Author Archive for Eric Lin

September: Enabling mobile communities

Published
by
Eric Lin
on September 8, 2006
in Announcements
. 41 Comments

Summer starts late in San Francisco, and in honor of our warm October, we’re leaving the laptops at home and taking off for the beach with nothing but our cell phones. Most early efforts at building communities for cell phones in the US have centered around adding a mobile component to pre-existing real-world or web communities. The rest of the world has become comfortable with communities that exist primarily in the cellular sphere, and now startups here are hoping the US is ready to join in. Developers are creating tools that enable mobile communities, whether that means building communities around their own products or allowing you to create your community around any common bond.

Who

  1. WAPtags is a mobile search and bookmarking site that is building an ad-hoc community around search results. Users can leave comments on sites, creating conversations and connections between visitors who found the site through WAPtags.
  2. Twitter is built to let you take an online community - your friends, blog readers, or site visitors - and make a mobile community around them. Users can send SMS updates to Twitter which are saved online and can be posted to website or sent to friends’ phones.
  3. TextMarks allows people to create instantaneous mobile communities based solely on text messages. Anyone can define a key word and choose an automated response when that keyword is sent to the system. But a community is created when users allow people to subscribe to the key word, then any subscriber to send messages to the group allowing anyone with a keyword, whether they know each other or not, to join in.

When

Wednesday, September 20, 7-9 p.m.

Where

CNET HQ
235 2nd Street
San Francisco

Each speaker will have 15 minutes to talk about their product, its origins, and give a brief demonstration. You will have some time to mix with the speakers and other participants before and after the presentations, so don’t be shy.

Thanks to CNET for providing us a venue that can fit about 100 people. Attendees with an appetite are asked to donate $5 to cover pizza and bottled water either at the event or in advance using PayPal.

Please RSVP in the comments below so we may properly prepare the room and food for the event. Thanks to Eric Lin of PhoneScoop for organizing this month’s speakers.