Where do all the geo-based startups gather to learn, mingle, and make presentations to each other? That would be the NYC Location-Based Apps Meetup, which held an event last night at the AOL HQ on lower Broadway.
I came to hear Brett Martin, founder/CEO/waterboy at Sonar, who I first saw present at TechCrunch Disrupt earlier this summer. My hunch was that it would be a good idea to hear more about his startup in AOL’s cozier sixth floor venue.
It was a good move. As a bonus for attending, I got to see my friends at Taap.it, who also gave a short demo, as well as watch an intriguing presentation on LoKast, a proximity based social network.
And I met briefly with NYC LBA organizers, Michael Fives (co-founder of Grapphic) and Gauri Manglik (check out her SpotOn app).
Not a bad evening’s work for me.
So was I the only one who heard Martin’s hidden reference to David Foster Wallace when he said the goal of Sonar is to get us out of our “skull-sized kingdoms”?
That particular expression came out of DFW’s memorable 2005 commencement address at Kenyon—wish I had that kind of talking to when I left academia—in which Wallace implored these liberal arts graduates to be aware of their hard-wired, self-centered focus or as he put it, “getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head.”
And in one of his more vivid images, he asked these soon-to-be working adults “to choose to look differently at the fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line”.
With Sonar and hyper-local social networks, Wallace’s challenge may be a bit less demanding for the more easily hypnotized. The big idea behind Sonar and the other players in this space is that once you check into a venue—they use FourSquare, Facebook, and Twitter—the backend searches the social graph to look for people and interests in common.
And then pings you on your iPhone when it finds a match, which these days is a sure way to break the spell of your own grand thoughts.
So maybe that screaming overweight women in the Kmart line happens to share your interest in Bakelite collectibles, something not even your spouse knows about, and with the help of Sonar you’ve now made a connection that would not have been heretofore possible.
And it goes without saying that shy people—thank you Brett— will now have a new weapon in their struggle to break the ice with an appropriate opening line.
That’s the promise of Sonar.
Boris Bogatin, founder and CEO of NearVerse, demoed his LoKast iPhone app, which creates instant proximity-based networks. By proximity, Bogatin means within a few feet of your curent longitude and latitude.
This magic is accomplished by going further down the hardware stack using technologies like Qualcomm’s AllJoyn, Zeroconf, WiFi Local/Direct, and NFC.
Essentially, LoKast, unlike Sonar, but similar to Bump and Yobongo, doesn’t require an external location database of check-ins to figure out who’s nearby. Hyper-hyper local social networks such as LoKast’s are more spontaneous and event-based (as in everyone near me at the concert), and the interactions center around sharing music and videos and chat sessions.
One new thing I learned was that these location-based services thrive on people density, whether it’s a crowded meeting area or a busy streetscape.
This just means that in spite of the Internet’s flattening of distances, there’s still big advantages, business and social, to be in urban areas, immersed in people who are eager to get out of their freakin’ craniums.
Related articles
- NYC Location-Based Apps Meetup (meetup.com)
- Sonar
- LoKast
- David Foster Wallace’s Commencement Address (moreintelligentlife.com)
- SpotOn
