MoveTogether is a mobile app (still in stealth mode) that seeks to make discovering and organizing casual activities as seamless as possible.

“The emphasis is on things you don’t want to put effort into planning rather than events,” said founder Sameh Elamawy in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. “You aren’t going to send out a formal invitation or make an event on Facebook for all your spare time, but text messaging is sub par in terms of reach. I want to own the free time space. If you have a bit of time to kill, why not own that time by finding something meaningful and fun to do.”

Elamawy gave the examples of grabbing a late launch, going for a walk, or finding someone to watch the game with. Apps and services that seek to bring people together or find fun things to do saturate the market. However, Elemawy said a hole still exists in how people communicate and mobilize for the in-between moments. His goal was to create a product that receded into the background and made it easier to find compelling things to do on-the-fly.

Within the app, users can quickly create an activity with a title, place, location etc… and choose who and how to notify about it. The growing penetration of smartphones means that people increasingly rely on their mobile devices to dictate their social calendars. Elamawy said this also results in a fear of commitment because people prefer to survey all their options and mood in a given moment, rather than schedule something in advance.

“There is a lot of fatigue with social-local-mobile, so it is important to give people utility,” he said. “I want to make it less about the app and more about the interaction people can have as a result. With all these social apps, the app is trying to be a hero and get people to spend all their time engaging with it. I just want the app to fulfill a role for me. Too many people spend too much time in the online world. I want to use the app as a facilitator for offline interaction.”

Social apps often struggle with network effects. For people to start using them, they need a strong network. But to create a strong network, people need to start using them. MoveTogether can functions whether your friends are on it or not. Furthermore, Elamawy said there is a data collection component that could ultimately lead to monetization.

“At end of day, I want to build an activity graph that shows what people do in the offline moments of their lives, and how this ties people together,” he said. “This data is super relevant to understanding consumer habits and their interests. We could use this information to promote related content, products or services that are targeted and offer native activities that could further enrich your experience of the things you like to do.”

Elamawy was inspired to build MoveTogether while studying at Stanford Business School. He found that there were moments everyday he wanted to connect with friends for, but didn’t have a desirable method of doing that. He combined his computer science skills and his understanding of consumer behavior from six years spent at Proctor & Gamble, and set out to create MoveTogether.

It is a case of an entrepreneur creating something to solve his own problem. There are plenty (too many) social apps out there, such as HangTime and Highlight, but none that Elamawy actually wanted to use. MoveTogether will officially launch in the next few months, and early beta testing has yielded some interesting insights.

“The root of this is that I am capturing all these social behaviors and spending time to figure them out,” he said. ”I am designing a product to match all these things.

May your Wednesday nights never be lonely again.

Facing unstable global markets and an upcoming presidential election, venture capitalists took a more disciplined approach to their investments in 2012 than in previous years.

Results from a MoneyTree report in partnership with the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) found that investments totaled $26.5 billion in 2012, with VCs closing 3,698 deals. This is a 10 percent decrease in dollars and a 6 percent decline in deals over the prior year.

Related: Check out the top investment deals from the fourth quarter.

Tracy Lefteroff, global managing partner of Pricewaterhouse Cooper’s venture capital and private equity arm attributed the decrease to unstable markets and “taxes, government policy, the general environment in the stock and equity markets, troubles in life sciences, [and] the regulatory market” in a call with press and analysts.

However, investors and financial analysts agree that there is cause for optimism in 2013. For the fourth quarter, venture investment of $6.4 billion into 968 companies fell 3 percent in dollars but rose 5 percent in deal volume over Q3 2012. With the re-election of President Obama and burgeoning excitement about the JOBS Act, deals kicked into high gear.

Mark Heesen, president of the NVCA, said there would be a decline in “me too” investments in 2013, meaning that VCs won’t just follow the herd. With the industry facing constriction, “more seasoned entrepreneurs” will get funding over 20-something Internet wunderkinds.

In addition, the experts anticipate a steady pipeline of high-profile IPOs in 2013, particularly in the business-to-business (B2B) software sector. Research firm CB Insights predicts that 80 percent of the companies in a position to go public target their products at businesses rather than consumers.

Related: We predicted that SurveyMonkey, Dropbox, and Square would be among the companies to go public in 2013.

Indeed, software is the only sector to see a steady increase in venture capital dollars, while biotech and life sciences, clean-tech and consumer products and services, failed to capture VC attention in the final quarter of 2012. Investment dollars rose 10 percent over 2011 to $8.3 billion, which funded 1,266 software deals.

This represents the highest level of investment in the software sector in over a decade.

It seems the reports of a “series A crunch” have been exaggerated. For the fourth quarter, early stage investments increased 5 percent in dollars and 9 percent in deals over the previous quarter.

Investors on the call, including John Backus of New Atlantic Ventures, said there were a healthy number of companies receiving first-round financing. Seed deals are notoriously difficult to track as family and friends often privately invest. “I don’t believe we had a series A crunch,” said Backus, who said he witnessed an “angel feeding frenzy.”

With entrepreneur-friendly government regulation and high-quality late stage companies on the cusp of going public, VCs expect to see solid returns in the coming year. “It’s a terrific time to be investor,” said Jim Healy of Sofinnova Ventures. ”We expect to be highly active in 2013.”

The quarterly Moneytree report is issued by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the NVCA, with data collected by Thomson Reuters. The full report is available online at NVCA.org.

Image: igor.stevanovic |Shutterstock 

GetYourGuide is a website that helps people search for, find, and book tours, attractions, and activities in advance. Today, it announced it was putting $14 million into its fanny pack to expand to its database of things to do and enter new markets.

Figuring out what to do in a foreign country can be challenging and stressful. You’ve got language barriers and innumerable offline options, and traditional guidebooks are often limited or out of date in what they suggest. As a result, the online travel space is heating up right now as startups like Viator, Peek, and Vayable take a stab at facilitating “experiences” while Gogobot and Trippy take a social approach to trip planning.

GetYourGuide’s approach to this market is to collect and index tours, along with ratings, cost, and customer reviews. It has aggregated more than 16,900 activities in more than 1,680 destinations around the world, and it has distribution partnerships with more than 1,000 online travel agonies such as TripAdvisor and Kayak.

“We realized that there were a lot of suppliers who didn’t sell their tours online and a huge demand coming from travelers, to actually have access to this a great offer of tours and attractions worldwide,” said CEO Johannes Reck in an email interview. “We have a two-sided marketplace with a consumer front-end and a supplier reservation system, which lets the whole range of travel activity suppliers upload and self-manage their inventory. This has allowed us to grow the world’s largest inventory in under two years.”

Spark Capital and Highland Capital led this first round of funding, which the company cites as one of the largest Series A investments raised by a European tech startup. GetYourGuide has offices in Zürich, Berlin, and Las Vegas.