.