Who said LBS was dead already? Well, obviously not the legendary VC’s Draper
Fisher Jurvetson and Nokia (their ventures company anyway) who’ve just pumped in $9.4 million into Wavemarket – Russell Beattie’s old employer, actually.
Wavemarket’s flagship product is Crunkie, which is an interesting app I’ve been meaning to post about for a while. It’s a kind of Friendster meets Location meets Virtual Graffiti meets MoBlogging meets a Business Model 
So you download their free mapping app onto a supported handset and get going. You can find friends in the area, post virtual notes or photos attached to the location or search for notes others have left in the area.
There’s a lot of potential here. But the problem they need to overcome at the moment is getting users to errr….use it. The content currently seems to be like one of those abandoned chat rooms you come across online. Just lots of messages saying “test” and “Is anyone here?”. Maybe that’s just an impression though and if you were to dig, you’d find some thriving communities.
But these things have to start somewhere – there had to be a first person to sign up to Friendster, who probably spent the evening wondering why they bothered.
The other thing that’s not so clear is what the business model is. The app is free to download and text messages can be sent free too – which implies they must be going through their server. So maybe the free stuff is just temporary and they’ll start charging when they have critical mass. In which case, maybe they should say that up front and then their users won’t have a nasty surprise.
Nice app though. Definitely a step in the right direction for LBS and a good vote of confidence from some powerful players.
Thanks to Stephen Dotsch for the link.
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