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Posts Tagged ‘Business Partners’

LoKast launches a ‘disposable social network” for sharing media from your iPhone

There are a number of companies at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin offering their own way of sharing your location with friends. LoKast, an app from a company called NearVerse, is launching a mobile app with a compelling spin on that idea — instead of sharing your location with people elsewhere, you share media with people in the same location.

In other words, when you open the LoKast app, you get a list of anyone else who also has LoKast open in your proximity (about 300 feet). When you click on their profile, you can see and download any content they’ve uploaded for sharing, including contacts, photos, songs, videos, and links. For example, if you’re at a conference, you might share the contact information of yourself and business partners, so anyone else at the conference knows how to reach you. Or if you’re at a concert, you could bring a favorite playlist, which all the other concert attendees would be able to view. And users could tailor the content they’re sharing to the occasion.

Co-founder Boris Bogatin describes LoKast as a way to link our online and physical activities.

“We’re doing all this internet stuff, we do internet or we do physical, but we don’t do both,” Bogatin said. “But the physical stuff is so powerful and rich.”

Philadelphia-based NearVerse has paid particular attention to the music side of the app. In most cases, you’re not sharing complete songs, but rather short clips and a link to purchase the song on iTunes. But musicians can also create accounts on LoKast where they make their songs available for free download. So if a band threw a promotional concert, they wouldn’t have to give out demo CDs. Instead they just ask everyone to download the songs from their LoKast portal. Then when all those fans wgo to other events, they could offer those songs as free downloads to other people, allowing the music to spread.

As part of its launch, NearVerse is announcing partnerships with music distribution companies The Orchard, IODA and Monalis 360. The model extends to promotional movie clips, which is why NearVerse is also partnering with Magnolia Pictures.

Beyond making money from music purchases, Bogatin said he sees LoKast as a platform for sharing content in other apps, though he didn’t offer many details. He added that LoKast will be adding app-sharing soon, which also provides revenue opportunities.

One of the big challenges with this kind of media-sharing app is speed. If it takes minutes to download a song or contact information, no one’s going to use it. But when the NearVerse team gave me a demo at South by Southwest (where there are lots of iPhone users competing for network bandwidth), the app seemed very responsive, with updates reflected immediately between phones and most (not all) downloads taking only seconds. You can download LoKast from the App Store here.

NearVerse has raised venture funding, but it hasn’t announced the details yet.

Tags: LoKast

Companies: NearVerse

People: Boris Bogatin

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MyTown’s uncanny success

Filed under: Software, Odds and ends, iPhone, App Store

I posted a few things last year about Booyah, an app that promised a lot, but turned out to be not much more than your standard social networking/check-in app. And despite a little hype around its introduction, Booyah had some trouble finding an audience. But the developers (former Blizzard folks still supported by some execs there) came right back with MyTown [iTunes link], and this time, they appear to have hit gold — despite the app’s low profile, it already boasts more users than the well-known Foursquare and Gowalla apps. That’s probably because it’s more of an actual game; rather than just checking-in, the app has a currency to it, where you can “buy” places you check-in from, and then charge money to the next person that stops by. Imagine Foursquare mixed up with Monopoly — instead of meaninglessly becoming the mayor of some place you visit, you can actually own and make money off of other people showing up there.

It’s an interesting idea, and it seems to be working. MyTown has just reached version 2.0, increasing the number of levels you can earn and items you can buy with the virtual cash. It’s still a free app, and originally, we heard that Booyah was going to earn money by teaming up with retail and business partners — Taco Bell would pay them, and then they’d attach some promotion to checking in from a Taco Bell. But they haven’t moved on to that point yet, apparently; right now it’s just about building up a userbase and setting up a solid formula. And so far, while the original Booyah app may not have been able to do that, MyTown seems to be rolling right along.

TUAWMyTown’s uncanny success originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 21 Jan 2010 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Start-up Chronicles: Who Is Invested in Your Success?

(Editor’s Note: The Start-up Chronicles is a new weekly feature giving an inside view of the trials of a bootstrapped start-up – The Cost Savings Guy. CEO and founder Bruce Judson is also the author of “Go It Alone!: The Secret to Building A Successful Business on Your Own” and a senior faculty fellow at the Yale School of Management.)

In business books, you read a lot about the ‘eco-system’ that surrounds successful companies. Generally, this consists of smaller companies that arise around (and feed off of) massively popular entities such as Google or Twitter (which are, in turn, enhanced by the smaller firms). For example, there are now a number of services that offer platforms to help businesses connect with potential customers through Twitter.

