Connecting local in a globalized world
Imagine you leave a restaurant and would like to share your thoughts with anyone nearby, or picture yourself standing in an unknown place while reading notes that have been left there from previous visitors or even your friends.
“Urban spaces are increasingly densely populated,” said Dan Melinger, a resident of New York City. “People live in these spaces but may not even know what their neighbors think of the environment that they share.”
By leveraging existing technologies, socialight.com offers a platform that allows people to connect and share the content that is important to them, and allows brands to provide content related to the areas they and their customers inhabit.
Socialight was founded by Melinger, a graduate of New York University, in 2005 but didn’t find its legs until social media exploded and mobile technology caught up to his dream of connecting people in dense urban environments with each other.
Today, devices like the iPhone can locate users and turn them into multimedia producers with the push of a button. It has made existing technologies available to the masses, said Melinger, whose company has grown with these developments.
“Up until a year ago we were only a handful of people. Now, we are about 10 fulltime people and we also have teams of people all around the world on the engineering side and on the content side,” said Melinger, who tracked his company’s progress in an entrepreneurial journal.
Socialight has taken full advantage of the changes and recently launched an iPhone app for the Travel Channel. It allows fans of the TV channel to view content from places around them, produced by their favorite hosts.
Critical mass is a serious issue for this type of technology. As one of the above experts mentioned, a strong parter sounds like a necessity for this to work. A popular online reviewing site like Yelp would in my opinion provide a great starting point, linking relevant reviews to nearby neighborhoods.
It would seem however, that without an obvious leader in the industry with relevant material for any major locaiton in the country there is a lot of room for competitors to step in and fragment the usefullness of the technology beyond a single city.