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Quick Refresher course on where LBS services are as of Oct 2008

Rummble

http://www.rummble.com

‘Mobile Local Discovery’  (Andrew Scott, Co-Founder, ex Playtext)
Award winning Mobile 2.0, MEX
User selected location – Feeds, photos, Google maps, basic listings, UGC reviews.
Friend invite via 50 Free texts or email.
Early stage development

Moximity
‘It’s all around you’ Austin based new start up (launched Sept 28, 2008)
Looks like a GPS Social Net – claiming to integrate your other social nets which beats having to find new friends or invite old ones. Find friends nearby, location based offers. Seems to be rolling out city by city and I love their use of Google maps for on their sign up page. Sounds pretty cool, and think it’s smart move rolling out city by city.

Plazes (now owned by Nokia)

http://plazes.com

‘Right place, right time’ (Felix Petersen, Co-Founder now head of social activities at Nokia)
Web based and appears to have SMS (but didn’t try this out)

Share your location (neat suggestions provided), updates, see who else is in the area. RSS, update to Facebook, WP, Blogger, good mapping and more – feature rich.

Tech crunch describes it ‘as Twitter with geotagging, points of interest, and social networking
features’ which is pretty fair IMO.

Buzz’d

http://buzzd.com/

‘What’s going on around me right now’
US Based new start-up, with local event UGC reviews, mapping and social nets.
MOMO award winner, just closed series A.

BrightKite
http://brightkite.com/ Currently invite only
Geo Social net with feed for status updates, photos etc..

The other major players have recently been extensively reviewed by Techcrunch. Covered in this review

• Loopt.com – mobile social mapping
• Whrrl (Pelago, funded by Jeff Bezos and T-Mobile))  – social net, google maps, mash up on the mobile
• Where/ Buddy Finder (uLocate) find locatin specific friends, shops, cafes, Zipcars, places listed on Yelp, petrol station and of course Starbucks (yawn)
• Limbo.com categorise users in to frieds, contacts (pulled in from native address phone book), members. Desk site is very weird with a games section. Hmmm?
• Zintin – Standford grads start-up, iPhone only. Seems to have started with the infamous scribble and shake app, which can then be shared on a FB like Wall but now morphing in to something else? Looks quite interesting.

Further reading:

LBS Primer by Tech Crunch is excellent http://tinyurl.com/4rsorr

Anatomy of a failure : lessons learned from failed start-up Meetro, excellent too. http://tinyurl.com/59ouwk

Andrew Finkle http://www.afpr.com/ – Social media blogger also has some great posts on this subject. http://www.afpr.com/