For smaller companies, though, the eco-system is made up of other companies—ranging from suppliers to business partners—that will benefit from their success. For a start-up, a motivated eco-system can be a significant way to jump-start awareness – as well as the value of its products and services.

As we approached the launch of “The Cost Savings Guy” (CSG) a few weeks ago, I gave this area a lot of thought.  For a start-up, the dynamics of engaging an eco-system are far different than those faced by larger companies. Established companies create them by enabling other entities to work with their products or services – often making their API’s available, so that developers can integrate valuable new products and services.

In contrast, a start-up needs to aggressively motivate its eco-system. It’s unrealistic to think anyone will instinctively act on your behalf. Nothing happens unless you make it happen.

In launching CSG, I realized that the central issue for this rollout was not who constituted the eco-system of the business. (CSG is built on partnerships.  We have a relationship with every company whose cost-saving services we recommend.) The real issue was what we could reasonably expect it to do to enhance our launch.

From experience, I knew there were at least three hurdles in motivating an eco-system to take action:

The need for specificity.  When working with busy people, broad requests for aid don’t cut it. You are far more likely to get action with a very specific request.

Your request needs to be easy to implement. If you’re not creating work for others, you’re ahead of the game.

Ask for something special. Articulate why your requests have benefits for everyone involved.

With all this in mind I put together a plan and started making active requests.  As objections occurred, I met them.

In some cases, I simply said, “I will write the first draft of what I am talking about and send it to you. Then, you can decide. “  By taking this approach, I made the request tangible and far more real, demonstrated I knew exactly what I wanted, eliminated as much of the work for the recipient as possible and showed that I was serious when I said “I will do all the work to make this happen.”

At launch, the eco-system responded and awareness of our service is quickly climbing. Right now, The Cost Savings Guy is ranked as the number #1 startup in November on KillerStartUps.com , and I am starting to get calls from press contacts initiated by our eco-system.

This effort also opened the door for discussions of joint initiative that can enhance CSG’s chances of success. Many of our partners have large, ongoing e-mail communications with customers in our target market. The right e-mail initiatives from these trusted providers, discussing CSG’s service, could quickly build a large customer base for the company.

These last benefits were unanticipated – and they underlined what’s probably the most important lesson of all.  The best opportunities are rarely the ones that you predict ahead of time. They arise as you move forward, and often surprise you. But, they never happen unless you act first.

Photo by AndyRob via Flickr.

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MobileMe mixup: Address book snafu exposes personal data to strangers?

Filed under: Bad Apple, Security, .Mac, MobileMe

Face it: your address book and your contacts, they’re personal. They reveal a lot about you: your friends, your business partners, your cake buying proclivities, and more. The address book you see at the top of this post appears to be for someone in the Denver area. I know that because of the REI Denver listing and Le Bakery Sensual on 6th, which I drive by whenever I head East from Broadway.

These contacts, along with their notes, their phone numbers, dates of birth, and other information say a lot about the person whose address book this is, and also about the people who appear in that contact list, with all their personal and professional info.

There’s one big problem. The screen shot you see wasn’t made by the person who owns this me.com account. Under certain very specific conditions, Apple is inadvertently sharing data from other people’s accounts. Ouch.

A TUAW reader sent us a video made as he renewed his me.com account from the UK. The address book data he accessed during that time included this Denver-based set shown here, as well as data from an Ireland-based user of Polish descent (all his contacts were back in Poland although his business was based in Ireland).

This all went down during the period when his MobileMe account was renewing. Each time he logged off and back on, he was presented with yet another set of contacts–none of them his. He writes, “Each time I logged off and on I got a different address book. All the other options were disabled (because my renewal was being processed) but clicking the Contacts icon showed me *an* address book,” just not his address book.

With a little Internet-fu, he checked out some of the numbers and found that they were valid and operational. This leads him to believe that this is real data. My inspection of the local Denver data from his screen shots convinces me of the same. Further inspection of work addresses and personal family names makes us believe we know whose Denver-based address book this is. We’ve attempted to contact this person but as yet have not heard back.

The address book glitch ended once the registration process finished, leaving our TUAW reader with a series of screen shots and videos and a deep concern about Apple’s ability to safeguard personal data. He’s already contacted Apple about the bug. “I contacted them by two means: their web-chat thing where they told me that they ‘had no reports of such an issue’. They suggested closing and reopening Safari (helpful eh?) and a generic autoresponse saying they’d reply within 5 days when i sent an email.” He adds, “I don’t think the people manning the help desk appreciated the seriousness of the situation.”

TUAW has sent a heads-up to Apple and will keep monitoring the situation to see how it develops.

TUAWMobileMe mixup: Address book snafu exposes personal data to strangers? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 12 Oct 2009 20:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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