Highlight is a location-based mobile app that notifies you when people in your social network are nearby. I was skeptical of the app engineering “serendipity” until it led to an impromptu dinner party in Tahoe over the weekend.

Today during a small event at Highlight’s offices, founder and CEO Paul Davidon demoed the new features and set out his vision for the future of communication. Highlight 1.5 pulls in elements like photo-sharing, commenting, and events from other social apps, but it still takes its own serendipity-centric approach. 

“How can you take people walking around cities and connect them in the physical world?” said Davison during his presentation. “Taken together, the photos and events features are really complimentary. The applications extend to conferences, fashion week, weddings, football games, company holiday parties, small group dinners, concerts. There are so many situations where we gather together as friends, people, part of community. Being able to see who else is there, and have real-time conversations, and have that memory of that after you leave, will create a richer experience.”

The app now has a photo icon, and you can use it to post photos and share them publicly with people in your vicinity. Davison gave the example of Fat Tuesday, when he snapped a picture of the donuts he brought to the office and watched friends and coworkers filter in for the treats.

“We want to allow people to share an experience they are having right now,” Davison said. “It’s not photo sharing in the typical sense, it’s photos plus physical space. If I am walking down the street and see something interesting, or I am standing near someone else’s photo physically, it will show up on my phone.”

The vision is that rather than emailing photos or organizing them into an album on Facebook, people will simply have access to photo albums simply by being in a particular place. The caption feature encourages communication between users, and Davison said this element is more popular than he initially expected.

Events are the other major update. Highlight events, however, do not have an official organizer or an invite list, and these are only visible to people in the immediate vicinity.

“We didn’t want to re-create services that already exist,” Davison said. “We want to create something that allows people to create shared experiences that are lightweight and fun.

“You can only start an event ‘here and now.’ You enter a title and it defaults to the current location, but that can be altered. Only people near you will get a notification.”

When Highlight went through its first update, it made the application “smarter” and more interactive. The team spent the past year rebuilding the notification backend and infrastructure to make the notifications more relevant. They also worked on extending the battery life, since the app runs in the background on phones and can be a power-drain and introduced a search function.

Davison said that these changes helped Highlight grow its user base and receive Apple’s Best of 2012.

Highlight launched in January 2012 and quickly became popular within the tech scene. It took off at the South-by-South-West conference as startup kids used it to network, meet new people, and track down their friends. Davison formerly worked as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Benchmark Capital, which invested in Highlight along with SV Angel, Crunchfund, and other angel investors last March. 

Photo Credit: Highlight

The app is taking a similar approach to Highlight and Sonar, both apps that help find people near you with similar interests. Serendipity works like this: Say you’re in a coffee shop and the owner of a business you’ve been trying to make a deal with posts on Twitter that he’s getting a latte at the same location. Serendipity will let you know so you can create a “chance” encounter with that person.

It ties in with Salesforce.com, making it even more useful. One feature of Salesforce’s Sales Cloud is Opportunities, which shows details about deals that your team is working on, including the names of customers and the value of the deal. Serendipity uses that data, mashes it up with your social network contacts and address book data, adds geographic data, and uses all of that to find people near you that could become sales leads.

Taptera co-founder Dan McCall

“In our experience, the ability to close deals is generally based on accessibility to the best information possible. Now, with untethered intelligence via Serendipity, these dedicated salespeople can truly ‘always be closing,’” said Taptera chief executive Chris O’Connor in a statement.

Though named Serendipity, the app is anything but serendipitous. The encounters facilitated by the app don’t happen by accident, but instead they are sneakily planned out. The company’s hope is that only one person realizes the interaction is planned, while the other person feels like they just had a chance encounter.

Highlight and Sonar have been called out for being slightly creepy and Serendipity falls under that umbrella as well. Overzealous sales people could abuse the app and create some less-than-satisfying interactions with people who don’t want to be bothered. If business people get wind of the app and stop sharing their locations on Twitter, Serendipity might fail to be useful.

In a panel following the demonstration, The Climate Corporation CEO David Friedberg said the Serendipity app lacked a specific customer. “There are 100 varieties of a sales person,” he said. The company, he explained, should focus on one particular vertical or user.

Taptera creates mobile applications for businesses, including apps that help book conference rooms, connect with company directories, and organize events. The company was founded in 2011 and is based in San Francisco, Calif. The company raised $2 million in equity in 2011.

Taptera is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Image: Sarah Mitroff/VentureBeat

Both emulate the serendipity of StumbleUpon, a lesser-known content-sharing site that nonetheless generates big traffic for sites chosen by its users. Instead of drawing on their own user bases for links, however, the new sites trawl feeds from Twitter and Facebook

Tumbl.in and FriendShuffle have you connect your Twitter account. Both then take you to random links chosen from those being shared by your friends and followers on the service. FriendShuffle adds links from Facebook as well.

iPad apps like Flipboard and Pulse let you sift through your Twitter stream in interesting ways, aiming for a more controlled magazine experience. The uncertainty of not knowing what you could see next can make for many hours of futile fun, and points to an interesting dichotomy: While it’s useful to scroll through a stream or flip through pages in reverse chronological order, the drudgery of catching up doesn’t match the fun of finding things one didn’t set out to look for in the first place.

It’s this spontaneity that has bought hard-earned success to StumbleUpon, which crossed 10 million users back in June. Other examples of serendipitous content discovery abound, like the recent Google Instant-meets-YouTube service YouTube Instant, which got coverage from many major outlets around the country and had its creator accepting a job at YouTube.

Tumbl.in and FriendShuffle mixes spontaneity with social connections, so their content originates from people or brands one is already connected to, which makes the results even more potentially relevant to the user.

Tumbl.in was created by UCSC student Suchit Agarwal and Blippy engineer Rahul Thathoo. The duo originally developed it at a hackathon event held in conjunction with technology blog TechCrunch’s recent disrupt conference. They’re currently working on adding additional features such as introducing topic verticals through links shared by Twitter’s Suggested Users, content-specific discovery (for example, a Tumbl.in just for video links), and an iPad app.

FriendShuffle’s developers are more secretive. Developer Chase Sechrist apparently launched the service with a tweet last week. Ustream.tv employees Matt Schlicht and Mazyar Kazerooni have been actively tweeting about the service recently. Kazerooni told a friend he’d “put out a new website” and Schlicht recently answered a question about the service shortly before the official FriendShuffle Twitter account did.

Both Tumbl.in and FriendShuffle are currently privately funded.

Getting content noticed is a challenge for everyone making apps. Join us at DiscoveryBeat 2010 and hear secrets from top industry executives about how to break through and profit in the new cross-platform app ecosystem. From metrics to monetization, we’ll take an in depth look at the best discovery strategies and why they’re working. See the full agenda here. The conference takes place on October 18 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. To register, click here. Hurry though. Tickets are limited, and going fast.