The hot spot in startups is where social networks, mobile phones, and targeted advertising collide. Services which let users record their location and broadcast it to their friends are blooming.
The largest service, Foursquare, has more than 4 million users. Facebook has jumped on the bandwagon and is exposing the idea of location to 500 million people on its social network. And venture capitalists have poured tens of millions of dollars into top startups. And businesses like the Gap and Starbucks are keenly interested in using location services to guide customers to their stores.
Yet the industry's still at a nascent stage, with business models unsettled and its future direction unmapped. At this point, location startups are very much driven by the personalities of their founders, whose enthusiastic use of their own products has helped shape the community springing up around them. So VentureBeat assigned Cody Barbierri to profile the people behind five top location startups: Booyah, Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, and Scvngr.
What he found is instructive. Scvngr's Seth Priebatsch pointed out how a user of Scvngr's location game found him on Facebook -- but identified him as just another player, not the guy behind it all. That may be a sign that location is achieving escape velocity into society at large, boosted by these pioneers into pop-cultural prevalence. But for now, we still think it's worth checking in with five key players who are building this business.
- Keith Lee, CEO, Booyah
- Dennis Crowley, CEO, Foursquare
- Josh Williams, CEO, Gowalla
- Sam Altman, CEO, Loopt
- Seth Priebatsch, Chief Ninja, Scvngr