Socialight / blog+news

Last season, I wouldn’t admit I was a Project Runway fan, but with season 4 of Bravo TV’s #1 show premiering tonight, I’m coming out to the world. And the timing couldn’t be better since we’ve got a treat for you here on Socialight.

Whether you watch the hit reality show (on Bravo in the US), Project Runway, or just love fashion, you’ll enjoy Project Runway Guide to NY. Judges Heidi Klum and Tim Gunn, along with current and past contestants from the show, have created hundreds of Sticky Notes throughout the City.

On the web, fans can view an interactive New York map with notes detailing the actual places where challenges and highlights occurred in past seasons, including Parsons the New School for Design, Mood Fabrics, Bryant Park and Michael Kors’ studio. On your mobile phone, the experience truly comes alive. Discover behind-the-scenes, insider information when near the featured locales on the streets of NYC.

Text RUNWAY to 27286 (BRAVO) to receive a link to the guide, along with PR updates.

full launch press release here

Under the Radar | Mobility is an event showcasing the latest and greatest in the stealthy world of mobile startups. Here’s how they describe it:

Under the Radar | Mobility is your chance to see, hear, and meet key players in the mobile universe, from the elusive carriers to the content developers, stealth startups and the industry leaders. This is a forum for partnerships, dealmaking, business development, and growth opportunities.

You’ll see a collection of companies in areas such as mobile content/video; social networking; voice services; marketing and advertising services; and a host of enabling technologies. From the industry experts and pundits to the company presentations and demos, you will learn about the future of mobility - its challenges and opportunities from consumer adoption to monetization of services.

I’m going to be talking about how Socialight is changing the way we think about discovering things around us in the Social Networking track on Thursday.

Sneaky tip: You can get $100 off the registration price if you book before Wednesday 14. Do it. Do it now.

Last month’s hyper energetic Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco was a frenetic hub of intellectual activity, movers, shakers, wheelers, dealers and more technoscenti than you can shake a stick at. I spent a whole two hours there and it was fantastic. Never ones to sit still, those clever people over at O’Reilly decided to export the Web 2.0 goodness to Berlin and Tokyo, and I’m thrilled to announce that Socialight will be participating in the Berlin expo.

If you’re anywhere near Europe, hop on to one of those ridiculously cheap flights and go catch Simon Davis, CEO of Socialight UK on the Marketing for Mobile 2.0 Panel tomorrow morning (Wednesday 7 November). Simon will be in great company - sharing the panel with him is Marko Ahtisaari from Blyk, Justin Davies from Buddyping and Helen Keegan from Beep Marketing.

Other panels you should check out include Trends in E-Commerce with Andreas Weigend and Mehrdad Piroozram, and Mobile to Web and Back: Designing for People.

Riding high on the news of their acquisition by Nokia for $8.1 billion, NAVTEQ is explaining the future of the location services industry with more clarity than I’ve ever heard from them before. I’ve been attending NAVTEQ-sponsored events for 3 years now, but this morning at their NAVTEQ Connections 2007 meeting in San Francisco, I’m finally hearing a vision that truly resonates, and I’m hearing it loud and clear.

Here’s what caught my attention during Winston Guillory’s (SVP, Consumer and Enterprise Sales) keynote:

• The end-user will have an important role as a source of data. It’s no longer just about getting content to the consumer; users collecting location-based content is an important piece of the puzzle and that’s a big part of why the Nokia marriage makes sense.
• Valuable content changes over time. This isn’t by any means a new realization, but today, it’s finally realistic to build products incorporating live location-based content streams.
• Pedestrian consumption is a huge growth area. Last year, NAVTEQ announced a renewed focus on pedestrian routing. Now they’re starting to talk seriously about pedestrian consumption of content not just for routing, but live content, filtered through the sources you trust, delivered to you when you’re in the city. I think that with the growing growing proportion of the world’s population that’s urban and the growing mobile youth market, this sector will continue to gain in importance.

We could not be more excited. Socialight is location-aware throughout the UK!* Simply text 88811 and we’ll look up where you are and give you the sticky notes around you. You can send a blank text, a search word, or even someone’s Socialight nickname. We’ll find all the relevant notes and send the closest ones back to you. You can also tell us where you are simply and easily by simply texting ‘at’ and the location, e.g. “at covent garden, london”. Best of all, it’s currently free. Check to see if your phone number and country are correct in your account and give 88811 a shot!

* We can look up the location of any Vodafone, Orange, O2 and T-Mobile phone. If you are on Three, Virgin or other network, you can still use the shortcode, but you’ll have to tell us your location manually. (sniff! shout at your network! we’d love it if they opened up…)

While the UK service is live countrywide, we’ve got something special for London… First of all, we’ve loaded nearly every bar, pub, tourist attraction and hotel so you can find the closest ones really easily, just by texting ‘pub’ or ‘bar’ etc. to 88811. But, better than that, we’re delighted to announce something Londoner’s really wanted: a tool to find cool late night happenings in the ancient labyrinth! “Late London” was conceived and written by Socialight users, specifically artists and musicians that spend their lives trawling the bar and club scene. So if you’re at a loose end after the pubs close, scratch London’s underbelly… text LATE to 88811 for a good time…

Not in London? Don’t worry, we’ll be expanding these types of services across the UK and then the US, Europe, and South Africa. In fact, if you have ideas like Late London, or want to work with us on content where you live, give us a shout.

full launch press release here

Next week Thursday, I’ll be in Chicago at Forrester’s Consumer Forum 2007 on a mobile social panel with Nick Tommarello from Urban Interactive and Vidya Lakshmipathy from Forrester. Here’s how they describe the overall conference:

Fueled by cheap devices and pervasive access, individuals are increasingly taking cues from one another rather than from institutions — a phenomenon that creates chaos for traditional brands, sellers, and media outlets.

Sound fun right? If you’re going to be there, come on over and introduce yourself.

Here’s a rundown of what’s coming up:

This Monday night, September 24th, we’ll be at the Web 2.0 Meetup here in NYC. But if you’re not in NYC, you can still catch the event. I’m told it will be streamed live so check the website.

We’ll be at the NMS Connect Conference in Boston on October 2. Registration is open for the event so register and come by. I’ll be on the Community Goes Mobile panel.

We’re part of what looks like a very cool panel called Introducing the Seventh Sense: Location Awareness at MIT/Stanford Venture Lab on October 16th.

And finally, there are a couple of events around CTIA in San Francisco during the week of October 22nd:

• We’re speaking at NAVTEQ Connections on Monday, October 22nd.
• We’re on a panel at SiRF Location 2.0 on October 23rd.

It’s shaping up to be a busy fall. We’ll probably be adding some European dates soon as well. Hope to see you around…

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.

Ready for the inside guide to Wine Country? Grab your glass, your fork and your sense of adventure as WineTravel.com staff sticky-note all the best spots in Napa and Sonoma to get your grape on. Get a sneak peek at 3 of their first getaways…

• Girlfriend’s Guide to St. Helena: Shoes, chocolate, wine and pampering in Napa’s toniest town. Hey, if you want you can bring the gents too.
• Zin tour of Dry Creek: Forget the clinkers and head straight for the good stuff. We ID the top Zinfandel sipping spots near Healdsburg
• Healdsburg Tasting rooms: Wine-crawl around the square